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Ever since Hamas went on its sadistic rampage last month, President Joe Biden has skillfully played a role he never asked for: restrainer. Publicly, he's expressed America's steely determination to support Israel and deter Iran and others from widening the war. Privately, he's been telling the Israeli allies that they must be proportionate in their response, lest a disastrous situation turn apocalyptic.
As the body count in Gaza increases, that balancing act is becoming harder to maintain. In that way, the situation in the Middle East — where Biden also needs the Saudis and various other difficult protagonists to show restraint — is beginning to resemble U.S. foreign policy globally.
Look at Eastern Europe. If the U.S. hadn't taken the lead in supporting Kyiv against the genocidal and neo-imperialist aggression of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Europeans and other Western allies would have dropped off by now. Ukraine might well be under Putin's boot, with Moldova and other former Soviet Republics — perhaps even the Baltic NATO members — in the Kremlin's sights.
Throughout his stalwart stand with Kyiv, however, Biden has also been murmuring into the ear of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that he must restrain his war strategy, to keep the Russo-Ukrainian conflict from becoming a Moscow-NATO clash or even World War III. That approach has dictated which weapons the U.S. has supplied at which time, and therefore also the armaments provided by European allies such as Germany, which take their cues from Washington. (1)
Biden's public message to Kyiv has been: We'll never dictate your strategy or foist compromises or peace negotiations on you. The private message has been: Defend Ukrainian soil, but don't massively threaten Russia itself, or Putin personally.
Something subtler but similar is happening in East Asia. There the U.S. has been counseling its South Korean allies to incorporate plans for a relatively limited counter strike against North Korea in the event of an attack by Kim Jong Un, the dictator of Pyongyang. The American fear — as in the clash with Putin — is that Kim might react to the superiority of the U.S. and its allies in conventional firepower with a tactical nuclear strike, which would make subsequent escalation imponderable.
The pattern holds from Taiwan to the Philippines. In both places, Biden publicly warns China not to kindle, while privately telling Taipei and Manila not to provoke.
All over the world, the former superpower is increasingly turning into a super restrainer. The reason for this evolution is that reality keeps forcing the U.S., and Biden, to adjust the country's grand strategy.
The big idea during the Obama administration, in which Biden was vice president, was a "pivot" in U.S. foreign policy. The plan was gradually to expend less diplomatic, military and strategic energy in Europe, the Middle East and other parts of the world, and more in Asia, where the U.S. faced its biggest challenger, China. But Putin, the Iranian mullahs and other rogues and villains kept disrupting their respective neighborhoods, causing geopolitical problems only the U.S. can contain.
In that way Biden has rediscovered that the U.S. is the one nation in the world that can't afford to pivot, from Europe or anywhere else, because it's needed everywhere. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said, and as Biden recently repeated, the U.S. is "the indispensable nation." Without its leadership, the world would descend into anarchy.
That realization raises a dilemma. The motivation for pivoting — that is, prioritizing and conserving energies through selective retrenchment — was a perception of overstretch. For a long time, America's strategic plans assumed that the U.S. must be able to win two wars at once. The rise of China as a veritable peer makes that two-war planning iffier — it now has the world's largest navy and intends to equal the U.S. in nuclear weapons in about a decade.
Worse, the plausible emergence of a de facto axis between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea renders that posture all but untenable, because it turns a two-front scenario into a multiple-front one. The nuclear weapons wielded by three of the potential axial powers — and, soon, perhaps the fourth — make that situation even scarier.
That prospect is what worries a bipartisan congressional commission that's just released its report on the "strategic posture" America needs in this complicated new world. It calls on the U.S. to invest huge sums in its conventional military, to be able to deter or defeat Russia, China, North Korea and Iran all at once, and in all domains from sea to space. The alternative would be to expand America's nuclear arsenal so vastly that it could, in theory, match Russia and China escalating in concert. But that would mean starting a new arms race.
A dire outlook, to be sure. Better, therefore, to buy time and keep regional wars from getting out of control or becoming entangled with one another.
This logic explains why Biden no longer seeks to retrench from any region, but is trying instead to keep America's foes and friends alike from escalating. That's true from the South China Sea to Crimea and now Gaza. If there's an emerging Biden doctrine, it might be a twist on Teddy Roosevelt's famous phrase: Carry a big stick, and whisper restraint to your allies.
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(1) That, incidentally, is why continued U.S. help to Kyiv is not only necessary but also connected to aid for Israel and other allies - as Democrats and Republicans in the Senate grasp, but some Republicans in the House apparently don't.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. He's the author of "Hannibal and Me."
Previously:
• 11/02/23: Where's the United Nations in all this? Oh, right, nowhere
• 09/22/23: We all need to keep supporting Ukraine, Elon
• 09/22/23: Biden said the right things at the UN. That won't be enough
• 08/02/23: Russia outnumbers the US 10-to-1 in tactical nukes. Now what?
• 06/27/23: Putin's biggest mistakes in the Wagner uprising
• 05/31/23: Should Ukraine take the war into Russia?
• 05/08/23: Ukraine in NATO: The heart says yes, the head no
• 04/25/23: How NATO should deter Vladimir Putin's Russia
• 03/29/23: Putin ups the ante with nukes in Belarus
• 02/15/23: Russia's 'human wave attacks' are another step into hell
• 12/09/22: Germany just averted the Fourth Reich
• 11/28/22: Russia's mass abductions are genocide
• 10/21/22: If Putin orders a nuke, will his generals obey?
• 09/23/22: A decision tree for Biden if Putin goes nuclear
• 08/25/22: Putin wouldn't shrink from starting Chernobyl 2.0 in Ukraine
• 07/08/22: Ukraine has better heroes than this friend of fascism
• 06/10/22: Merkel will enter history as the Neville Chamberlain of our time
• 04/29/22: NATO needs to seal the deal with Sweden and Finland fast
• 01/24/22: Vladimir Putin has no time for your reality
• 01/06/22:Bombast, distance and distrust: Your guide to Ukraine talks
• 01/06/22: An international court decision forces all of us to debate who should get medical care if it must be rationed
• 12/08/21: A crisis of masculinity as robots replace men
• 11/03/21: In post — Merkel Europe, what is 'conservatism'?
• 11/03/21: In this nuclear arms race, China's hypersonic gliders are a wake — up call
• 07/16/21: By doggedly backing a Russian gas link, Angela Merkel has let down the U.S. and Europe — — — and left her successor only bad options
• 06/08/21:Will you have fewer friends after lockdown?
• 07/29/20: OK, boomer, we're gonna socialize you
• 07/09/20: The fight over a coronavirus vaccine will get ugly
• 05/26/20: The EU is entering a constitutional crisis