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Mrs. Schake directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
President Biden gave an admirable speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, condemning Russia’s war and making clear that the United States will continue its support for Ukraine. “We chose freedom. We chose sovereignty,” he said rousingly.
Rhetoric aside, the administration has signaled in several other ways that Mr. Putin’s threats have limited aid to Ukraine. Sir. Mr Biden’s foreign policy team is talking about putting up roadblocks in the conflict and congratulating themselves on their slow increase in aid that does not provoke Mr Putin. Administration officials tell reporters that they have been sending private warnings to the Russians about nuclear use for months, but the president himself publicly sounds concerned, repeatedly asserting, “We’re trying to avoid World War III.” We have allowed Russian threats to dictate our actions, encouraging Russia and others to test our resolve.
The problem is even bigger than it seems. Twenty months into the administration, there is no public national security strategy. That makes it difficult for Congress to align spending with the strategy and difficult for allies to align their policies to support ours. All downstream strategy directives, including the National Defense Strategy and the National Military Strategy, are hostage to delays in the National Security Strategy. Even within the administration, there is no binding guidance, to take a recent example preventing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, from opposing the administration’s proposal to cancel a new nuclear cruise missile (which Congress supported over White). House objections).
The Biden White House may argue that surprises such as China’s nuclear weapons outbreak and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine required major revisions to US strategy. Good strategy protects against uncertainties like these, so the Biden administration’s lack of strategy and its lack of foresight — not the events that derailed it — are to blame.
The gap between what the administration claims as its foreign policy goals and what it is actually willing to do is a serious problem for American security, for Russia, and beyond. In mid-September, President Biden said for the fourth time that if China were to invade Taiwan, the United States would send troops to defend it. And for the fourth time, administration officials argued that this apparent change in policy represented no change in policy.
It’s bad enough that the Biden administration is mixing its messages. But worse are the real gaps in capability that call into question whether the US could actually defend Taiwan. The ships, troop numbers, aircraft and missile defenses in the Pacific are a poor match for China’s capabilities. The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, has assessed the threat to Taiwan between now and 2030 as “urgent”, yet the defense budget is not geared to deliver improved capabilities until the mid-2030s. More generally, the Biden administration is not funding a U.S. military that can adequately fulfill our defense obligations, a dangerous position for a great power. The Democratic-led Congress added $29 billion last year and $45 billion this year to the Defense Department’s budget request, a measure of how inadequate the Biden budget is.
Further, even though the Defense Department knows industry needs multi-year contracts to keep production lines open, the Biden defense budget is long on research and development, short on arms and ammunition procurement. Our supplies to Ukraine have revealed unacceptable shortages of ammunition in US stockpiles and industrial inability to resupply.
The shortcomings are not just military either. In fact, the absence of an international economic policy that helps the United States and other countries reduce their dependence on China may prove to be an even bigger problem. Although its strategy relies fundamentally on allied support to counter China, the Biden administration’s “middle-class foreign policy,” as outlined on the campaign trail and by the national security adviser, appears indistinguishable from the Trump administration’s trade protectionism. The current administration allowed trade-promoting authority from Congress to lapse, won’t rejoin the Trans-Pacific trade deal, has offended Asian allies with the protectionism of the Inflation Reduction Act, and offers only vague promises of future negotiations. That is not a recipe for success.
Nor are these the only gaps between the stated policy and the will and ability to implement the policy. The administration appears to lack an effective strategy for the dangers posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea beyond empty declarations that we will not allow North Korea to have nuclear weapons, even though experts believe the leadership in Pyongyang may have dozens of them. Or look at Iran, where the administration pursued a strategy known as “more for more” — more sanctions relief for more restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program — and yet it can’t even get a return to the 2015 terms from Iran. Also, war with Iran is surely a non-starter for a president who left Afghanistan and actually doesn’t care about the fate of Iraq and Syria.
When we spoke to Ukrainians in Kiev in mid-September, it was striking how much better they are at strategy than the Biden administration. They understand – and convey relentlessly from every department – that their success depends on Western support, and that the West has both a moral and geopolitical interest in Ukraine winning. Acknowledging that he was being pressured by some Western governments for concessions to make negotiations possible, President Volodymyr Zelensky turned the question around: “We instead set the conditions to make negotiations possible,” he told me: a sharp but diplomatic reorientation for to protect Ukraine. against Western indecision. The military, economic and foreign policy lines of Ukraine’s strategy are mutually reinforcing and each gives greater strength. This is what a whole government strategy looks like in execution.
Analyzing Russian strategy in Foreign Affairs, Liana Fix, a historian and political scientist, and Michael Kimmage of Catholic University recently concluded that Russia’s failure comes from “matching extravagant political goals in Ukraine with meager and ineffective means.” As tempting as it is to marvel at Russia’s strategic incompetence, we should be concerned that the serious shortcomings Russia exhibits also haunt our own national security strategy. We risk making the same mistakes as Vladimir Putin, by overestimating our military power, inhibiting significant international cooperation with our economic policies, and believing our own words despite the fact that our actions undermine them.
Kori Schake directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
