The Xi Balloon Passage Through the US: A Keystone in Biden’s Strategy for a Free, Open, Secure World

Xi’s desire to emerge as the de facto leader of a major strategic bloc, but one with the prestige of a statesman, creates an opportunity for the West to manage the relationship in a way that achieves President Biden’s efforts to compete vigorously while avoiding a war with China. While talking about the Chinese balloon that passed through the US, he reiterated that it was an objective.

Biden got the document 21 months into his term. The broad contours of the strategy have been in evidence over the course of the President’s tenure, including a focus on rebuilding global partnerships and countering China and Russia.

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said the White House wasn’t watching the world solely through strategic competition.

We will not let those who do not share our vision of a free, open, prosperous, and secure world affect our future. “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.”

If Putin’s conflict with Ukraine had turned into a swift Russian victory, the alliance of autocracies would have made huge strides. Moscow has been slow in progress. Russia could become an albatross to Beijing, warned Wendy Sherman, the deputy Secretary of State.

“This decisive decade is critical both for defining the terms of competition, particular with the (People’s Republic of China), and for getting ahead of massive challenges that if we lose the time this decade we will not be able to keep pace with,” he said.

The Rise and Fall of the Rule of the Strong: The Xi-Putin Era in the White House after the 2016 Moscow Winter Olympics

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

In February of last year, Russian president Putin stood side by side with his Chinese counterpart. Putin was still denying plans to invade Ukraine, which he would do just after the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics.

In a show of unity, the leaders of the two nuclear powers vowed to have a relationship with “no limits.” It looked like a pivotal moment in a global realignment of power.

A year later, Putin’s push for a quick victory in Ukraine, one that would solidify Russia’s place as a top global player, looks like a disaster, and the alliance appears much less valuable to Xi.

Since that day in Beijing, a lot has changed, but the two leaders smiled for the cameras and expected a new era to begin. The war made it clear that democracies should push back against antidemocratic regimes and not allow them to join forces.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has thrown a light on the path forward for US foreign policy, adding to the forces trying to change the world.

In addition to fortifying NATO and strengthening alliances, which President Joe Biden’s administration has accomplished with great success, the US must aim to forestall the creation of a credible, unified force of aggressive antidemocratic regimes.

It requires keeping Russia from winning in Ukraine, but also keeping Moscow and Beijing apart, and counteracting China’s efforts to forge stronger bonds with Iran.

On February 1st, 2015, Xi and Putin launched a bloc of aggressive anti-Western autocracies. Beijing and Moscow sought to replace the rule of law with “the rule of the strongest,” warned European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The rule of the strongest doesn’t work when you can’t win, that’s how Russia’s plans began to break down and China had to rethink its commitment

Is the man with Putin in or out? Xi seems to want it both ways. He wants the relationship with a country that has invaded its neighbor without provocation, but he’s trying to present himself as a responsible global leader; an alternative to the democratic Western model for other countries to follow.

The US believes Russia has purchased military equipment from North Korea, which denies any involvement in the war.

Those adamant denials changed later, with Iran claiming it sold weapons before the war started, but those were not being used in Ukraine. The documents show the drones in Ukrainian are very similar to those used by Iran in the Middle East.

Iran, whose repressive, interventionist regime has also turned it, like Russia, into a pariah to much of the world, now finds itself being courted by both Moscow and Beijing.

This week, Ebrahim Raisi became the first Iranian president to visit China in 20 years. The trip is supposed to implement an agreement for a 25-year strategic cooperation pact the two reached at a meeting in 2021.

The Beijing-Tehran ties have raised concerns in Congress about whether China will help Tehran escape sanctions that could be related to its nuclear and conventional weapons programs.

Clearly, there’s an internal contradiction in Xi’s dual goals. If you want to elevate your standing to that of a respected global leader, it’s hard to create an alliance of rule-breaking autocrats and assorted dictators, and then expect other countries to join enthusiastically.

Donald Trump wants to end the war in Ukraine in one day, while Ron DeSantis only wants to end a culture war.

A bitter Republican primary that turns on the isolationist sentiment of the party’s “Make America Great Again” wing could produce a nominee, and possibly a 47th president, who could shelve the assurance of Joe Biden that Americans will stand by Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”

This should worry the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has profusely thanked Americans for their multi-billion dollar generosity while warning he will keep asking for more.

Many polls show that the current Republican coalition has a lot of support for the idea of changing US foreign policy to avoid alliances with Europe and against China. A Gallup poll released this month shows that Republican voters prefer China over Russia as the main US adversary in the world. (More Democrats picked Russia than China.) The polls show a decline in GOP support for US aid to Ukraine, with the percentage of GOP voters who believe the US is doing too much now equaling the percentage who think it is doing too little. (Quinnipiac found big majorities of Democrats and independents still believe the US is doing the right amount or not enough.)

Trump has no love lost for Zelensky, after what he misleading described as their “perfect” 2019 phone call, in which the then-president tried to use US military aid to extort his counterpart into opening an investigation into Biden. Trump was impeached due to the incident. While giving a speech at the conservative political action conference on Saturday, Trump seemed eager to reestablish his relationship with Russian President Putin, whom he now regards as a war criminal. Trump does not see the need to defend a democracy as a foreign concept.

Putin, of course, is listening. The Russian leader appears to be digging in for a forever war in Ukraine – where he has already been entrenched since 2014 after the illegal annexation of Crimea. Even if there were hints that a Republican president would cut loose, he’d still believe the West was going to get tired and splinter. After all, Germany only agreed to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine after Biden also agreed that more advanced US M1 Abrams tanks would also be shipped to the battlefield.

