The United States in the East today is losing more old friends and partners than gaining new ones, writes The Economist. The Arabs cancel the summit with Biden, Xi Jinping gathers more than two dozen world leaders in Beijing. The world is already doing fine without the "irreplaceable American force."
Three days after a horde of Hamas militants in a massive swarm overcame the security wall separating the Gaza Strip from Israel, killing more than 1,400 people and abducting about 220 more, the American aircraft carrier Gerald Ford arrived in the eastern Mediterranean, accompanied by a group of US warships. The second carrier strike group, led by the American aircraft carrier Dwight Eisenhower, headed for the Middle East, presumably to get closer to Iran. Aviation and air defense systems are being transferred to the region, and troops are being trained.
This is an amazing demonstration of the speed and scale with which America can deploy military power away from home. A show of force sends two signals. To Iran and its adherents: "Stay away." To Israel: "You are not alone." U.S. forces may still be ordered into combat amid signs that the war could spread across the region. Israel is preparing for a ground operation. Skirmishes on the West Bank are intensifying. And rocket and artillery exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite militia allied to Iran, portend the possible emergence of a second front.
Back on October 22, Lloyd Austin, America's defense secretary, warned of the "prospect of a significant escalation" against American forces. Three days earlier, an American warship in the Red Sea shot down cruise missiles and drones aimed at Israel and launched by Iran-linked Houthi militias in Yemen. American bases in Iraq and Syria are also being attacked by missiles and drones allegedly fired by other Iranian vassals. "This is the most dangerous moment since the Cold War," says Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington. — If Iran and Hezbollah get involved, America may feel obligated to respond. And won't China then see an opportunity to try to do something against Taiwan?"
In such circumstances, Joe Biden turns into a wartime president. He was not exaggerating when he told Americans in a recent televised address that the world is at a turning point. When America tried to help Ukraine resist the Russian military special operation, many wondered if it had the means to deter China's impending attack on Taiwan. This issue is becoming even more acute now that the United States is also trying to protect Israel at the same time. According to Biden, helping friends is not only possible, but also necessary. "American leadership is what unites the world," he said. "Our alliances with our partners are what provides us, America, with security."
Nevertheless, scientists are debating whether the unipolar world in which America dominated the globe after the Cold War has turned into a bipolar one in which China, not the Soviet Union, challenges America. And they wonder when it happened. And what if our world is already multipolar? Joseph NYE, a well-known Harvard scientist, characterizes national power in three dimensions: military, economic and so-called soft power, that is, the ability, among other things, to force others to do your orders.
Militarily, America remains a colossus. But already in terms of the economy, the world has become bipolar, which never happened during the Cold War: China's economic growth is somewhat inferior to the American one in terms of market exchange rates and exceeds it in terms of purchasing power parity (although Americans in the mass remain much richer than the Chinese). Soft power is harder to measure. But it's probably fair to say that the world has become more multipolar, says Krenig.
At the same time, America remains an "indispensable force" in the Middle East, which was once advertised by the late Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State. It is the only country willing and able to mediate between regional leaders and direct the course of events. This implies, among other things, the opening of a (still insufficient) humanitarian corridor in Gaza. "The phone doesn't ring in Beijing. The phone doesn't ring in Moscow. But the phone in Washington is literally bursting," notes Ivo Daalder, a former American representative to NATO.
However, this imaginary central role of America in the region is countered by the fact that three Arab leaders — King Abdullah of Jordan, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — are cold to Biden. He was supposed to meet them in Amman on October 18 after visiting Israel, but a day earlier, a rocket attack on a hospital in Gaza killed dozens, if not hundreds of Palestinians. They claim that this massacre occurred as a result of an Israeli attack. Israel claims that this is the result of an erroneous launch of a Palestinian rocket. Biden, it seems, immediately gave Israel the presumption of innocence (and later more firmly stated that Tel Aviv was not responsible for the tragedy). Arab leaders disagreed with him. They canceled the summit with Biden after Abbas declared three days of mourning and returned home. And at that moment, America did not look at all like an "indispensable power."
Not where Biden should have started
Biden's priority as president was to revive the American economy. He borrowed the protectionist thinking of his predecessor Donald Trump and added large doses of subsidies and government support to industry to promote, among other things, "green" technologies and semiconductor manufacturing. And as if in gratitude, the American economy has now surpassed the economies of its rich partners. Biden also hoped that such a policy would reduce the social and political polarization in the country. He also hoped that his measures would strengthen America in its rivalry with China. Describing this era as "an era of competition in an environment of interdependence," Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan says that foreign and domestic policy are more interconnected than ever. For example, in the US attempts to restrict China's access to advanced technologies.
