Biden’s gambit

As US President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda ‘build back better’ faces major challenges in Congress, he seems to have taken his schema to the international scene in an attempt to build back US global alliances better. Biden, who campaigned on repairing the political and strategic damage caused by his predecessor, has more leeway to manoeuvre internationally, as the US commander-in-chief, than he does nationally, where Congress and the state governors exercise great power.

It also helps that the deeply polarised Democratic and Republican leadership are united behind his vision and determination to ‘restore US global leadership’ vis-a-vis the more bellicose Russia and the more assertive China. What better way to rebuild transatlantic alliances than whipping the European allies into a frenzy by warning them about Russia’s ‘sabre-rattling’ in Eurasia and its imminent invasion of Ukraine and preparing to deploy US troops in Eastern Europe?

And what better way to rebuild transpacific alliances than whipping Asian allies into a frenzy by raising the stakes with China and warning of a potential Chinese intervention in Taiwan? As part of this strategy, Biden seems to be hyping up the war scenario domestically and internationally, despite the fact that the Kremlin is downplaying it. That is not deterrence, not by any stretch of the imagination. It is almost as if Biden is daring Russia to go ahead and do it, invade!

Such an approach may have been a clever strategy against say, Iran or Venezuela, but it may prove reckless against nuclear powers like Russia and China. To be sure, Moscow and Beijing have been making aggressive moves in their neighbourhoods to cement their influence, which the West has taken as a justification to enact preventive measures, such as raising the diplomatic temperature, establishing coalitions, and issuing sanctions threats.

But pushing Russia and China into a corner at the same time leaves little room for serious diplomacy. Such attempts at ‘dual containment’ have been tried and have failed against the far weaker non-nuclear powers, Iraq and Iran, in the 1990s. In the following decade, this mutated into the ‘axis of evil’ strategy, which also proved a foolish disaster. When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva last month, he sounded eerily like his predecessor, James Baker, after meeting with his Iraqi counterpart, Tariq Aziz, in the Swiss city three decades earlier.

Like Baker, a confident Blinken said the talks were ‘not negotiations’; they meant to inform not threaten, and warned against another terrible miscalculation while stressing the need for a peaceful outcome. The US has fought two wars against Iraq and held Iran under sanctions for decades at a terrible cost for all three nations, sowing further instability, insecurity and prompting Iran to pursue nuclear power status. Needless to say, Russia is no Iraq or Iran. Nor is the US today the same global power it was in 1991.

Excerpted: ‘Biden’s gambit in Ukraine is a risky gamble’

Courtesy: Aljazeera.com