As an example, Feaver said DeSantis’ insistence that the US should shift more attention from countering Russia to containing China – an argument he repeated with Morgan – was illogical because “abandoning Ukraine assists China’s most significant ally, Russia.” Haley used the same case in her Wall Street Journal piece in which she criticized him for comments he made to Carlson. Haley wrote that it was foolish to think that we could counter China by ignoring Russia.

This is an improvement over his position in 2015, when he strongly supported supplying Ukraine to fight Russia, according to CNN.

And even if Kyiv prevails in the conflict, or reaches a currently unlikely peace deal with Moscow, its future could rely on being a de facto NATO protectorate armed with Western weapons and even security guarantees from major US or European powers that some future Republican presidents, judging by current rhetoric, might be loath to honor.

The Trump-DeSantis-ukraine-2024 campaign at the White House: Trump and the threat of World War III in the 2020 election

With Trump and DeSantis now seen as the favorites, their rivals may come under increasing pressure to fall into line to ensure their own political viability.

But the possibility of changing political conditions in the United States as a new White House campaign begins means that Zelensky’s desperation for more weapons and ammunition to eject Putin’s forces from Ukraine will only become more urgent.

In his appearance at CPAC, Trump made clear that he would accuse the Democrat of leading the planet to the brink of disaster in a repeat of the 2020 election if given the chance to confront Biden.

“I am the only candidate who can make this promise, I will prevent, very easily, World War III,” Trump said in a speech riddled with falsehoods. If something isn’t done fast, we’re going to have World War III.

The former president is in some ways repeating his 2016 tactic of warning about America’s exposure to foreign wars. He tried to make people forget about the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq when he was trying to encourage fatigue over US involvement in Ukraine.

And he drove home another familiar criticism of presidents who fixate on foreign policy by showing up in East Palestine, Ohio – at the site of a chemical spill after a freight train derailment – while Biden was visiting Europe last month.

When the politicians and their representatives get here, I hope they have some money left over, that’s a promise I made to Biden.

“We are never going back to a party that wants to give unlimited money to fight foreign endless wars but demands we cut veteran benefits and retirement benefits at home,” Trump said during his CPAC speech.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/07/politics/trump-desantis-ukraine-2024-campaign/index.html

Trump’s Internationalism: a Reappraisal of U.S. Engagement in the Middle East and the Rise of a Populist Nationalism

Biden characterized the US support for Ukraine as part of a major national interest to protect democracy.

The sense among many voters that Bush overreached and led Americans into disastrous years-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was not just a motivating force that helped the rise of Trump’s populist nationalism in the Republican Party. Barack Obama became president in 2008 and warned against dumb wars.

There is a reluctance among American voters on the right and left to get involved in foreign wars again. A group of Democrats in Congress called for negotiations to end the war last year, despite the fact that there is no indication of Putin’s willingness to withdraw his troops. But they were criticized by their colleagues for such a move.

Iraq and Afghanistan are not a clean analogy for Ukraine since Biden has avoided the involvement of US forces as he seeks to head off a potentially dangerous direct clash with nuclear-armed Moscow.

Biden went to Ukraine to mark the anniversary of the Russian invasion because he wanted to shore up public support for a long-term commitment to the country.

The clock might be running for Ukraine now that the battle on the edge of Europe is not expected to end any time soon, which may cause Biden to argue in the debate with a Republican nominee next year.

Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former US permanent representative to NATO under Barack Obama, agrees. The fact that both 2024 GOP front-runners are expressing a broad skepticism about US engagement abroad, he said, raises the possibility that Republican “internationalists have not only lost in ’16 and ‘20” when Trump headed the GOP ticket, “but have lost the party forever.”

After Eisenhower’s landmark victory over Taft in 1952, every Republican presidential nominee over the next six decades – a list that extended from Richard Nixon through Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney – identified more with the internationalist than isolationist wing of the party.

As a long-term force in the GOP thinking about the world, Trump-ism needs to be taken seriously. The foreign policy center of gravity in the Republican Party, he added, has moved toward “a much more pinched or minimal American relationship with the world, [with] not a lot of interest in contributing to global responses to challenges like climate change or pandemics.”

“After Pearl Harbor there was no way to be a strict isolationist and a national political [figure],” said Joyce Mao, an associate professor of history at Middlebury College and author of the book “Asia First,” which recounts the GOP foreign policy debates of that era.

“Eisenhower was viewed as moderate by his colleagues,” Mao said. “His European focus was deemed by that conservative wing of the party as much too similar to the liberal Democrats. If this was going to be a moment for conservatism to reassert itself not only against liberalism but also against the moderates in the Republican Party, China provided an ideal plank” to do so.

To play tango is a risky game because it can get you into a campaign for something that makes no sense when you are governing. This is a difficult problem to deal with when you are campaigning for president. They can lock themselves into policy positions that are no sound when they actually win if they give applause lines that work for the narrow segments of ideologically hardened factions that they are trying to win over.

The opinions of the public about whether the US should do more or less in Ukraine are the same regardless of education or age. Some surveys show that turning away from global leadership is more powerful for those without college degrees than it is for younger Republicans. While a solid three-fifths of Republicans with a college degree in the Chicago Council poll said the benefits of US leadership exceed the costs, for instance, a majority of non-college Republicans disagreed. Younger Republicans were also much more likely than those over 60 to say the costs exceed the benefits.

It is probably no coincidence that the two groups that have registered as Trump supporters are Republicans who do not have a college degree and people who are younger.

Trump’s first term, as Daalder noted, was a chaotic time for the international order and traditional US alliances. But “If an isolationist leader gets elected president in 2024,” Daalder added, “you haven’t seen nothing yet.”