Republicans may reverse a foreign policy reversal within the next decade
Biden’s First Formal National Security Strategy: Identifying China as the Most Consistent Geopolitical Challenge and Rebuilding alliances for the United States of America
President Joe Biden’s first formal national security strategy identifies China as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge” while stressing the importance of rebuilding alliances in order to effectively compete over the coming decade.
The document has been required by Congress for 21 months. Over the course of the president’s presidency, there has been evidence of a focus on rebuilding global partnerships and defeating China and Russia.
Jake Sullivan told reporters that the strategy made it clear the White House wasn’t looking at the world solely through strategic competition.
“We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision for a world that is free, open, prosperous, and secure,” he goes on. The United States of America is in a better position than the world to lead because of the effects of the Pandemic and uncertainty in the global economy.
The alliances of autocracies could have made huge strides if Putin’s conflict with Ukraine had ended quickly. Moscow’s stumbling has slowed its progress. As Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman noted, Russia could become an albatross around Beijing’s neck.
“This decisive decade is critical both for defining the terms of competition, particular with the (People’s Republic of China), and for getting ahead of massive challenges that if we lose the time this decade we will not be able to keep pace with,” he said.
The Russian Invasion of Ukraine in February 2013: What Xi and Putin wanted from the US, China, and their alliances?
The former CNN producer and correspondent Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. She has her own views on this commentary. You can add your opinion on CNN.
In February of last year, the Russian President and the Chinese president stood together in front of the world. Putin was still denying plans to invade Ukraine, which he would do just after the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
The leaders of the nuclear powers pledged to have a relationship with no limits. It looked like a pivotal moment in a global realignment of power.
A year later, Putin’s push for a quick victory in Ukraine, one that would solidify Russia’s place as a top global player, looks like a disaster, and the alliance appears much less valuable to Xi.
Both leaders have been courting dictators. Russia is trying to acquire weapons for its war in Ukraine, and China is trying to start a new alliance to counter the west. The project did not do well; it is not a resounding success. But it is very much a work in progress.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine gave credence to the ideas of forces trying to change the world, and put a light on the direction of US foreign policy.
The US should strive to deter the creation of a unified force of anti-democratic regimes because of the success President Joe Biden’s administration has had with fortifying NATO and strengthening alliances.
It also means defaming Beijing, as well as keeping Russia from winning in Ukraine, and trying to prevent China from forging stronger bonds with Iran.
A bloc of aggressively anti-Western autocracies is precisely what Xi and Putin were launching that day in February. Beijing and Moscow sought to replace the rule of law with “the rule of the strongest,” warned European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
But the rule of the strongest doesn’t work when you can’t win, which is how Russia’s plans started to unravel, and China had to rethink its commitment.
Is Putin in or out of the picture? There is a chance that Xi wants it both ways. He wants a relationship with the country that invaded its neighbor without provocation, but he is also trying to present himself as a responsible global leader and an alternative to the democratic Western model.
According to US intelligence, Russia has bought artillery shells from North Korea, another notorious dictatorship, which denies its involvement in a war whose morality is beyond the pale.
After the war began, Iran said it had sold weapons to Ukraine but they were not used there. Now, newly-declassified documents show the drones in Ukraine are identical to those Iran has used in the Middle East.
Russia has also become a pariah to much of the world because of it’s interventionist regime, and Iran is now being courted by both Moscow and Beijing.
This week, Ebrahim Raisi became the first Iranian president to visit China in 20 years. The trip, at Xi’s invitation, ostensibly aims to implement an agreement for a 25-year strategic cooperation pact the two reached at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2021.
The Beijing-Tehran ties have raised alarms among both democrats and Republicans in congress who fear that China’s support of Tehran could encourage it to support terrorism and human rights abuses.
There is an internal contradiction in the dual goals of Xi. It is hard to create an alliance of rulebreaking autocrats and dictators if you want to be considered a leader in your field.
Donald Trump wants to save a foreign democracy by ending the war in Ukraine, whereas Ron DeSantis wants a culture war rather than a proxy war.
The ex-president and Florida governor are campaigning for the GOP nomination in two decades time, which is bad news for the grassroots conservatives who feel like they are being ignored by the Trump administration.
This should worry the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has profusely thanked Americans for their multi-billion dollar generosity while warning he will keep asking for more.
According to polls, there is a large base of support in the Republicans for both Robert Taft’s idea of reducing US commitment to international alliances and his idea of increasing resistance to China. In a Gallup poll released earlier this month, Republican voters were more likely to say China was the US’s main adversary than Russia was. (More Democrats picked Russia than China.) The share of GOP voters who believe the US is doing too much now is equal to the percentage of GOP voters who think it’s doing too little or right, according to polls this year. A large majority of Democrats and independents still think that the US is doing the right amount.
Zelensky’s relationship with Trump was badly damaged when he misled the public about their 2019) phone call, in which the president attempted to use US military aid to extort his counterpart into opening an investigation into Biden. The incident led to Trump’s first impeachment. More recently, in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, Trump seemed eager to rekindle his genuflecting relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom much of the world now regards as a war criminal. The need to defend a democracy that is being attacked is a foreign concept to Trump.
The war between Russia andUkraine will be over by the time I arrive at the Oval Office. … I will get the problem solved. It will take me one day to resolve it in rapid order, said Trump. He said that he knew exactly what to say to each of them, before suggesting that he would siding with the one who’s in the war by reminding his audience that he got along well with Putin.
