President Joe Biden opened his recent Washington Post op-ed with a familiar refrain: “Today, the world faces an inflection point.”
There is no better proof of the validity of that truism than the perceptions and actions of the authoritarian adversaries of the Western international order. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea and their lesser accomplices see the present geopolitical posture of the United States as a unique opportunity to advance their interests and undermine those of the U.S. and its allies.
The 2024 presidential election has captured the authoritarians’ attention as the ultimate inflection point on their trajectory to supplant the U.S.-led rules-based order. They see unparalleled opportunity in the election of either of the two party front-runners, both of whom have shown fatal weaknesses in and out of the presidency.
Former President Donald Trump’s stellar national security team rescued U.S. foreign policy from four decades of elite naivete regarding Beijing’s intentions. U.S.-China relations were on the brink of disastrous and irreversible decline. By 2017, either Washington was going to submit to Chinese communist economic, diplomatic and geostrategic supremacy, or the situation was about to slip into inevitable military confrontation.
But that foreign policy team is no more, and can never be reconstituted in a new administration theoretically led by Trump, given his allegedly criminal and surely unpatriotic behavior since he lost the 2020 election and what subsequently has been revealed of his conduct in office. Trump has also effectively repudiated much of his own administration’s accomplishments on the most critical issue in U.S.-China relations: the fate of Taiwan.
Those global dangers remain. Biden’s administration has largely followed its predecessor’s transformative policies on China and Taiwan and explicitly recognized the existential struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, but it has sounded an uncertain trumpet on overt challenges from China’s anti-West partners.
Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan sent an unmistakable message of weakness and war-weariness and invited adventuristic probing from lurking aggressors. The most open and obvious of these was Xi Jinping’s declared “no-limits strategic partner,” Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Biden already bore the burden of his own record, which President Obama’s Defense secretary, Robert Gates, described as having been “wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue over the last four decades.” Vice President Biden was Obama’s foreign policy guru when Putin invaded Ukraine the first time in 2014. The Obama-Biden administration did nothing in the face of what was at that point the greatest example of international aggression since the Second World War.
That acquiescence was foretold when Obama communicated to Putin in 2012 that he would be “more flexible” after his re-election. The Obama-Biden team also looked the other way when Putin defied Washington by propping up Syria’s Bashar Assad, erasing Obama’s “red lines.”
As president, Biden has continued Obama’s flexibility toward Russian aggression. He indicated in January 2022, when the administration already knew Russia’s invasion was imminent, that he could accept “a limited incursion” that would take yet another piece of Ukrainian sovereign territory.
Once the aggression was underway but was prevented by Ukrainian valor and military competence from taking Kiev and toppling the government of Volodymyr Zelensky, Biden continued to demonstrate a flexible U.S. strategy. He skillfully marshalled NATO members to assist in preventing a total collapse of Ukraine under Russia’s onslaught. But he refused to provide Ukraine, and blocked allies from providing, the weapons that would decisively defeat Russia and eject its forces from Ukrainian territory, the only resolution consistent with international law and the defeat of Nazi aggression 77 years earlier.
Instead, Biden’s policy seems designed to arrange a stalemate that freezes the correlation of Ukrainian and Russian forces on the ground and compels Zelensky and his victimized population to accept an indefinite partition of their country. That outcome — substantially rewarding Russia’s aggression — supposedly will avoid the escalation that could theoretically lead to World War III, Biden’s paralyzing fear that has inhibited sound military planning from the outset.
Trump, who sees the world only as an extension of his ego and personal interests, has made clear that his Ukraine policy would be even more defeatist, entirely ending U.S. support “within 24 hours.” It is no wonder that Putin would welcome the return of either Biden or Trump to the White House, and that Xi would share that satisfaction given the implications for U.S. policy on Taiwan.
With former Vice President Mike Pence no longer in the Republican nomination picture, only one of the remaining candidates possesses the combined foreign policy credentials and executive experience to qualify immediately upon taking office as a credible commander in chief: former South Carolina Governor and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
In three GOP debates, Haley has demonstrated a convincing command of the geostrategic issues confronting the next president. Moreover, her mastery of the subject is not only intellectual; she manifests a passionate grasp of the significance of the historic “inflection point” that Biden often invokes rhetorically but is timid and erratic in addressing. The prime example is his failure to cope with the major threat to American and Israeli values and interests from the Islamic republic of Iran and its collusion with China and Russia on the war in the Middle East.
If recent polls showing Haley rising against both Trump and Biden continue, she would become the giant-killer in 5-inch heels. Reprising Britain’s Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, she would do more to curb the advances of authoritarianism than either Biden or Trump. Other GOP candidates should rally behind her.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
America’s adversaries have reason to fear Nikki Haley
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28.11.2023
President Joe Biden opened his recent Washington Post op-ed with a familiar refrain: “Today, the world faces an inflection point.”
There is no better proof of the validity of that truism than the perceptions and actions of the authoritarian adversaries of the Western international order. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea and their lesser accomplices see the present geopolitical posture of the United States as a unique opportunity to advance their interests and undermine those of the U.S. and its allies.
The 2024 presidential election has captured the authoritarians’ attention as the ultimate inflection point on their trajectory to supplant the U.S.-led rules-based order. They see unparalleled opportunity in the election of either of the two party front-runners, both of whom have shown fatal weaknesses in and out of the presidency.
Former President Donald Trump’s stellar national security team rescued U.S. foreign policy from four decades of elite naivete regarding Beijing’s intentions. U.S.-China relations were on the brink of disastrous and irreversible decline. By 2017, either Washington was going to submit to Chinese communist economic, diplomatic and geostrategic supremacy, or the situation was about to slip into inevitable military confrontation.
But that foreign policy team is no more, and can never be reconstituted in a new administration theoretically led by Trump, given his allegedly criminal and surely unpatriotic behavior since he lost the 2020 election and what subsequently has been revealed of his conduct in office. Trump has also effectively repudiated much of his own administration’s........
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