Emma Ashford: Happy holidays, Matt. We’re heading into the Christmas period, when everyone leaves Washington but global crises keep on churning regardless.
Emma Ashford: Happy holidays, Matt. We’re heading into the Christmas period, when everyone leaves Washington but global crises keep on churning regardless.
We’ve got a lot of controversy to round out this year: a highwire negotiation between the White House and congressional Republicans on Ukraine aid and the carnage in Gaza are just a few examples.
It’s almost hard to believe that the title of our column last December was “Will 2023 be more peaceful than 2022?”
Matt Kroenig: Yes, in hindsight, I think the answer to that question is a clear “no.” Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to rage. I don’t believe either of us had a major Israel-Hamas war on our bingo card at this time last year. And the China threat continues to grow in the Indo-Pacific.
EA: Ending the year trapped in the Middle East and failing to pivot to China? It’s like foreign-policy Groundhog Day.
MK: Like we did last year, I thought it might make sense to look back on the major events of the year. What do you think was the most significant foreign-policy development of 2023?
EA: There are so many, it’s hard to choose. It’s tempting to say the war in Gaza—which reminded everyone that the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot simply be swept under the rug. But I also think that the Biden administration’s roller coaster China policy deserves some attention: from early 2023, when National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan effectively told an audience at the Brookings Institution that the United States would use export controls and novel economic sanctions to try to restrict China’s access to high-level technology, to late 2023, when we have President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping meeting in California in an attempt to calm tensions between the two countries. It’s been a mess. The best you can say for it is that the administration realized it had overreached and compensated for it.
Congress, meanwhile, has just released the recommendations of its select committee’s strategy on the Chinese Communist Party, which suggests economic measures that would begin to decouple the U.S.-China economic relationship. The most radical is probably the proposal to raise tariffs on Chinese goods in violation of World Trade Organization rules, but there are a variety of other measures—like screening investments or restricting technology transfers—that are also quite draconian. It doesn’t matter how many summits Biden and Xi have met: If Congress puts these proposals into legislation, then the relationship is headed back into a downward spiral next year.
MK: Well, I want to come back to U.S.-China relations, but, if forced to choose, I would say the gruesome Hamas terror attack of Oct. 7, and Israel’s war in Gaza in response, was the most notable international development of 2023. As you suggest above, Washington has wanted to pivot away from the Middle East to focus more on the Indo-Pacific for many years. For a while, it seemed that that was happening. The Middle East had been quiet. Last year at this time, the big debate was whether America and the free world could deal with Russia and China at the same time.
The Oct. 7 attack reminded us that the Middle East also remains an important geostrategic region, and Washington and its allies cannot afford to ignore it. It also reminded us that “the war on terror” is not yet, and indeed may never be, over. While not as important as World War III with China or Russia, terrorism remains an attractive tactic for weak groups with extreme ideologies and likely will be with us for decades to come.
Terrorism has always been a tactic. That’s why declaring a war on terror—rather than on specific terrorist groups—was always such a stupid idea.
EA: Terrorism has always been a tactic. That’s why declaring a war on terror—rather than on specific terrorist groups—was always such a stupid idea.
But I interpret the Oct. 7 attack a bit differently. It doesn’t really add any geostrategic significance to the region from the point of view of U.S. interests, which have always been more about oil and concrete security concerns. But the attack was a reminder that no matter how much the United States and even Arab states would like to ignore the Palestinian question in favor of more interesting anti-China or anti-Iran coalitions, it won’t go away unless it’s somehow resolved.
MK: Well, it might not be as significant if the White House were willing to outsource the problem to its partner, Israel. But that is not happening. Instead, the conflict is sapping a lot of high-level attention as Biden attempts to micromanage the war from the Oval Office, in large part for domestic political reasons.
But the other reason this is relevant is the role of Iran. Tehran has long backed Hamas and seems to have had at least some role in the planning of this attack. It is now conducting regular proxy attacks against U.S. forces in the region. According to the Pentagon, Iran’s “dash time” to the bomb is measured in days. And Tehran is increasingly working with China and Russia in a new—and I know you love this term—axis of evil.
At the end of the day, I think the eruption of new conflict in the Middle East shows that the United States and its allies need a strategy to deal with the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East at the same time.
EA: Unironically using the term “axis of evil” in 2023? That’s something I hadn’t expected. Might be worth thinking about how that original group of countries worked out, though, to assess U.S. policy over the last couple of decades? Saddam Hussein is gone in Iraq, sure, but the country is now basically an Iranian satellite state. Iran is still a thorn in the side of the United States and pretty close to having a nuclear weapon. Oh, and North Korea, of course, is still an authoritarian hellhole, but now it has ICBMs that can hit the continental United States.
So maybe we don’t want to repeat the axis of evil strategy.
You are right about one thing: 2023 has shown just how overstretched the United States is. The administration wants to focus on China but has spent much of its political capital and energy on other conflicts. It’s notable that neither of us has even mentioned Ukraine yet. 2023 looks to be the year when the Ukraine conflict started to lose its luster among voters and politicians in the West, most of whom are now trying to find a politically acceptable way to exit—or at least lower the temperature of the conflict.
MK: But we aren’t politicians, so let’s turn our attention to Ukraine. I think the stalled Ukrainian counteroffensive is one of the big stories of the year. To our credit, we did predict that the war would continue through 2023 in our year-end column last year. But at this time last year, there was a lot of optimism about the coming spring counteroffensive. Ukraine had succeeded in taking back a sizable chunk of territory quickly in the summer of 2022, and many analysts hoped that Kyiv would return to stunning and rapid victories when the battlefield thawed this spring.
