Ukraine, Iran, ISIS ... Can America still ‘pivot’ to counter China?

To illustrate the challenges President Joe Biden faces as he struggles to redirect America’s strategic focus to countering a rising China, Margarita Konaev cites one of the world’s renowned international affairs analysts.

“As Mike Tyson once said, ‘Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face.’”

And President Biden has taken a few punches over his first year in office – from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, from an Iran barreling toward nuclear capability, even from a much-weakened but recalibrated ISIS. Those hits have distracted the United States from its long-envisaged “Asia pivot,” says Dr. Konaev, adjunct senior fellow in technology and national security at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.

After two draining Middle East wars, America is viewed internationally and on a divided home front as both tired of expectations that it provide international leadership, and distracted by conflicts in regions where it has traditionally had influence.

For many, the question now is whether the United States has the superpower heft and domestic support to carry out an effective counterbalancing effort to an increasingly aggressive and economically powerful China.

Indeed, for some national security experts, the attention-grabbing security challenges presented by Russia in Europe and by Iran in the Middle East place Mr. Biden’s plans to shift America’s focus to the Indo-Pacific at a critical juncture.

“We’re on the knife’s edge right now. We’re going to figure out in the next six months or so whether this administration can successfully develop the shift in attention and resources to Asia that has been the stated priority for nearly two decades now – or whether we’re going to have our fourth failed Asia pivot,” says Hal Brands, senior fellow in defense strategy and U.S.-China relations at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

The Asia pivot is most closely associated with former President Barack Obama, but as Dr. Brands notes, it got a tentative start under George W. Bush – before being stalled by the Iraq war.

Now the Biden administration is doing its best to show the world – and the home audience – that the Asia pivot is on track.

Flying the flag

Despite the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been in the Indo-Pacific region this week, meeting with foreign ministers of the so-called Quad countries – Australia, India, and Japan, besides the U.S. – the leaders of Pacific Island nations, and then with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea in Hawaii. Secretary Blinken made the long trip to Australia even as Mr. Biden and the Pentagon remained focused on the Ukraine crisis and the broader destabilization of Eastern European allies.

The weeklong trip seemed designed in part to demonstrate that the U.S. has not taken its eye off what the administration insists remains its top international priority.

“With Secretary Blinken’s trip to the Pacific and with a number of other diplomatic and military actions, the administration has been trying to signal that it can walk and chew gum at the same time,” says Dr. Brands, author of “The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today.”

But he adds that the Biden administration is now confronting a problem “that is not of its making but which has been building over a decade now, and that is the growing gap between our commitments and our ability to fulfill them – especially if those demands are made simultaneously.”

Secretary Blinken has been at pains throughout his trip to demonstrate how he’s keeping tabs on Ukraine. After ticking off to the traveling press a list of the issues he’s addressing in Asia – the pandemic, climate change, China’s provocative moves in the South China Sea, North Korea’s recent ballistic missile tests – he went on to underscore his split-screen agenda.

“We’re covering quite literally as well as figuratively a lot of territory [on this trip],” he said, and added: “Meanwhile ... even as we’re doing this we will be on the phones, on the video conference with other countries and counterparts, back in Washington, given everything that’s going on in Europe.”

Clearing the decks

Mr. Biden came into office a year ago declaring an authoritarian and economically potent China as America’s chief strategic and ideological rival, the only one, his national security strategy declared, able to “mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.” At the same time, he was cognizant that in order to counter China in the vital Indo-Pacific region, other drains on attention and assets would need to be managed to secondary status – or taken off the plate altogether.

Thus Mr. Biden ended America’s longest war in Afghanistan and has sought to quickly return the U.S. to the Iran nuclear deal.

Moreover, he crossed the Atlantic in June for a summit with Mr. Putin, with the stated goal of establishing a “stable and predictable” relationship with America’s Cold War nemesis.

Then came those Tysonian punches.

Far from quickly reviving the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action limiting Iran’s nuclear program, the administration has been stymied by drawn-out yet unfruitful talks with Iran. Tehran has used the months without limits on its program to stockpile enough fuel to deliver a nuclear bomb in a month or less, some experts say.

Talks with Iran and other world powers reconvened in Vienna this week, but U.S. officials warn that without a deal very soon, Iran’s nuclear progress will make a deal moot and put the international community back on crisis footing in the region.

As for Mr. Putin’s Russia, his amassing of more than 130,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders and his demands of Western acknowledgment of a Russian “sphere of influence” over much of the former Soviet Union have prompted Mr. Biden to dispatch 3,000 troops to fortify NATO’s eastern flank. The Ukraine crisis has required the administration to focus more attention than anticipated on transatlantic relations.

The home front

Yet as challenging as those crises will be to a superpower Dr. Brands describes as “overstretched,” some international security experts say a deeply divided domestic political environment poses just as great a threat to America’s ability to lead in successfully countering China.

“Most people and countries in the region worry about what they see as a decline in the United States’ ability to continue to underwrite the Indo-Pacific’s security and prosperity, let alone its ability to do more in the face of an increasingly powerful China,” says Ramesh Thakur, emeritus professor at the Australian National University in Canberra and senior fellow at the Toda Peace Institute in Tokyo.

The Asia-Pacific region became accustomed over the decades since World War II to an “indispensable” American presence, he says, “but the bigger worry now in the region is over the United States’ ability to deal with its domestic tensions and political divisions in a way that allows it to lead,” he says. “We watch in horror as events unfold within [the U.S.] that cast doubt on its continued leadership of the kind of free and open and prosperous region most people want.”

Others agree that the image the U.S. offers to the world will play as important a role in determining a successful Asia pivot as defense policies and diplomatic forays.

“With China challenging U.S. leadership with its own vision of managing international affairs, people in Asia, like people and countries elsewhere, are asking, ‘What does America have to offer?’” says Dr. Konaev, of the Center for a New American Security. “That means a first step to a successful Asia pivot, as much as other factors, is to get our own house in order and narrow the political divisions that weaken our image and our ability to lead.”

Dr. Konaev says she’ll be looking for U.S. investment in “critical emerging technologies” to compete with China and wants to see even more emphasis on strengthening alliances with Asian partners to fortify the “free and open” region the Biden administration talks about. But she cautions that fostering an Indo-Pacific region with Western ideals cannot come at the expense of America’s traditional alliances, first and foremost with Europe.

“It makes sense for the U.S. to shift its primary focus to Asia to build alliances based on ideals of free and open economies and societies with democratic systems and respect for human and civil rights,” she says, “but if we don’t stand up for those principles where they are most threatened right now, what’s the point of mounting this competition with China?”

Dr. Thakur agrees that the guiding principles for a “free and prosperous” Indo-Pacific region are what’s most at stake.

“The U.S. continues to speak of China as a ‘rule-breaker’ in the international system that the U.S. itself has led in the region and globally,” he says. “But the reality is that unless the Western-led system is strengthened and China is challenged, we’re going to find that China has become the new rule-maker.”