The Courage to be Free was published last week by the Florida governor. He takes issue with President Bush’s second inaugural address, in which he said the survival of liberty in our land will increasingly depend on liberty in other lands. The impulse to promote democracy by force around the world was grounded in Wilsonian moralism and not in a clear-eyed view of American interests.
CNN said that this is an evolution from where he was in 2015, when he was a congressman, when he supported the fight against Russia.
The future of Kyiv could depend on being a NATO protectorate armed with Western weapons and even getting security guarantees from the major US or European powers if the conflict between it and Moscow goes on.
The Trump/DeSantis/UKraine Campaign: When Will the US go to the Edge? A Brief History of the 2016 Campaign at CPAC
But presidential primaries have a habit of defining a party’s positions at the extremes – and with Trump and DeSantis being seen as the current favorites, their rivals may come under increasing pressure to fall into line to ensure their own political viability.
But the possibility of changing political conditions in the United States as a new White House campaign begins means that Zelensky’s desperation for more weapons and ammunition to eject Putin’s forces from Ukraine will only become more urgent.
If Biden becomes the Democratic nominee in 2020, Trump will accuse him of leading the world to the brink of disaster, according to his appearance at CPAC.
“I am the only candidate who can make this promise, I will prevent, very easily, World War III,” Trump said in a speech riddled with falsehoods. If something doesn’t happen fast, World War III is going to happen.
The former president is in some ways repeating his 2016 tactic of warning about America’s exposure to foreign wars. He’s trying to fan fatigue over US arms-length involvement in Ukraine as he did over the long conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And he drove home another familiar criticism of presidents who fixate on foreign policy by showing up in East Palestine, Ohio – at the site of a chemical spill after a freight train derailment – while Biden was visiting Europe last month.
Trump said that he hopes Biden has some money left over when he gets back from his tour of Ukraine.
During his speech at the CPAC, Donald Trump said that they would not go back to the party that wants to give money but also wants to cut veteran benefits at home.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/07/politics/trump-desantis-ukraine-2024-campaign/index.html
The Cold War and the Cold War: Why is President Biden referring to Ukraine as a national interest in protecting democracy? The case for the end of the Russian invasion
It seems odd to think that the US support forUkraine is part of a national interest to protect democracy.
The rise of populist nationalism in the Republican Party was helped by voters feeling that Bush overreached and led Americans into disastrous years-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008, the year Obama won the presidency, he declared that he was against dumb wars.
There is some reluctance to get involved in foreign wars again among American voters on the right and left. A group of Democratic members of Congress called for negotiations to end the war last year despite the fact that there were no signs that Putin was interested in pulling out his troops. They were criticized by their colleagues for doing that.
Iraq and Afghanistan are just as bad as Ukraine, since Biden doesn’t want to involve US forces in a direct clash with Moscow, which is one reason why he has kept his distance.
One of the reasons why Biden went to Ukraine to mark the first anniversary of the Russian invasion was to shore up public support for an extended commitment to Ukraine.
With the battle on Europe not looking like it will end any time soon and with a Republican nominee coming in the next year, Biden may have to make that case on the debate stage.
The current president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs is a former US permanent representative to NATO. When Trump was the nominee of the Republican Party, the internationalists may not have only lost in 16 and 20 but have lost the party forever.
After Eisenhower’s landmark victory over Taft in 1952, every Republican presidential nominee over the next six decades – a list that extended from Richard Nixon through Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney – identified more with the internationalist than isolationist wing of the party.
“Trump-ism has to be taken seriously,” as a long-term force in GOP thinking about the world, Haass said. The foreign policy center of gravity in the Republican Party, he added, has moved toward “a much more pinched or minimal American relationship with the world, [with] not a lot of interest in contributing to global responses to challenges like climate change or pandemics.”
According to Joyce Mao, an associate professor of history at Middlebury College and author of the book, “Asia First”, after the Pearl Harbor attack there was no way to be a strict isolationist and a national political figure.
“Eisenhower was viewed by Taft and his colleagues as much too moderate,” Mao said. “His European focus was deemed by that conservative wing of the party as much too similar to the liberal Democrats. If this was going to be a time when conservatives would have to fight against both liberals and moderates in the Republican Party, China would be an ideal plank to do so.
“Triangulation is a risky game because if you get the language off, you may commit yourself in a campaign to a line that makes no sense when you are governing,” Feaver said. This is a most difficult problem for newcomers when they are campaigning for president. By giving applause lines that work for the narrow segments of ideologically hardened factions that they are trying to win over for the primary, they can lock themselves into policy positions that are not sound when they actually win.”
Opinions in the GOP about whether the US should do more or less in Ukraine don’t vary much along lines of education or age, the Pew poll found. Younger and lack of college degrees are the two distinct groups of Republicans who are most powerful when it comes to turning away from global leadership. A majority of non-college Republicans disagreed with a Chicago Council survey that found that benefits of US leadership exceed the costs. Younger Republicans are more likely to say the costs are more than the benefits.
Two groups that have registered as supporters of Trump are Republicans without a college degree and those who are younger.
A Trump-Inspired Strategy to Re-examine the Mission of the United States in a Second Term: The Implications for the Global Economy
In a second term, Trump will likely push even further in an isolationist and protectionist direction. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, has said he believed the former president came close to withdrawing the US from NATO and would likely do so if elected to a second term. In a recent campaign video, Trump stated that his administration needed to finish the process of fundamentally re-examining NATO’s purpose. Trump has also said he would impose a four-year plan “to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods, everything from electronics to steel to pharmaceuticals.” It would be a big change in the global economy.
