For
three decades, U.S. foreign policy has run on inertia and called it
strategy. The Cold War had ended, but the United States nonetheless
retained its Cold War alliances. The Soviet Union had disappeared, but
the absence of a major threat produced much the same prescription as the
presence of a major threat had: just as the U.S. military had defended
“the free world,” now it would become the guardian of the whole world.
When problems appeared, successive administrations generally took them
as reasons to expand U.S. deployments. Even if its bid for primacy had
created or exacerbated those problems, Washington had the solution: more
and better primacy.
Now the war in Ukraine is tempting policymakers to repeat that mistake
in an exceedingly consequential way. Just when President Joe Biden had
been trying to prioritize security in Asia and prosperity for the
American middle class, advocates of U.S. primacy are seizing this
emotionally charged moment to insist that post–Cold War path dependency
prevail. Rather than pivot to Asia, they argue, the United States must
now build up its military presence in Europe to contain an assertive
Russia, even as it strengthens its Indo-Pacific defenses to contain a
rising China. They admit their proposal would cost hundreds of billions
of dollars more in defense spending and put U.S. forces on the front
lines of two potential great-power wars, but they think the price is
worth it.
The Biden administration should decline this invitation to wage a risky
global cold war. Although the invasion of Ukraine has revealed Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to take risks in the pursuit of
aggression, it has also exposed the weakness of the Russian military and
economy. If anything, the war has strengthened the case for strategic
discipline, by offering a chance to encourage Europe to balance against
Russia while the United States concentrates on security in Asia and
renewal at home. Such a division of labor is fair and sustainable. It
would put the United States in the best position to limit the fallout
from the war in Ukraine and achieve long-term peace and stability in
Europe and beyond. Primacy’s lure is strong in Washington, but a more
restrained approach is better.
DÉJÀ VU
Since Russia’s invasion began, advocates of U.S. primacy have contended
that the war demands not only an immediate response from the United
States but also an enduring grand-strategic shift. Riding a wave of
anti-Russian sentiment, they want the Biden administration to cast aside
the new, Asia-centric posture that it had been expected to roll out.
“We cannot pretend any longer that a national security focus primarily
on China will protect our political, economic and security interests,” wrote former
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. “As we have seen in Ukraine, a
reckless, risk-taking dictator in Russia (or elsewhere) can be every bit
as much a challenge to our interests and our security.” To keep the war
from expanding, the Biden administration has boosted the number of U.S.
troops in Europe to around 100,000—a level not seen in decades.
But a bid to restore global military primacy is no more merited today
than it was before the invasion. Putin’s gruesome attack has made the
Russian threat visceral, but it has not actually increased the threat or
produced other compelling evidence for taking on new commitments or
missions. Gates appears to confuse a humanitarian calamity with a threat
to the United States. As the Biden administration has maintained, vital
U.S. security interests are not at stake in Ukraine, and so the United
States will not intervene directly against Russian forces. Especially
unclear is why Putin or just any “reckless, risk-taking dictator” should
be presumed to challenge U.S. interests on a similar magnitude as
China, the world’s number two economic and military power. Thinking
that way could lead U.S. officials to give up on formulating strategy
on the basis of discernable national interests. The United States would
find itself policing the world, no matter the stakes.
If Russia were to overrun the heartland of Europe, the United States’
security and prosperity would become endangered, since much of the
wealthy and populous region would come under Moscow’s control. In the
late 1940s, the United States waged the Cold War in part to prevent the
Soviet Union from using its formidable resources to conquer noncommunist
Europe. In a March article in Foreign Affairs,
the scholars Michael Beckley and Hal Brands implicitly resurrected this
strategic objective by invoking “the policies that won the Cold War” as
a model for what to do today: contain Russia and China simultaneously
through U.S. military buildups in both Europe and Asia. By their
estimate, this course of action would require boosting defense spending
over the next decade from 3.2 percent of GDP to five percent of GDP,
making for a 56 percent increase.
