The United States this week published its National Security Strategy (NSS), a 48-page document that lays out what the president, in this case Joe Biden, sees as the country’s most serious challenges and how his administration plans confront them at home and abroad.
The latest NSS commissioned by Congress outlines a Biden doctrine that is both ideological and pragmatic: He names geopolitical enemies China and Russia within his world vision of “struggle between autocracies and democracies,” while intending to work with nations of any kind to address the pandemic, climate change, inflation and other global threats.
The strategy argues that at the beginning of what Biden calls this “decisive decade,” there is a small window of opportunity to meet shared transnational challenges, even within current great-power rivalries, to advance US interests and put the US at risk. world on the road to a brighter future.
“America will lead with our values and we will work together with our allies and partners and with all those who share our interests,” Biden said in his foreword. “As the world continues to navigate the lingering impacts of the pandemic and global economic uncertainty, there is no nation better positioned to lead with strength and purpose than the United States of America.”
The NSS lays out a three-pronged plan for his administration to do: make national investments in industry, innovation, education, health care, and democracy; mobilize alliances and coalitions to enhance collective influence and shape the rules of the road; modernize and strengthen the US military.
Strategic challenges at the end of the post-Cold War era
Management identifies two main strategic challenges. The first is competition among major powers to shape the next global order as the world moves away from a post-Cold War era in which the US is the sole hegemon. The second is how to work with allies and adversaries alike to tackle transnational problems, including climate change, food insecurity, communicable diseases, terrorism, energy shortages, and inflation.
“We have reached a point where we can and we just have to address both on the same plane: geopolitical competition and shared transnational challenges, so we are building a strategy fit for purpose, both for competition that we cannot ignore as for global cooperation without which we cannot succeed,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said while introducing the NSS at an event Wednesday hosted by Georgetown University and the Center for a New American security.
Moscow and Beijing are singled out as “revisionist authoritarian powers,” non-democratic actors whose goal is to change the world order and pose a threat to international peace and stability by “waging or preparing for wars of aggression,” a reference to Russia’s invasion . of Ukraine and China’s military buildup in the South China Sea and their threats to Taiwan. China considers Taiwan a rogue province and does not rule out an invasion.
The countries are also singled out for “actively undermining the democratic political processes of other countries, harnessing technology and supply chains for coercion and repression, and exporting an illiberal model of international order.”
Even when denouncing these behaviors, the NSS emphasizes that democracies and autocracies can cooperate, said Stacie Goddard, who teaches global power politics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
“The problem, the NSS asserts, is not that China and Russia are not democracies,” Goddard told the VOA. “The problem is that they are undermining some basic rules that allow order in international politics.”
Those rules, Sullivan said, include the principles of sovereignty.
“Many countries that do not have democratic institutions are on the side of upholding and defending the terms and principles of the UN Charter,” he said, pointing to the overwhelming vote at the United Nations this week to reject Russia’s annexation of Ukraine.
Discrepancy in respect of sovereignty
Critics pointed to the discrepancy between the administration’s rhetoric of leading the global fight to preserve respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the prohibition on acquiring territory through war, and the actual policies it pursues on the ground, on all in relation to Israel.
The Biden administration has yet to override or even criticize former President Donald Trump’s 2019 decision to recognize the annexation of the Golan Heights by Israel, said Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. The Golan Heights were part of the Syrian territory that was captured by Israel in 1967 and annexed in 1981.
“Nor has he called for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as previous presidents have done,” Elgindy told the media. voice of america.
Critics also point to the recent decision by OPEC+, a group of oil-producing countries that includes members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, that despite intense Biden administration lobbyingdecided to cut production to raise the world price of oil and thus help finance Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.
The NSS offers strong principles to guide policy in the Middle East, said Daniel Shapiro, distinguished fellow for the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, from promoting regional integration to ensuring the security of partners and allies from regional and external threats. , to support better human rights conditions, all without overstretching US resources or taking our eyes off global priorities.
“But the region moves fast, and even as those words were released, events challenged the ability to implement this strategy,” Shapiro said, adding that the Middle East “cuts strategy papers to shreds, forcing policymakers to make decisions that require the most painful trade-offs. of one essential priority as opposed to another equally valid one”.
The most important geopolitical challenge
Although the publication date of the document scheduled for February 2022 was delayed due to russian invasion of ukrainethe administration’s focus on China has not changed: the NSS stresses that Beijing is the “most important geopolitical challenge” to the US.
The NSS notes that Russia is a “source of global disruption and instability” and represents an “immediate and continuing threat to the regional security order in Europe.” He also calls other smaller “aggressive and destabilizing” autocratic powers, namely Iran and North Korea. But he argues that no other country except China has “full-spectrum capabilities.”
“Russia’s aggression is a challenge, but it’s clear that this administration still sees China as the long-term problem for US influence,” Goddard said.
The administration says Beijing is using its “technological prowess and growing influence over international institutions to create more permissive conditions for its own authoritarian model and to shape global technology use and norms to privilege its interests and values.”
The administration adds that Beijing uses its economic power to coerce countries and rapidly modernize its military as it seeks to erode US alliances in the Indo-Pacific and around the world.
At the same time, the administration acknowledges that China is “also central to the global economy and has a significant impact on shared challenges, particularly climate change and global public health” and that it is possible to “peacefully coexist and share and contribute to the human health, progress together”.
The launch of the NSS comes as the Chinese Communist Party prepares for its National Congress this weekend. President Xi Jinping is expected to be elected for a third term following a 2018 constitutional amendment. The meeting is set to usher in “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” by 2049.
“That rejuvenation and aspects of China’s overall development will be hampered by action by the Biden administration,” said Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.
The administration’s message to the Chinese people, Daly told the VOAis that while the United States will not actively harm them, Washington will no longer assist in key aspects of their technological development because their government is a threat to a rules-based order.
The NSS, however, takes pains to refer to Beijing as the People’s Republic of China, or PRC, rather than China, as previous strategies have done.
The administration intends to keep the focus of the rivalry between the United States and China in the policies and strategies of its administration, Sullivan said. “It’s very important to us that this doesn’t turn into Americans versus Chinese.”
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