{A} lmost everywhere you look, it seems like the wheels are coming off.
Iran is now participating directly in a campaign of region-wide violence it had previously orchestrated through its terrorist proxies beginning on October 7. Iranian forces claimed credit for missile attacks in northern Iraq conspicuously — perhaps deliberately — close to the new U.S. consulate in Erbil. Iranian forces also executed strikes on what it regards as terrorist elements inside Syria and Pakistan in response to the deadly bombing of a January 3 commemoration for Qasem Soleimani, strikes for which the Pakistani government retaliated on Thursday. “Iranian media said several missiles hit a village in the Sistan-Baluchistan province that borders Pakistan, killing at least nine people, including four children,” Reuters reported.
After three unabated months of attacks on Western commercial and naval assets in and around the Red Sea, the Biden administration has finally responded against the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist organization in Yemen. Those strikes may not be “working,” the president confessed, insofar as they have not deterred the group from mounting those costly and disruptive attacks. But they are going to continue, Joe Biden insisted. Indefinitely, we must assume. If the administration’s proportionate, limited, retaliatory response to Houthi aggression has failed to secure the shipping lanes that lead into the Suez Canal, but the president is not inclined to change his approach, what else can we conclude? After all, the Houthis’ sponsors – Iran, yes, but Iran’s anti-Western partners in Beijing and Moscow, too — are the beneficiaries of this aggression. Their support for Ansar Allah’s attacks will prolong this conflict.
The stalemated situation on the battlefields in Ukraine, where Kyiv continues to defend itself against Russia’s war of territorial conquest, suggests that the biggest land war in Europe since 1945 is cooling off. Not so. This week, Ukrainian drones bore down on targets inside St. Petersburg for the first time and set an oil depot ablaze outside the Russian town of Klintsky. Ukrainian naval assets have successfully engaged their Russian counterparts in the Black Sea, forcing Moscow to “consider relocating its vessels to a planned naval base in the Russian-controlled Republic of Abkhazia in Georgia,” according to the analysts at the Jamestown Foundation.
But Ukraine’s successes are fewer and farther between as Western-provided ammunition supplies dry up. Leaked German military documents published in the German tabloid Bild foreshadow a scenario in which a Ukrainian collapse emboldens Moscow to challenge the integrity of the NATO alliance by compelling it to defend a Baltic ally on Europe’s frontier — a scenario the Kremlin believes would fracture the alliance and sow the seeds of its dissolution. The likelihood of that scenario notwithstanding, NATO isn’t taking any chances. The alliance is mobilizing 90,000 personnel for the largest military exercise since the fall of the Berlin Wall — a move that reflects the deteriorating threat environment on the continent.
Never one to be ignored, North Korea is reportedly telegraphing signals that it, too, wants in on the action. “We believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” observed the DPRK analysts Robert Carlin and Sigfried Hecker in a disturbing dispatch picked up by Axios. Even if a full-scale attack on the South isn’t in the offing, the objectives Pyongyang seeks to achieve with its recent provocations may extend beyond merely spooking Seoul’s allies back to the negotiating table. America is overextended, and Kim Jong-un’s regime could rationally, if not soberly, conclude that a window to achieve reunification on its terms is now open.
And then, there’s China. Once content to bide its time, secure in its self-conception as a rising power whose hegemony was a matter of destiny, Beijing’s economic downturn, corruption scandals, and the publicly available evidence that graft has degraded the People’s Liberation Army’s readiness have come as a shock to the system. Xi Jinping is telling anyone willing to listen that he intends to retake Taiwan by force — an action that would, by his own assertions, commit Joe Biden to a direct conflict with the Chinese. The United States has so far responded to China’s threats and miliary provocations lethargically, but the political will inside the United States to meet the Chinese challenge has increasingly come to dominate the thinking of American tacticians and lawmakers alike. Beijing, too, likely sees a window of opportunity that won’t stay open forever.
From the mouth of the Essequibo River in South America to the Saharan desert, sovereign states are pressing their territorial claims, backed by the threat of force, with renewed vigor. What begat this global spasm of revanchism? Nations do not commit themselves to costly and risky ventures like armed conflict or, short of shooting, standoffs with the powerful Western alliance and its many partners across the globe on a whim. It would be reductive — even chauvinistic — to attribute all this activity to Joe Biden’s habitual displays of weakness and indecision. But those displays cannot be discounted.
No president in this century has demonstrated more tolerance for setbacks abroad than Joe Biden. That’s in part because no president this century has shown more commitment to the project of retrenching from America’s commitments overseas. That was the obvious conclusion America’s adversaries drew first from Biden’s bloody and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. On that, we don’t have to speculate.
In testimony before Congress, U.S. Air Force general Tod Wolters partly attributed Vladimir Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine to his desire to “take advantage of fissures that could have appeared in NATO as a result of the post-Afghanistan environment.” Nikolai Patrushev, a former Russian intelligence officer and Putin’s “right-hand man,” confirmed Wolters’s assessment. “Did the fact that Afghanistan having the status of a main U.S. ally outside of NATO save the ousted pro-American regime in Kabul?” he asked. “A similar situation awaits those who are banking on America in Ukraine where neo-Nazis are capable of taking power.” Even French socialists, such as onetime president François Hollande, can see the connection. “When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, it showed signs of weakness,” he said. “Each of our withdrawals has been a new opportunity for [Putin’s] influence to grow.”
In the years that followed, Biden signaled repeatedly to America’s adversaries that this is the moment to secure their interests. From rhetorical slips like his now infamous remark about the inconsequence of a “minor incursion” by Russian forces inside Ukrainian territory, to his ceaseless overtures toward an aggressive Iran, to his inexplicable dithering in the Red Sea, America’s enemies can smell Biden’s weakness. And every new conflict makes the next more likely by stretching Western resources and straining its focus, creating the conditions for a self-perpetuating cycle.
Joe Biden alone is not responsible for the explosion of instability abroad, but it also can’t be said that his conduct and comportment have given the enemies of the U.S.-led geopolitical order pause. Just the opposite. Biden’s behavior seems to have helped convince America’s adversaries — too many to be a coincidence — that their time is now, and time is running short.