But it is difficult to discern how Russia could drive far into Europe,
even if it tried. Before the invasion, the EU’s economy was roughly five
times as large as Russia’s, by the conservative metric of purchasing
power parity, and wartime sanctions are set to widen the gap. Taken
together, the European members of NATO already outspend Russia on
defense, and Europe’s geopolitical awakening will only push them to
spend more. And the lackluster performance of the Russian armed forces
in Ukraine does not augur well for their prospects against NATO in the
near term.
Rather than explain how Russia could possibly come to dominate Europe,
then, Beckley and Brands adopt an expansive conception of the United
States’ interests and responsibilities that would have made George
Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment, blush. They would
seemingly have the United States go to war to stop any act of
“autocratic aggression” in eastern Europe or East Asia, and perhaps
wherever else “the international order” might appear to be imperiled.
Indeed, as inspiration for their approach, they draw on NSC-68, the
strategic document of 1950 that called for limitless anticommunist
crusades and exorbitant military spending. As the historian John Lewis
Gaddis has put it, NSC-68 “found in the simple presence of a Soviet
threat sufficient cause to deem the interest threatened vital.” In other
words, NSC-68 had the United States assume vast costs and risks without
reference to the country’s safety and well-being; it severed the link
between U.S. policy and U.S. interests. It should not be a template for
our time.
The call for a cold war against China and
Russia would have Americans take on enormous burdens not because
specific U.S. interests require it but because U.S. primacy does. No
longer able to maintain global military dominance at the current level
of exertion, the United States is now supposed to plow ever-greater
resources into the endeavor. Perhaps the country could get away with
strategic excesses in the 1950s, when it accounted for some 27 percent
of world economic output, nearly double the combined Soviet and Chinese
share of 14 percent. In 2020, by contrast, the United States accounted
for 16 percent of global GDP. China and Russia together came to 22
percent. China alone topped the United States. It is doubtful that sheer
will can overcome the chasm between the United States’ material
superiority during the Cold War and its shortfall today.
Coming out of World War II, the American public understood the
implications of undertaking obligations to defend other countries. By
contrast, most Americans alive today, having never seen a great-power
war or paid tangible costs for smaller wars, are not used to enduring
hardship for foreign policy choices. Their well-founded suspicion of
far-flung military interventions creates uncertainty about how the
United States would truly act if one of its dozens of defense
commitments came due. It also raises doubts about whether high defense
spending could be sustained indefinitely.
Rather than lock a new cold war into place, Biden should remember what
produced the United States’ greatest successes during the original
affair: a willingness to adjust to changing circumstances and weigh
creative options without clinging to outmoded habits. The Marshall Plan,
for example, broke with precedent by extending government funds to
rebuild European countries that might have turned
communist. Decades later, U.S. policymakers saw an opportunity to
stabilize superpower relations and achieved détente, devising mutually
beneficial arms control measures and stabilizing Europe through the
Helsinki Accords. These achievements deserve to be emulated—and that
requires eschewing misplaced nostalgia.
A EUROPE STRONG AND FREE
The war in Ukraine has made strategic discipline not only more necessary
but also more achievable. By turning Europe into a more unified and
determined geopolitical actor, the war has generated international
dynamics that are conducive to U.S. restraint. Biden should
reject a cold war strategy of dividing the world and keeping one half
dependent on the United States. He should not allow Putin’s aggression
to define the United States’ concept of itself and its role in the
world. Instead, he should seek to make the world resilient—more capable
of effective and collective action and less reliant on U.S. military
protection.
The first step is to support Ukraine while avoiding escalation into a
direct clash between U.S. and Russian forces. Having galvanized domestic
and international action, the Biden administration should avoid the
rhetorical inflation of its aims and stick to a clear goal: not to
defend Ukraine but rather to help Ukraine defend itself and end the war.
Accordingly, the administration should push for a peace settlement with
as much vigor as it has displayed in imposing costs on Russia.
