In the weeks after President Joe Biden decided not to run for reelection, there was a surge of hope among policymakers anxious about Washington’s willingness to sustain its global security commitments. Though opinion polls indicate that the battle between the Democratic Party’s new candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former President Donald Trump will remain tight, the emergence of a viable electoral challenge to Trump’s brand of isolationist MAGA Republicanism has revived optimism among those who remain convinced that only U.S. leadership can resolve dangerous geopolitical crises. Yet even as senior figures in Washington continue to assert, as Republican Sen. John Cornyn recently did, that “nothing happens without American leadership,” the ineffectual nature of the Biden administration’s response to armed conflicts that could destabilize the global order indicates how diminished U.S. influence has already become in many parts of the world.
The declining ability of U.S. governments to shape outcomes in key conflicts was already visible long before President Biden took office in January 2021. While the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the 1990s had their share of foreign policy failures, the U.S. was still able to exert decisive influence over most geopolitical flashpoints. The Soviet Union’s collapse had thrown Moscow into chaos, Beijing remained focused on economic growth and the attention of EU leaders was consumed by complex institution-building. Over time, however, the United States’ struggle to balance failing counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan with growing great power competition from China and Russia meant that Washington’s capacity to engage with every major conflict decreased.
This gradual waning of American influence outside of core areas of strategic focus rarely features in ferocious debates in Washington between those who believe that the U.S. should remain deeply involved in global affairs and the so-called Restrainers on the left and MAGA Republicans on the right who are skeptical of security commitments outside U.S. borders. With attention focused on conflict between Israel and Iranian-backed groups, Ukraine’s war for survival against Russia and Chinese pressure in East Asia, many policymakers and commentators in Washington have barely registered how other escalating conflicts could over time disrupt key nodes of global trade and security, and they struggle to grasp how little leverage they now have in several key global regions.
The limits of the United States’ ability to influence developments on the ground in destabilizing conflicts, or the responses of states engaged in them, have been particularly visible with civil wars in Myanmar and Sudan that barely feature in domestic American news cycles. In both cases, U.S. policymakers distracted by developments elsewhere failed to anticipate emerging escalation dynamics and then failed to develop the strategic leverage needed to rein in brutal armies and militias whose backing from other states rapidly widened devastating wars.
These failures were particularly visible in the build-up to the current conflict in Sudan between a network of armed groups within the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, led by Mohammad “Hemedti” Hamdan Dagalo and factions dominated by the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF. Long before these actors plunged into civil war, U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials frequently attempted to foster negotiation, but their efforts were promptly ignored by Sudanese powerbrokers.
While Washington will continue to play a decisive role in managing conflicts that involve great power competition, in many other parts of the world the U.S. impact will be limited to diplomatic press releases expressing grave concern.
In the 1990s, the efforts of senior U.S. policymakers to exert pressure through sanctions on Sudanese leaders that provided safe havens to terrorist networks did not lead to more comprehensive engagement with structural dynamics on the ground that have plunged Sudan into repeated cycles of revolt and civil war since independence in 1958. Though the George W Bush administration did expend some political capital to help secure South Sudan’s independence and put pressure on an Islamist-dominated authoritarian regime under President Omar al-Bashir to rein in militias that committed horrific atrocities in the Darfur region, such initiatives were the product of brief surges in U.S. interest that rapidly waned once the attention of the American public was drawn to other matters.
The weaknesses of U.S. diplomacy towards Sudan became visible again after a popular uprising that toppled Bashir in January 2018. Though the U.S. and EU made some efforts to back a civilian-led transition to democratic rule in the months that followed, these initiatives struggled to match the huge resources expended by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Russia and other autocratic states to bolster the position of Hemedti’s RSF or its rivals in the SAF. By the time both military factions conspired to topple the civilian government in April 2019, unleashing a struggle for power that would lead to civil war four years later, autocratic states’ willingness to double down in support of rival authoritarian factions had further marginalized the U.S. position on the ground.
The inability of distracted U.S. presidents to focus on several geopolitical flashpoints at a time also led to strategic failures in Myanmar. Isolationism had been a core feature of the military regimes that ruled Myanmar since independence in the late 1940s, so U.S. options for encouraging reform after mass protests in 1988 were limited already. Support from China for Myanmar’s military government and India’s unwillingness to intervene gave the regime space to ignore U.S. preferences, and it refused to recognize an election result that would have enabled opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to take power in 1990. Even though Western economic pressure prodded the ruling elite into accepting reforms in the 2010s that gave a civilian government under Suu Kyi some control over state policy, the speed with which the military seized power once again the moment it felt its grip was loosening indicated the limits of Washington’s ability to affect underlying structural dynamics within Myanmar’s political system.
Though both the EU and U.S. imposed sanctions on the military junta that ordered Aung San Suu Kyi’s arrest in 2021, policymakers in Washington and Brussels initially wrote off any near-term hope of restoring democratic governance in Myanmar. As a consequence, U.S. policymakers were blindsided by the speed and scale through which a popular insurgency allied with established ethno-religious militias was able to find the recruits and funds needed to wage successful military operations in much of the country. Having devoted only intermittent attention to Myanmar at best since the end of the Obama era, policymakers in Washington lacked adequate situational awareness of developments on the ground that triggered the 2021 coup and then fueled an increasingly effective insurgency. That insurgency’s wider impact is reshaping geopolitical dynamics in a crucially important region for India as well as China.
Washington’s flailing in the face of conflicts within Myanmar and Sudan that have now become wider geopolitical crises is a product of long-term shifts in the global balance of power. While Washington will continue to play a decisive role in managing conflicts that involve great power competition, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the tensions between Israel and Iran and China’s strategic assertiveness under Xi Jinping, in many other parts of the world the U.S. impact will be limited to diplomatic press releases expressing grave concern.
Whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, other global powers such as India, China and the EU can no longer assume that Washington is willing or able to take an active role in resolving some of the world’s most dangerous geopolitical crises. As conflict in Sudan and Myanmar begins to engulf neighboring states, efforts to avoid further escalation will require more effective regional institutions with the power to encourage negotiations and deter further violence. Even as many commentators and policymakers fret over what might unfold after November’s U.S. presidential elections, for much of the world a post-American order has already arrived.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.