The Russian invasion has bonded America
to Europe more tightly than at any time since the Cold War and deepened US ties
with Asian allies, while forcing a reassessment of rivals like China, Iran and
Venezuela. And it has reenergised Washington’s
leadership role in the democratic world just months after the chaotic US
withdrawal from Afghanistan ended 20 years of conflict on a dismal note. But the new focus on Russia will come
with hard choices and internal contradictions, similar to ones that defined US
diplomacy during the Cold War, when America sometimes overlooked human rights
abuses and propped up dictators in the name of the struggle against communism. “It feels like we’re definitively in a
new era,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser in
the Obama White House. “The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris,
and decline, is now behind us. And we’re not sure what’s next.” The attack by President Vladimir Putin
of Russia on his neighbour has become a prism through which nearly all US
foreign policy decisions will be cast for the foreseeable future, experts and
officials said. In recent weeks, Western officials have
spoken in terms that often echo the grand declarations that followed the 2001
terrorist attacks. On Friday, President Joe Biden said that “the free world is
coming together” to stand up to Putin — a phrase reminiscent of President
George W Bush’s talk of how “the entire free world” was at war against
terrorism. In the near term, Moscow’s aggression is
sure to invigorate Biden’s global fight for democracy against autocracies like
Russia, making vivid the threats to fledgling democracies like Ukraine. Yet
three increasingly authoritarian NATO nations — Poland, Hungary and Turkey —
play key roles in the coalition aiding Ukraine. And the United States is
grappling with internal assaults to its own democracy. The war lends urgency to Biden’s climate
change agenda, reinforcing the need for more reliance on renewable clean energy
over the fossil fuels that fill Russian coffers. Yet it has already generated
new pressure to increase the short-term supply of oil from the likes of
Venezuela’s isolated dictatorship and Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian monarchy. And it creates a powerful new incentive
for the United States to find ways of prying President Xi Jinping of China away
from Putin, who is likely counting on diplomatic and economic lifelines from Xi
amid crushing Western sanctions. But some administration officials see China as
a lost cause and prefer to treat China and Russia as committed partners, hoping
that might galvanise policies among Asian and European allies to contain them
both. While some experts warn that a renewed
focus on Europe will inevitably divert attention from Asia, several top White
House officials say the United States can capitalise on how the war has
convinced some Asian governments that they need to work more closely with the
West to build up a global ideological front to defend democracy. “What we are seeing now is an
unprecedented level of Asian interest and focus,” Kurt M Campbell, the top
White House official on Asia policy, said at a talk hosted by the German
Marshall Fund of the United States. “And I believe one of the outcomes of
this tragedy will be a kind of new thinking around how to solidify
institutional connections beyond what we’ve already seen between Europe and the
Pacific,” he said. America’s approach to the world was
already undergoing a major shift, with the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
concluded, and conversations over Islamic terrorism no longer at the fore. Many
war-weary Americans welcomed calls for a reduced military footprint overseas by
President Donald Trump, who questioned NATO’s relevance and even flirted with
withdrawing from the alliance. Biden sought to rebuild US alliances,
but did so largely in the name of confronting China. The Russian invasion has
expanded his mission dramatically and urgently, setting the stage for a seismic
geopolitical shift that would pit the United States and its allies against
China and Russia at once if they form an entrenched anti-Western bloc. But it also gives Washington a new and
nobler sense of purpose, Rhodes said. “We’ve been trying to get to a new era
for a long time,” he said. “And now I think Putin’s invasion has necessitated
an American return to the moral high ground.” Playing Hardball Over Energy Early signs of how the new US priorities
are creating diplomatic quakes have already emerged. On Friday, the United States and its
European allies agreed to pause talks with Iran that just days earlier seemed
on the verge of clinching a return to the 2015 deal that limited Iran’s nuclear
program. Western nations are refusing a demand by Moscow, which is a party to
the Obama-era agreement from which Trump withdrew, for guarantees that its
future transactions with Iran be exempted from the sanctions imposed on Russia
in recent weeks. “It’s been clear since last weekend that
negotiations to revive the Iran deal could not be walled off from the Ukraine
war,” Dalia Dassa Kaye, an Iran expert at the Rand Corp., said Friday. Last year, Biden made a new agreement a
core goal of his foreign policy. It is unclear whether one can be struck
without Russia, which is a member of the commission that supervises compliance
with the deal and would take control of Iran’s excess enriched uranium. The United States is also looking at
Venezuela from a new angle. Senior Biden administration officials travelled to
Venezuela two weeks after the Russian invasion, becoming the first to visit the
country in years. Venezuela, a partner of Russia, is under heavy US sanctions
imposed years ago to weaken the repressive government of President Nicolás
Maduro. In 2019, the Trump administration imposed additional sanctions on the
state oil company, central bank and senior officials to pressure Maduro to step
down. Now, with Biden looking to increase
global oil supplies to bring down prices, US officials are talking to Maduro’s
