The US President, Joe Biden, has made it clear. If Russia launches a new military attack on Ukraine, America will not defend it.
Why not? Why will the US not defend a newish democracy of some 40 million people on the edge of Europe against an aggressive dictator and traditional US rival?
Illustration by Dionne Gain.Credit:Fairfax Media
There’s the obvious political reason. America is war-weary. After two decades of wasting blood and treasure on a faked war against Iraq and a failed war in Afghanistan, Americans are disillusioned and exhausted.
Fifty-five per cent of Americans oppose the idea of sending US troops to stop Russia, according to a YouGov poll last week. Only 13 per cent of Americans agree that it’d be a good idea.
But there’s a bigger, harder reason of national strategy. Even if war against Russia were wildly popular, grand strategy would stay a president’s hand.
For all Russia’s power, it’s a sideshow. “We need to husband our resources for the primary fight,” says the lead author of the US National Defence Strategy of 2018, Elbridge Colby.
“At this point, we really can’t afford” war against Russia, Colby tells me. “It would be like, for example, obsessing over the Boer War when World War I is looming.”
The primary fight? Only one country has the potential to dominate the US, says Colby, and it’s not Russia. Only one country is amassing the power to be able to coerce the US economically, in turn positioning itself to be able to undermine its freedom and prosperity, he says:
“The only plausible way that could happen is China and Asia. Asia is about half of global GDP, in fact, probably more than that pretty soon, and China is by far the most powerful other state in the international system. So, by deduction, our most important interest is denying China hegemony over Asia,” says Colby, author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defence in an Age of Great Power Conflict, published last year.
China’s treatment of Australia today illuminates Beijing’s plans for other countries including the US, says Colby: “Australia is the perfect example of what the future could hold. I use Australia as an example all the time. They’re demanding you change your free speech law, your internal political system, and that’s the future if we let it happen.
“But Australia has America as a backstop. But if we let China get to the point where China can subordinate America then we and those who are allied with us are finished – we have no America.”
But Colby wrote the 2018 National Defence Strategy as a Pentagon official in the Trump administration. How does the Biden administration see it?
One clue. Joe Biden says that America is “competing with China to win the 21st century”.
Another clue. While US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was engaged in intensive negotiations to avert war in Ukraine, he made the long flight to Melbourne two weeks ago for the meeting of foreign ministers of the four Indo-Pacific Quad nations – Australia, India, Japan and the US.
A bullet-riddled effigy of Russian President Vladimir Putin in eastern Ukraine.Credit:AP
His visit to Australia in the midst of the Ukraine crisis “only reinforces the point that, for us, as a Pacific nation ourselves, we see the future, we see it here, and you have got to keep focus on the core thing even as you deal with the challenge of the moment,” Blinken told me. So, for Blinken, Russia is the moment. China is the future.
A third clue. The Biden administration’s interim national security strategic guidance says that China “is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system”.
OK, so China is uniquely dangerous to the US, the Trump and Biden people agree. But isn’t Russia a scary big power? China might be the long-term danger, but isn’t Russia the immediate threat?
Russia’s economy is ranked number 11 by GDP at about $US1.65 trillion, using market prices. This is smaller than South Korea’s or Canada’s and only a smidgin bigger than Australia’s $US1.61 trillion. China’s, on the other hand, is three-quarters the size of America’s and 10 times the size of Russia’s. Moscow has a formidable nuclear and conventional military, but it’s ageing and cannot keep up with the cutting-edge powers of the US and China.
Colby says that China, once again, is unique, “the largest economy to emerge in the international system since the US itself. There’s an implicit tendency to dismiss China, to say that it’s not as real as the numbers suggest. But if China gets to the same per capita income level of Japan, they will be something like three times the size of our economy. And many Chinese are well below middle-income level at the moment, so they have plenty of catch-up growth opportunity.”
America is preoccupied by Xi Jinping’s China, not Putin’s Russia.Credit:AP
As for the short-term threat versus the long-term: “People say, China is a long-term problem,” Colby says. “My response is: It’s a long-term problem like acute heart disease. Sure, it’s long-term and you need to change what you eat and your workout regimen but, if you don’t address the blockage now, you’ll still get killed before you’re able to worry about the long term.”
By comparison, Russia is but “a pale shadow of China, given the size of their economy”.
But doesn’t the US have the capacity to deal with both Russia and China? The days of overweening American power are gone. The main China adviser to the Biden White House, the National Security Council’s Rush Doshi, wrote this before he was called to government service: “Sheer size suggests it is likely that Beijing – unlike the Soviets – could eventually generate and spend more [his emphasis] resources on competition than the US.”
In his 2021 book The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, Doshi made clear that the US is now on the defensive: “The US cannot compete with China symmetrically – that is, dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan – in part because of China’s sheer relative size.”
In other words, America won’t defend Ukraine because it’s seized with the all-consuming urgency of defending itself.
Peter Hartcher is international editor.
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