After
four years of Donald Trump, Joe Biden was supposed to restore the
United States to a position of global leadership. By many conventional
standards of Washington, he has delivered. He anticipated Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine and adroitly rallied NATO to stand up to it. In
Asia, he shored up old alliances, built new ones and fanned China’s
economic headwinds. After Israel was attacked, he managed to support it
while avoiding all-out regional war.
Yet
there is more to global leadership than backing friends and beating
back foes. Leaders, in the full sense, don’t just remain on top; they
solve problems and inspire confidence. Mr. Trump barely pretends to
offer that kind of leadership on the world stage. But precisely because
most U.S. officials do, it is all the more striking where American power
stands today. Never in the decades since the Cold War has the United
States looked less like a leader of the world and more like the head of a
faction — reduced to defending its preferred side against increasingly
aligned adversaries, as much of the world looks on and wonders why the
Americans think they’re in charge.
When
Russia invaded Ukraine, a familiar frisson shot through Washington.
After decades of dubious warmaking, the United States would become the
global good guy again, uniting the world to resist the Kremlin’s blatant
affront to law and order. In the opening months, the White House scored
brilliant tactical successes, enabling Ukraine’s defense, organizing
aid from allies and smoothing Finland’s and Sweden’s entry into NATO.
Yet if Russia is paying a steep price for its invasion, the conflict is
also dealing a strategic setback to the United States.
The
United States now must contend with an aggrieved and unpredictable
nuclear peer in Moscow. Worse, China, Iran and North Korea have come
closer together to supply Russia’s war effort and resist what
they call U.S. global hegemony. This anti-American entente has already
proved strong enough to mitigate the effects of Western aid to Ukraine,
and it is raising the price of U.S. military dominance. Russia directly
borders six countries that the United States is treaty-bound to defend.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, is preparing for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
The United States is not outmatched, exactly. But it is badly
overstretched.
Nor
is the rest of the world flocking to America’s side. Most countries are
casting a plague on both houses, finding fault in Russian aggression
but also in the West’s response. Mr. Biden hasn’t helped matters. By couching the
conflict as a “battle between democracy and autocracy” and making few
visible efforts to seek peace through diplomacy, he has appeared to ask
other countries to sign up for an endless struggle. Hardly any nations besides U.S. allies have imposed sanctions on Russia. Isolating China, if it attacked Taiwan, would be an even taller task. In Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, perceptions of Russia and China have actually improved since 2022.
The
Gaza war came at the worst possible time, and Mr. Biden responded to
this calamity by plunging in. He immediately pledged support for
Israel’s merciless military campaign rather than condition U.S. aid on
Israel finding a strategy that would protect civilians. Having chosen to
follow, not lead, Mr. Biden was left to tut-tut about Israel’s behavior
from the self-imposed sidelines. In a defining conflict, the United
States has managed to be weak and oppressive at once. The costs to
America’s reputation and security are only beginning to appear.
Not
long ago, the United States tried to mediate between Israelis and
Palestinians on terms both parties might accept. It used diplomacy to
keep Iran from going nuclear and encouraged the Saudis to “share the
neighborhood,” in Barack Obama’s words,
with their Iranian rivals. As of now, the Biden administration
apparently aspires to do little more than consolidate an anti-Iran bloc.
In return for Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel, it seeks
to commit, by treaty, to defend the Saudi kingdom with U.S. military
force. This deal,
if it happens, has a tiny chance of bringing peace and stability to the
Middle East — and a large chance of further entangling the United
States in regional violence.
Part
of the problem is the president’s inclination to overidentify with U.S.
partners. He has deferred to Ukraine on whether to pursue peace
negotiations and has avoided contradicting its maximalist war aims. He
fast-tracked aid to Israel even while publicly doubting its war plans.
Mr. Biden also vowed four times to
defend Taiwan, exceeding the official U.S. commitment to arm the island
but not necessarily fight for it. His predecessors were not always so one-sided, maintaining “strategic ambiguity,” for example, over whether the United States would go to war over Taiwan.
Yet
Mr. Biden’s instincts reflect a deeper error, decades in the making.
Coming out of the Cold War, American policymakers conflated global
leadership with military dominance. The United States had sure
possession of both. It could safely widen its military reach without
encountering deadly pushback from major nations. “The world is no longer
divided into two hostile camps,” Bill Clinton declared in
1997, the year he championed NATO’s eastward enlargement. “Instead, now
we are building bonds with nations that once were our adversaries.”
But
bond-building never overcame mutual suspicion, in part because the
United States continued to prize its own global dominance. Successive
administrations expanded U.S. alliances, started frequent wars and aimed
to spread liberal democracy, expecting potential rivals to accept their
lot in the American order. Today that naïve expectation is gone, but
the dominance reflex remains. The United States keeps extending itself
further and finding formidable resistance — which in turn tempts
Washington to double down, as much of the world recoils. This is a
losing game, and Americans will have to risk and spend more to keep
playing it.
A
better approach is available. To reclaim global leadership, the United
States should show a suspicious world that it wants to make peace and
build resilience, not merely bleed an enemy or back up an ally. That
would mean supporting Ukraine but working just as hard to end the war at
the negotiating table — along with gradually shifting to a smaller role
in NATO and insisting that Europe lead its own defense. Mr. Biden’s recent proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza was laudable, except that it lacked a threat to stop sending arms to Israel if Israel refused.
Pulling
back from Europe and the Middle East would improve American engagement
where it matters most — in Asia. It would clarify that America’s purpose
is not to pursue hegemony, as Beijing’s propaganda alleges, but rather
to keep China from establishing an Asian hegemony of its own. From this
standpoint, the United States could be a confident leader in the
Indo-Pacific even if China continues to rise. China is today far from
capable of imposing its will throughout the region, nor would seizing
Taiwan, risky in the extreme, enable it to do so.
None
of this would be easy, of course. But compare it with the alternative.
Leading only a faction of the world turns the United States into a
fretful follower. It puts Americans perpetually on the cusp of war in
the Middle East, Europe and Asia alike, afraid that losing ground
anywhere will set off catastrophe everywhere. The real danger, though,
is to stake so much of global security on one country’s willingness to
overcommit itself. True leaders know when to make room for others.
Stephen Wertheim (@stephenwertheim) is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of “Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.” |
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