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US President Joe Biden
Biden’s strategy is in danger of failing: wars are escalating, diplomacy is stalling. The world is on the brink. A guest post
President Joe Biden has described America as a “global power” and referred to its “leadership role in the world.” If Biden actually sees himself as a world leader, then he has disappointed in his office and mismanaged it.
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The world today is on the brink of major wars, perhaps even world wars, on two fronts at the same time. This is perhaps the most precarious situation the world has experienced in more than half a century, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps even longer. Back then the danger came from one front, today it comes from two or even three fronts.
The Biden administration appears to be following a foreign policy doctrine that cultivates wars while trying to manage them so that they remain limited to America’s foreign policy interests and do not escalate too much. But such fine-tuning is not easy.
Can wars be cultivated?
War is chaotic and unpredictable. Even when a nation’s plans are well understood by its planners, voting on what might push the enemy too far and trigger a major war also depends on the enemy’s plans, votes, passions, and red lines: all of which are harder to grasp or understand.
What’s more, the current culture of the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems designed to ignore the kind of knowledge and empathy that makes it possible to understand the mind of the adversary. Instead, uninformed and hateful prejudices are promoted.
Calibrating how far you can go militarily or politically without upsetting the balance and triggering all-out war is dangerous and complicated. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has seriously miscalculated how far the calibrated strikes and responses with Israel can go before a controlled conflict turns into a major war.
The price of this miscalculation was his life and a war in Lebanon.
Hezbollah and NATO miscalculated
Successive American and European governments, as well as the NATO Secretariat, have calculated that through a series of steps they could expand NATO into the former Soviet space without triggering a military response from Russia. The result of this miscalculation was a war that was disastrous for Ukraine and extremely damaging to the interests of the West, and which threatens to end either in humiliation of the West or in direct war between Russia and the West.
Despite the fragility of such calibrations, they appear to have become core to US policy. In both the Middle East and Ukraine, the United States has fueled wars through arms shipments and discouraged diplomacy. And in both cases, the US has simultaneously prioritized containing the wars it supports to prevent them from escalating into larger wars.
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In the Middle East, the focus has been on balancing support for Israel and its right to self-defense with preventing escalation into a larger regional war. Biden emphasized that “we will do everything in our power to prevent a major war.”
Can Washington control wars?
In Ukraine, the focus was on providing Ukraine with everything necessary to occupy the strongest position on the battlefield to win freedom, sovereignty and territorial integrity while preventing the war from escalating into a larger war with Russia . “We will not wage war against Russia in Ukraine,” Biden said. “A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia would be World War III, something we must prevent at all costs.”
But Biden’s strategy threatens to fail catastrophically on both fronts. The course has been set dangerously wrong on both fronts. The war in Gaza has spread to Lebanon and is looming in Iran. After the Iranian missile attacks on Israel on October 1st, the world is waiting not only for Israel’s reaction, but also for Iran’s.
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The danger is not just an Israeli-Iranian war. By sending not only a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System, or THAAD for short, a state-of-the-art missile defense system, to Israel, but also about 100 American soldiers to operate it, there is a risk that the United States will be drawn into a war with Iran. And if that wasn’t bad enough, this war could potentially involve Russia.
Will the US be drawn into their wars?
In Ukraine, too, the mood is teetering on the verge of a major war. Zelensky is daily urging the US to remove all red lines and allow the use of Western-supplied long-range missile systems for deeper strikes into Russian territory, which, as in Israel, would require US involvement.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warns that such a green light would “dramatically change the essence, the nature of the conflict” because it would mean “that the NATO countries – the United States and the European countries – are at war with Russia “. If Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is right that the US sees “evidence” that the South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence agencies are correct in their claim that North Korea sent 3,000 troops to Russia, then there is a risk of an even bigger war.
The Biden administration’s policy of figuring out how far you can stoke a war before pushing it past the escalation threshold has gone terribly awry, bringing the U.S. to the brink of two major wars. If Biden is the leader of the world, he has ruthlessly and dangerously misgoverned it.
Anatol Lieven is director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and at King’s College London.
Ted Snider is a regular U.S. foreign policy and history columnist at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He writes frequently for Responsible Statecraft and other media outlets.
This text first appeared on our partner portal Responsible Statecraft in English.