government about buying his oil again. The idea has drawn some sharp criticism
in Congress, however, where Sen Bob Menendez, D-NJ, chair of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, fumed that “efforts to unify the entire world against a
murderous tyrant in Moscow should not be undercut by propping up a dictator
under investigation for crimes against humanity in Caracas.” The same imperative on oil is reshaping
US diplomacy with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two Persian Gulf
nations that some Biden administration officials view with suspicion or
hostility because of their autocratic systems and leading roles in a war in
Yemen that has resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe. Brett McGurk and Amos J
Hochstein, two senior administration officials, travelled to the Gulf days
before the Russian invasion to discuss security and energy issues. However, Saudi Arabia has declined so
far to increase oil production, while the United Arab Emirates waited until
Wednesday to ask the OPEC nations to do so. US officials were also furious with
the UAE for declining to vote on a United Nations Security Council resolution
to condemn Russia, although it did support a similar resolution later in the UN
General Assembly. The unreliability of the two nations and
Russia’s place in the oil economy have increased momentum within the Biden
administration to enact policies that would help the United States more quickly
wean itself off fossil fuels and confront the climate crisis. This could lead
future administrations to devote fewer diplomatic and military resources to the
Gulf nations in the long term, even if US officials want them to help on oil
now. “We may see more fundamental questioning
about the value of these partnerships,” Kaye said. “These states already believe
the US has checked out of the region, but their stance on Russia may only
strengthen voices calling for a further reduction of US forces in the region.” Israel, the closest US ally in the
Middle East, has also staked out a neutral position on the Ukraine war, largely
because of Russia’s presence in the region. But US officials have been more
forgiving of Israel’s stance as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett conducts shuttle
diplomacy. He met with Putin for three hours in Moscow on March 5 and then
spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by phone before returning
home. US officials said Bennett consulted with them about the talks, and
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this past week that they “appreciate the
efforts.” Zelenskyy told reporters Saturday that
Jerusalem could be a site for peace talks between the leaders of Ukraine and
Russia. Juggling Allies in Europe and Asia In Europe, Russia’s invasion has
supercharged the Biden administration’s efforts to restore the morale of a NATO
alliance that Trump undermined. But the alliance includes three nations
— Poland, Hungary and Turkey — whose democratic backsliding has troubled the
Biden administration. Hungary and Turkey were pointedly excluded from Biden’s
global democracy summit in December, and the European Union has cut billions of
euros of funding to Poland and Hungary for what it sees as erosions of legal
and democratic principles. Now all three countries are participating in the
coalition against Russia. “In times of crisis, there is sometimes
a tension between our values and our interests,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a
senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “In the short term,
we’re going to have to prioritise pushing back against Russia, at the risk of
taking our foot off the gas on the democracy and human rights concerns that had
been at the front and centre of the Biden administration’s agenda.” In the Asia-Pacific region, several
important US partners and allies are working with Washington on sanctions and
export controls on technology against Russia. These include Japan, South Korea,
Taiwan, Singapore and Australia. Some Asian nations have agreed to long-term
gas swaps with Europe to help relieve a potential Russian shut-off of energy
exports. And Australia has committed to spending $50 million to send weapons to
Ukraine, including missiles and ammunition. However, India — the most populous US
partner in the so-called Quad coalition of democracies in Asia — has refrained
from condemning Russia’s invasion because of decades-old security ties with
Moscow. That stance undermines Biden’s insistence that democratic nations band
together against autocracies. But it is the other Asian behemoth,
China, that presents the biggest diplomatic challenge for the United States.
China is Russia’s most powerful partner, and their bond has strengthened in
recent years. Even as the Russian military decimates
Ukrainian cities and kills hundreds or thousands of civilians, China has signalled
that it stands by Moscow by issuing anti-US declarations and amplifying the
Kremlin’s propaganda and conspiracy theories. Xi’s persistent support of Putin, with
whom he shares a drive to dilute US power, has made administration officials
wonder whether there is any way to pull them apart on Ukraine. On Thursday, CIA Director William Burns
told US senators he believed that Xi was “unsettled” by the war. Some China
analysts say that if Beijing wants to salvage its reputation with Western
nations, particularly in Europe, it might agree to take steps to help Ukraine
without directly breaking from Russia. Ryan Hass, a China director on the
National Security Council in the Obama White House, proposed testing Beijing
with specific requests, such as asking them to provide more humanitarian aid
and refrain from recognising Russian-installed governments in Ukraine or
shielding Russia from war crimes investigations. “If China’s leaders take concrete
actions to relieve suffering,” he said, “then lives would be saved and there
would be less centrifugal pressure toward cleaving the world into rival blocs.” © 2022 The New York Times Company