President Biden’s big interview with Time magazine allows him the space to paint a full picture of the world as he sees it. That picture, in turn, reveals the basic problem with Biden’s management of world affairs as president: He thinks and acts like he’s the secretary of defense, awaiting orders to change strategy when the tide turns against the ship of state.
“We are the world power,” the president tells Time as he explains his belief in the power of alliances. Later in the interview, he says: “We have put together the strongest alliance in the history of the world.”
The president seems to think those two statements mean the same thing. They don’t.
The piece presents Biden in as positive a light as possible, so let’s compare the way the writer admiringly describes Biden’s supposedly muscular multilateralism with its results: “He has added two powerful European militaries to NATO, and will soon announce the doubling of the number of countries in the Atlantic alliance that are paying more than the target 2% of their GDP toward defense, the White House says. His Administration has worked to prevent the war in Gaza from igniting a broader regional conflict. He brokered the first trilateral summit with long-distrustful regional partners South Korea and Japan, and coaxed the Philippines to move away from Beijing’s orbit and accept four new U.S. military bases. He has rallied European and Asian countries to curtail China’s economic sway.”
And what’s the verdict on all that? According to Time, “Alliances haven’t been enough to win a new European war in Ukraine. U.S. power and leverage haven’t prevented a humanitarian catastrophe in the Middle East, marked by alleged war crimes. Putin is trying to assemble an axis of autocrats from Tehran to Beijing. In China, the U.S. faces an adversary potentially its equal in economic and military power that is intent on tearing down the American global order. President Xi has told his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.”
The problem is glaring: The president has almost no capacity to adjust for events.
Take the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Peace looks like making sure Russia never, never, never, never occupies Ukraine,” Biden says. OK, but according to the State Department Russia occupies not only Crimea (which it took in 2014) but sections of five Ukrainian oblasts. Indeed, despite Ukraine’s recapture of about half of what Russian troops had taken since the war began two years ago, Moscow still controls nearly a fifth of Ukrainian territory.
Perhaps, then, the president means that Russia must not occupy the entirety of Ukraine. “If we ever let Ukraine go down,” Biden tells Time, “mark my words, you’ll see Poland go, and you’ll see all those nations along the actual border of Russia [fall].”
If Biden believes that, he’s got a funny way of showing it.
We see something similar in the Middle East. Biden deserves credit, no doubt, for dropping his earlier disastrous plan to undermine our alliance with Saudi Arabia (and thus the entire Sunni coalition in the region). The same is true for the successful U.S.-led intervention against Iran’s unprecedented missile-and-drone attack against Israel in April, an anti-Iran coalition that involved the mobilization of Arab defenses.
But there’s another way to think about it: A truly successful deterrent alliance would not have been tested by an attack consisting of 300 Iranian ballistic missiles and drone strikes, especially one that was announced in advance.
We’re told Biden’s response to Hamas’s atrocities on Oct. 7, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, “was to provide rock-solid support to Israel.” But that was then. Now when he’s asked by Time if Israel committed war crimes, Biden says, “It’s uncertain.” And though the war has dragged on for many reasons, at or near the top of that list would have to be Biden’s own choices, his concessions to anti-Israel protesters, and his attempts to appease his party’s progressives. Nevertheless, when asked if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has delayed the war repeatedly at Biden’s request—is prolonging the war for political reasons, Biden responds: “There is every reason for people to draw that conclusion.”
America’s alliances are tested abroad, because our enemies live at a distance. But our friends live at that same distance. And those enemies are their next-door neighbors. Ukraine and Israel have foes right on their border who will forever be trying to kill them. America can “pivot to Asia” or “reset” or adopt some similar concept that can only be fulfilled in isolation. The purpose of “the strongest alliance in the history of the world” is to keep those borders quiet.
Right now Biden’s prized alliance looks like a global Maginot Line—tough on paper but unintimidating in practice. It has failed as a deterrent in the two major tests it has faced. The third test will likely be from China. Without a different approach, don’t expect a different result.