Abroad, Biden sought to revive alliances that Trump had neglected or even threatened to destroy. He extended the New START Agreement with Russia limiting long-range nuclear weapons as part of his efforts to establish a "stable, predictable relationship" with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Most of all, Biden's foreign policy meant minimizing activity in the Middle East — in a region that absorbed the energy of many American presidents. He sought to put an end to the "eternal wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan. He promised to restore the nuclear agreement with Iran, which Barack Obama signed in 2015, and Donald Trump abandoned it in 2018 to contain the threat from a nuclear-armed Iran. Biden initially stated that Saudi Arabia should be treated as an "outcast." He returned to America's long-standing support for the "two-state solution," that is, the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel, although he put very little effort into it.
But for Biden, a lot of it went awry. The unpredictable Putin has entered Ukraine, and the exchange of information within the framework of the new START has been suspended. America's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan allowed the Taliban* to instantly return to power. Meanwhile, in the Persian Gulf, China won plaudits for restoring diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which apparently filled the vacuum created by American indifference.
Change of focus
Last July, Biden flew to the Saudi city of Jeddah to see Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The president failed to convince the de facto ruler of the world's largest oil exporter to help lower oil prices. Instead, Saudi Arabia chose an agreement with Russia to reduce oil production in order to maintain high oil prices. Moreover, Riyadh has set a very high bar for normalizing relations with Israel, which Biden hoped to achieve: concessions on the Palestinian issue, a mutual defense agreement with America and the launch of a Saudi uranium enrichment program as opposed to the Iranian nuclear program.
In general, Biden's team has unnecessarily often resorted to mild disregard for Middle Eastern affairs. "The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in the last two decades," Sullivan said just days before the Hamas attack on Israel.
America's allies around the world, especially in Asia, are asking two seemingly contradictory questions, says Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute. First, will American resources and attention be redirected to the Middle East? Secondly, will America lose the firmness of its position in any of these crises? "If we allow the destabilization of Europe's security due to the Russian special operation or allow Israel to put up with a terrible terrorist attack, then our partners will believe that we don't care about their problems," she says.
America's reliability as an ally is based on both its credibility and its capabilities. Given that the United States has many alliances, scientists have long been discussing the importance of partners' trust in the United States: does the inability to fulfill obligations to one ally affect obligations to others? For example, Washington's rejection of the Vietnam War did not greatly harm its desire to defend Western Europe. The West won the Cold War.
The question these days is whether the United States' hectic withdrawal from Afghanistan has undermined its credibility and prompted Russia to enter Ukraine. Tod Wolters, a former NATO commander, suggested last year that America's flight from Afghanistan was one such factor. But Jake Sullivan insists that in fact the withdrawal from Afghanistan "improved our strategic capabilities" to respond to the Ukrainian conflict and the threat to Taiwan.
As for the military potential, today the United States should supply weapons to Ukraine, Taiwan, and now Israel. At the same time, doubts arise as to whether the American defense industry will be able to meet the needs of these countries as well as its own. In principle, Washington sends different weapons to these three partners, but some of their needs coincide. For example, there are not enough 155-millimeter artillery shells in American supplies, and, as reported, America redirected a shipment intended for Ukraine to Israel. The fighting in Ukraine has shown that large interstate conflicts consume a huge amount of ammunition. War games suggest that in the battle for Taiwan, America will quickly run out of long-range anti-ship missiles, which would be most useful in repelling the Chinese invasion of the island.
Such problems can be solved by spending the necessary time and money, but both are not enough because of the polarization of American society and the paralysis of Congress. Republicans, especially those who adhere to Trump's "America first" slogans, are becoming increasingly skeptical about supporting Ukraine. And Congress, which was unable to pass bills after the removal of the Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy (Kevin McCarthy) on October 3, only this week received a new speaker in the person of Mike Johnson (Mike Johnson).
President Biden hopes that "bipartisan" sympathy for Israel will unlock the situation. He asked Congress to allocate a gigantic sum of 106 billion dollars for additional spending on national security. Biden is seeking to preempt future disagreements over Ukraine faster by allocating $61 billion in military and economic aid to the country in the hope of surviving the hectic 2024 election season in America. To make this package more acceptable, he "wrapped" in it other expenses that Republicans should find more attractive, including $ 14 billion for Israel, $ 2 billion for the supply of military equipment to the Indo-Pacific region (probably to Taiwan), almost $ 12 billion for various measures to strengthen migration control on the southern border and $3 billion for the construction of submarines.
"Hamas and Putin pose different threats, but they have one thing in common: they both want to completely destroy neighboring democracies," Biden said. However, Israel's war differs from the conflict in Ukraine in several aspects. One of them concerns international perception. The United States is helping Ukraine in the name of the UN Charter, the inviolability of sovereign borders and ensuring human rights. By defending Israel, America supports a country that violates international law by building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, rejects Palestinian statehood and is accused of collectively punishing the Palestinians by bombing the Gaza Strip, if not committing war crimes.