EA: In retrospect, it should probably have been a sign that things were not proceeding well when the spring offensive didn’t start until June and was still going in December.
MK: Right. Ukraine has succeeded in making some gains, but they were small, slow, and grinding. Russia was able to dig in with stronger fortifications. Both sides are using new technology, like drones, to better see the battlefield and thwart offensives, leading some to speculate about new models of 21st-century warfare.
And, I hate to say it, but you are right; more and more analysts and politicians wonder whether there is anything that can break the stalemate in Ukraine’s favor. Is a cease-fire along the current lines inevitable? Or is the bigger variable now flagging Western support? Could Russia still succeed over time in dominating Ukraine?
EA: I think a lot of Western analysts have now swung too far in the opposite direction, believing that a stalemate is forever. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility for Russia to start making gains again in Ukraine if Ukrainian defenses falter. That’s why it’s vitally important for Ukraine to pivot urgently toward defense. And it wouldn’t hurt to start talking to the Russians; I tend to think there’s little prospect of a peace deal prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, but even opening the lines of communication would be a start.
I wonder if 2024 will see Ukraine slip further off the Western agenda—or if there will be a turnaround?
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MK: Support for Ukraine in Europe remains strong. And the new Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, has been a stronger supporter of Ukraine than many expected. His criticism of Biden has been mostly about a lack of a clear strategy for victory. So far, he has been able to retain the support of Ukraine-skeptical GOP members, but that may not last.
Turning to current events for a moment, I do think the Biden administration needs to give him something on border security to show as a victory to his caucus. The former Fox talking head Tucker Carlson framed this debate for many rank-and-file GOP voters early in the war by asking some version of the question: Why are we defending Ukraine’s border when we can’t defend our own southern border? A White House compromise on border security would help GOP members answer the Carlson question to their constituents.
EA: I thought we only let Carlson set the agenda during Trump presidencies? Now he’s getting to do it under Biden, too!
Seriously, though, Biden’s popularity is historically low, and is low even among parts of his own base. He’s running for reelection next year when only a small proportion of young voters think he’s doing a good job. I would have said this morning that I can’t imagine anything that might make that problem worse, but I’m pretty sure that giving the GOP a wide range of concessions on immigration policy strongly opposed by most of the Democratic Party in order to send more money to Ukraine and Israel might just do the trick.
Honestly, that’s my big-picture takeaway from 2023: The Biden administration is floundering in terms of foreign policy. The most embarrassing example was Sullivan’s headline article (over in that other foreign affairs magazine) on the administration’s strategy that had to be edited and republished just days later because it was so embarrassingly wrong on the Middle East.
Almost every one of their signature achievements or policy goals has proved hollow, and they’re contorting themselves to fit it all—support for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, opposition to China—into a coherent framework that they can sell to voters. A new survey found that voters are confused about Biden’s foreign policy and even that they favor Donald Trump on the foreign-policy question.
I was pleased to see Biden come to office with a tough-on-China approach, but that seems to have reversed in 2023.
MK: I give the administration credit for strengthening free-world alliances. NATO is stronger than when Biden took office, and his administration has taken concrete steps to stitch together democratic allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific with initiatives like AUKUS.
But I agree that the overall results have been disappointing. Two major world regions are in flames today. I am sure administration officials would say they were unfortunate to have bad things happen on their watch, but you can trace both disasters at least in part to misguided Biden policies. The then-supreme allied commander of Europe testified that Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan encouraged Russian President Vladimir Putin to further invade Ukraine, for example. And Iran might have lacked the resources to train and equip Hamas had Biden retained the “maximum pressure” campaign on Tehran.
And, like you, I do fear that their strategy for the other major region, the Indo-Pacific, is unsteady. I was pleased to see Biden come to office with a tough-on-China approach, but that seems to have reversed in 2023.
Starting this spring, Washington has sent a convoy of high-level officials to kowtow to Beijing, and then it rolled out the red carpet for Xi in San Francisco in November. The results of the summit were minimal, and it does not seem to have changed China’s approach to the competition. It was revealed this week that China has conducted dozens of cyber-intrusions into U.S. critical infrastructure to conduct cyberattacks on the United States in the event of a major war over Taiwan.
So, I would place Washington’s misguided attempt to shift to an engagement track with China as a notable foreign-policy development of 2023, and I hope Biden shifts back to a more competitive stance in 2024.
EA: Well, I disagree, but with elections in Taiwan and potential congressional action looming next year, I suspect that the U.S.-China relationship will worsen again without much assistance from the president. I’m more concerned about the fact that the Biden administration’s economic containment strategy is already showing cracks: The Chinese are doing better in the semiconductor and AI spaces than anticipated despite U.S. restrictions. That was eminently predictable when the Biden team put the restrictions in place, but the speed with which it’s been proved wrong is impressive.
You know, it’s been such a busy year that we haven’t even talked about India (and its attempted assassinations of dissidents abroad), about the sudden surge in interest in the defense implications of AI, or even about the other war on Europe’s periphery. What does it say about the purported liberal order that the West has poured billions of dollars in aid and weapons into Ukraine to protect its sovereignty but barely raised a squeak when Azerbaijan restarted its war against Armenia and conquered Nagorno-Karabakh?
I guess we’ll be back to discuss that and other developments next year. This time, though, let’s not ask if 2024 will be more peaceful than 2023. I’m not sure I really want to tempt fate on that one.
MK: OK. I agree. Let’s leave that one alone.
For now, I would just like to close by wishing you and the readers happy holidays and a happy new year! See you in 2024.
EA: I won’t argue with that. Christmas is the time for peace on Earth and goodwill to all men—even you!
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