President Biden announced on Wednesday that the biggest challenge facing the United States in the coming years will be “competing China and containing Russia” while focusing on restoring a democracy that has been damaged. at home.
In his 48-page national security strategy, which every new administration is required to enact, Biden made it clear that in the longer term, he is more worried about China’s moves to “upgrade its governance.” dictatorship with revisionist foreign policy”. a fallen, battered Russia. More than six months after the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military seems less intimidating than when the first draft of the document circulated at the White House in December.
“Russia and the People’s Republic of China pose different challenges,” Biden wrote, using the acronym for People’s Republic of China. “Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly violating the fundamental laws of today’s international order, such as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine showed.”
“China is the only country that has the intention to reshape the international order and has increasingly the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to achieve that goal,” the president wrote.
Mr. Biden’s strategy notably erases the distinction between domestic and foreign policy; it argued that the source of the United States’ strength would come from the reaffirmation of the nation’s democratic traditions. But it also comes as China is rising and seeking to rewrite the rules of trade, surveillance and influence over other countries, and Russia is seeking to redraw national boundaries. Allies and adversaries alike will be scrutinizing strategy for signs that Mr. Biden is committed to taking a stand against both opponents.
The president has taken on a number of unusual positions, especially for a Democrat. He urged faster military modernization, although critics say his budget does not reflect his ambitions. And he took a dark look at the benefits of globalization, describing at length how it has fueled pandemics and misinformation and contributed to supply-chain shortages. response.
And Mr. Biden returned to the subject he has raised since his second month in office, describing an upcoming struggle as one between autocracies versus democracies. He said the United States must invest with allies and private industry as part of the West’s efforts to reduce dependence on rivals.
The strategy document was delayed last winter, as it became clear that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was imminent and that the United States’ relationship with its European allies was about to undergo an enormous test. The revised document celebrates new cohesion among NATO countries but also includes warnings to Moscow that were clearly included to usher in a new era of restraint, the word used during the Cold War to contain the greatest challenge at the time: Soviet expansionism.
“The United States will not allow Russia, or any other great power, to achieve its goals through the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons,” the new document says. But this sentence stands alone, without clarifying the meaning of the word “don’t allow” or discussing the US and NATO response should Russian President Vladimir V. Putin choose to use it. tactical nuclear weapons to make up for the failures of his conventional forces in Ukraine. Mr. Biden declined to divulge details of his options when highlighted by CNN on Tuesday in an interview with Jake Tapper.
For every administration, a national security strategy is a combination of instructions, a signal of intent to allies and adversaries, and often an ode to American power. President George W. Bush’s strategy is known for establishing a “fight before power” doctrine that contributed to his administration’s justification for the invasion of Iraq. Mr. Obama has used his power to call for a world without nuclear weapons, while expanding America’s soft power to conquer global disease and poverty.
President Biden
With the midterm elections approaching, this is where President Biden stands.
President Donald J. Trump claims that the era of counterterrorism is being replaced by a resurgence of great power rivalry against what he calls “revisionist” powers, though he often ignores it. ignores statements in its documents about the value of NATO and other alliances.
Mr. Biden’s strategy document delves into the workings of American democracy, not covered by previous strategies. “As Americans, we must all agree that the judgment of the people, as embodied in elections, must be respected and defended,” the document reads. It then discussed moves to combat “domestic terrorism” and said “the US will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections.”
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The openings of the strategy focus on domestic issues, led by a resurgence of key technologies, and begin with cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.
Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, told reporters Wednesday morning: “We’ve broken down the dividing line between foreign policy and domestic policy to invest heavily here in our hometown. home into our industrial and innovation base.”
Mr. Biden recently travel to Ohio to help launch a new Intel facility and IBM Page in upstate New York, celebrating investments made by the federal government CHIPS Act. But it will be years before these plants – and others built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung in the US Southwest – will go into production. Even then, they would represent a tiny fraction of the most advanced microelectronics consumed by American industry.
The strategy, Mr. Sullivan said, is largely driven by a changed context, one that candidly describes: “The post-Cold War era is over.”
“We have entered a decisive decade on two fundamental strategic challenges,” Mr. Sullivan told reporters Wednesday. The first is competition among great powers to shape the future of the international order, and the second is to deal with transnational challenges such as ‘climate change, food insecurity,’ he said. food, infectious disease, terrorism, convertible energy, to inflation. “
The past few weeks have shown how tough some of that will be.
Mr. Biden was undercut by Saudi Arabia, which he visited in the summer, when the kingdom leading a movement within OPEC last week to cut oil production after telling him it would increase it. OPEC’s move contributes to inflation, and it also aids Russia’s effort to finance the war in Ukraine. Mr. Biden said on Tuesday that he would review his relationship with Saudi Arabia and make them pay.
China’s cooperation on climate issues has almost stopped; The “strategic stability” talks with Russia on limiting the nuclear arsenal have ended.
“Russia now poses an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and stability,” says the document, a stark departure from decades of discussed strategies for cooperation. Russia and the West. “This is not a struggle between the West and Russia. It is about the basic principles of the Charter of the United Nations, of which Russia is a member, in particular respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and prohibition of the acquisition of territory through war.
Putin sees it the other way around: He declares Ukraine has always been part of Russia, going back to the days of the Westerners, and has described this moment as the West’s attempt to contain it and remove it. Russian power hungry.
But what leaps from the pages of Mr. Biden’s strategy, drafted by the National Security Council with input from the administration, is the relentless focus on China. This is also the topic of a This week’s speech by Jeremy FlemingUK’s head of cyber and signals intelligence.
Much of the military planning described in the administration’s documents is aimed at countering China in space, cyberspace and at sea. Each arena requires very different weapons, software, and strategies than the efforts to contain Russia on the ground in Europe. The document describes a more aggressive U.S. effort to strengthen cybersecurity and calls for working with allies and the private sector to “counter efforts to undermine shared technological advances.” ours” by restricting investment by China and other countries in the United States and controlling exports of critical technologies to China.
Some critics of this strategy fear that it does not move fast enough. “China’s plan for central Taiwan is around 2027,” Kori Schake, who directs defense and foreign policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview. “The budget doesn’t envision modernizing at that rate.”
Ms. Schake wrote in a New York Times opinion essay last month that “ships, numbers, aircraft and missile defense systems in the Pacific are a poor match for China’s capabilities.” Mr. Sullivan pushed back on that criticism, arguing that Mr. Biden’s budget follows strategic guidance first released in preliminary form during his first weeks in office.
The new national security strategy paves the way for the Pentagon to release a national defense strategy in the coming weeks, and a related document, called the Nuclear Posture Review, will describe his plans. Biden on the nuclear arsenal.
Mr. Sullivan said that despite Russia’s recent threats, the documents would be “a step forward in reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US strategy”.
“We are not looking to turn competition into confrontation or a new Cold War,” he stressed. But that is the last phrase Chinese officials often use to describe US strategy.