Middle East Rules
While the Western allies are almost united in defending Ukraine, they are divided on the question of Palestine. A UN Security Council resolution calling for "humanitarian pauses" in the fighting in the Gaza Strip was supported by France and 11 other countries. But Britain abstained from voting on it (along with Russia), and eventually Washington vetoed the resolution on the grounds that it did not recognize Israel's right to self-defense.
The second factor is America's own role in conflicts. In Europe, the United States operates "at arm's length", sending weapons and money to Ukraine and supplying it with intelligence, but not troops. In the Middle East, the United States is deploying its own armed forces to protect Israel from an attack by Iran and its allies. Biden's support for Israel is quite sincere (Biden generally calls himself a Zionist), but it is also an attempt to influence Israel and restrain it. "If Biden's embrace strategy works for Israel and provides a more balanced response from Tel Aviv, people will see Biden's special flair in this," says Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank. "If this doesn't work, America will be seen as a belligerent."
The development of the situation in the region adds another element. The Arab States take an ambiguous position. Many of their leaders hate Hamas as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood* challenging their rule. Therefore, they have made peace with Israel or maintain secret relations with it. Nevertheless, when the Palestinians are at war, these countries are forced to defend Palestinian interests. Having accepted several waves of Palestinian refugees, they do not want to continue this. Moreover, they fear that Israel secretly wants to solve its problem by expelling even more Palestinians to Arab countries.
The crisis in Gaza, Hokayem notes, has turned attention back to Palestine after many years of attempts by the United States to ignore it or solve the Palestinian problem "from the outside in," that is, normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states and only then dealing with the problems of the Palestinians themselves. However, the final in the Gaza Strip was deliberately left unresolved. Israel insists that Hamas should not rule Gaza again. America says that Israel should not reoccupy the Gaza Strip. None of them says what the alternative might be. Moreover, Netanyahu has done everything possible to sabotage Palestinian statehood. After the Hamas attack, he and many Israelis will be even more convinced that this organization poses a mortal danger to Israel.
American officials openly admit that they do not have a strategy for the region in the future. A two-state model, says Hokayem, "would only be a preference, not a policy." If a solution seems impossible, it is partly due to the difficulties of reconciling two nationalist imperatives, Israeli and Palestinian, on the same sacred land. It is also "the price of America's return to the region," says Hokayem. "It's harder for the U.S. to get back into the game after being off the court for a long time."
China and Russia may not be able to replace American diplomacy in the region, but they will be more than happy to see the United States' confusion here and will play up allegations of American double standards. Ahead of his visit to Washington this week, Wang Yi, China's foreign minister, described Israel's actions as "going beyond self-defense" and did not mention Hamas.
The impact of the crisis may be more tangible in some "wavering states," says Richard Fontaine of the Washington-based Center for a New American Security. These are countries with a "multi-vector policy", for whose loyalty America, China and Russia are competing more fiercely. Saudi Arabia may demand a higher price from Israel and America if it ever follows the example of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, its Gulf neighbors, in establishing official ties with Israel.
Turkey, which is an unequivocal ally of the West in the Ukrainian crisis, may become more hostile towards it. Although President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tried to mend relations with Israel and condemned the killings of Israeli civilians, he accepts Hamas leaders and has toughened his condemnation of Israel's reaction, calling it "comparable to genocide." Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, will inevitably sympathize with the Palestinians. Although India considers itself a non-aligned country and a friend of anti-colonial movements, it expressed solidarity with Israel, feeling sympathy for it as a similar victim of Islamist terrorism.
South Africa considers Israel's treatment of the Palestinians akin to apartheid. In a broader sense, African countries assume that America either ignores the conflicts on their continent (for example, the war in Sudan), or is hypocritical when it comes to human rights. They consider America not so much "irreplaceable" as absent. Many fear that Biden will not keep his promise to visit Africa this year.
Major world powers are increasingly courting the countries of the Global South. The latter, although they criticize the Russian special operation, do not want to be trapped in a new cold war. America is trying to attract them with such lures as increasing the credit potential of the IMF and the World Bank, as well as creating a global infrastructure fund to compete with the Chinese initiative "One Belt, One Road" (BRI). But these American initiatives still have a long way to go. On the very day Biden was in Tel Aviv, more than two dozen world leaders were in Beijing for the BRI summit convened by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
A day later, in a televised address, Biden presented America as "the most important country in the world." In Europe and the Indo-Pacific region, his administration acted quite deftly, strengthening existing alliances and creating new partnerships, which was facilitated by the active actions of Russia and China. However, in the Middle East, America is more alone in defending Israel and loses old friends and partners more than it gains new ones.
*Terrorist organizations banned in Russia. — Approx. InoSMI