A negotiated agreement will almost certainly require lifting at least
some of the harshest sanctions on Russia, including the freeze of the
Russian central bank’s assets. The administration should proactively
communicate an offer of sanctions relief to Moscow, which might not
otherwise believe that such relief is possible. In conjunction with a
pledge by Ukraine to give up on trying to join NATO, Biden should also
be prepared to state publicly that the United States opposes further
consideration of Ukraine’s membership prospects, which were never high
to begin with. After the war, the United States should continue to send
weapons to Ukraine to help it defend itself. It would not be necessary
or wise to pledge to go to war on Ukraine’s behalf, a commitment that
would diminish American security and expand the U.S. military role in
Europe.
While avoiding the worst outcomes in Ukraine, Biden should take
advantage of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put the European
security order on the path to self-sufficiency. With immense economic
and demographic superiority, Europe is more than capable of developing
the military power to balance Russia. Now, it seems increasingly willing
to do so. But if Washington does not get out of its own way, change
will not happen.
Biden should back European strategic autonomy and make a six-year plan,
to cover the rest of his term and the next one, to transition European
defense to European leadership. The administration should press European
countries to provide new manpower in the eastern countries of NATO and
replace the additional U.S. troops sent there since January. And it
should help European capitals coordinate their next steps: improving
their forces’ readiness and sustainability, developing capabilities for
high-end operations, and harmonizing EU defense capabilities with those
of a European-led, U.S.-supported NATO.
Limiting the United States’ burdens in Europe would enhance its strategy
in Asia. Biden would spare himself and his successors from facing the
devil’s choice that advocates of primacy would force on generations to
come: weaken the United States’ Indo-Pacific defenses in the event of a
European war with Russia, or prepare to fight two great-power wars by
raising defense spending so high as to court a political backlash. U.S.
policymakers must steer clear of these unacceptable options. Nor need
they resign themselves to a strategic competition with China so intense
and encompassing as to resemble the early Cold War.
Military restraint is desirable on strategic grounds, but it is also
essential to freeing U.S. statecraft to pursue what matters most. The
priorities that Biden identified when he came into office—delivering
prosperity for ordinary Americans and tackling climate change and
pandemics—remain just as important today, and the war has made them
even harder to address. Russia’s war and Western sanctions risk
triggering a global recession or contributing to a period of
stagflation. A downward economic spiral could even accompany a downward
security spiral; countries could divide into economic blocs for fear
that geopolitical contingencies may one day suddenly force them to join
one grouping or another.
The United States should act to arrest deglobalization, which would
depress growth and innovation and inhibit climate cooperation. Rather
than succumb to a cold war framework, it should remain economically
engaged with China and respect the sovereign choices of countries in the
developing world to abstain from sanctions on Russia and otherwise opt
for nonalignment. As surging prices compound the effects of the
pandemic, the United States should rally its European and Asian partners
to provide funds and technology to build renewable energy capacity in
developing countries. Climate change is perhaps the biggest threat to
the American people. If it remains a sideshow in national security
policy by the end of Biden’s tenure, then his foreign policy will have
failed, no matter how well he handles the war in Ukraine.
THE PRICE OF PRIMACY
Among the priorities of the twenty-first-century United States should
not be relations with Iran. Nevertheless, the country may soon vault to
the top of the president’s agenda. Negotiators are currently trying to
resurrect the agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
If those talks break down, the Biden administration will have to decide
whether to support a military strike on Iran, even though it will
likely regard the country as a negligible concern and a distraction from
Ukraine. But even Ukraine is a distraction from what the administration
had hoped to focus on: competition with China, not to mention rescuing
American democracy, mitigating a pandemic, and preserving a habitable
planet. Such cacophony is the predictable result of the quest for global
military primacy—not
control over world events but the forfeiture of self-control. The
problem will get ever worse as the unipolar moment continues to recede.
A new cold war promises clarity of purpose. In reality, it would impose
enormous costs and generate unnecessary risks. It would not, moreover,
make other priorities go away; it would more likely exacerbate the
United States’ domestic travails and stifle urgent international
cooperation. After 9/11, the United States allowed itself to become
consumed by fears of the enemy. After Ukraine, the Biden administration
should let nothing keep it from advancing the best interests of
Americans.
STEPHEN WERTHEIM is Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Visiting Faculty
Fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School. He
is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2022-04-12/ukraine-temptation |