As of: January 28, 2024, 10:39 a.m
From: Foreign Policy
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The United States has expanded its security commitments around the world - and the bill is coming due.
The global influence of the USA is in jeopardy.
Our partners in Asia in particular are beginning to doubt the support from the United States.
Could Trump's re-election further endanger the security situation?
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by Foreign Policy magazine on January 22, 2024.
Washington DC - The election of Lai Ching-te as Taiwan's president will revive old debates about "strategic ambiguity."
The Biden administration is sticking to its approach of keeping vague any scenarios for intervention in a conflict with China over the island.
Proponents say this puzzling ploy keeps Beijing and Taipei on their toes - deterring China and ensuring Taiwan doesn't act rashly.
Critics say that “strategic clarity,” meaning when the United States might act, would be more likely to deter Beijing.
President Joe Biden himself caused confusion when he publicly promised that the US would intervene to support Taiwan and left his officials scrambling to explain that official policy had not changed.
This question of ambiguity raises questions about the nature of U.S. security guarantees at a time of increasing geopolitical tensions.
Washington's network of alliances - it has more than 50 formal relationships of this kind - is a powerful asset in its struggle with China.
It also has a number of quasi-allies such as Taiwan, as well as close partners such as India, Singapore and Vietnam.
All of these partners have committed either expressly or implicitly.
Are the global crises overburdening even the USA?
But Washington's credibility to honor these commitments is under increasing pressure in the eyes of adversaries and allies alike.
The US will likely have to demonstrate its capabilities more frequently – making its guarantees less ambiguous – further straining an already overwhelmed US military.
The fact that the United States is in danger of overextending itself should be clear from recent developments.
Biden is brimming with confidence about Washington's ability to meet its global commitments.
But the combination of Russia's Ukraine war and the ongoing crisis in the Middle East raises obvious questions about distraction and overstretched resources.
Recent attempts to calm relations with China reflect a strong desire to maintain calm in Asia, especially in the year of the US election.
Constructive atmosphere, firm handshake: Do the USA and China want to stabilize relations?
© Li Xueren/Xinhua/Imago
Examples of concerned Asian allies are not hard to find.
The Philippines is one of them.
Manila has recently clashed with China in the South China Sea.
Beijing has tried to block missions to resupply a rusty World War II-era ship at Second Thomas Shoal, which Manila grounded in 1999 to mark its territory.
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has called on the United States to provide guarantees that attempts by China to retake the shoal would trigger the United States' alliance commitments, which Washington has done.
In recent weeks, the United States has dispatched a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, to sail with the Philippine Navy.
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USA often has to show its support with actions
South Korea is another case, as Seoul is concerned about the threat from the north.
More recently, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said Seoul may need to develop a nuclear deterrent, a sign of dissatisfaction with Washington's nuclear umbrella.
Last April, the United States and South Korea signed the Washington Declaration, a pact that promised, among other things, to strengthen and clarify U.S. expanded deterrence commitments.
The agreement calls for the United States to send a nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea for the first time in a generation, along with nuclear-armed bombers.
The fact that the United States often needs to demonstrate its capabilities and reassure its allies through actions, not promises, is not exactly new.
Under President Barack Obama, the United States struggled with how to respond to China's campaign to build artificial islands in the South China Sea.
This came after a tense standoff between China and the Philippines after Beijing seized Scarborough Shoal in 2012.
Sensing its credibility was threatened, the Obama administration began freedom of navigation operations, in which military ships sailed near disputed sea areas just to prove it was capable.
These maneuvers are now a central part of the US strategy to calm the region.
Two of these maneuvers were conducted by the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet last November in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, respectively.
America's military superiority is crumbling
However, three factors suggest that the United States will now need to demonstrate similar capabilities more frequently: The first is the deteriorating global and regional military balance.
In the decades following the Cold War, Washington enjoyed undeniable military superiority and therefore rarely had to flaunt it.
Now it must contend with China's massive military buildup in Asia.
This is particularly true in the maritime sector, where China now has a much larger navy in terms of the number of ships.
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The second factor reflects a change in US strategy.
Biden's team talks a lot about "allies and partners."
This often means asking close allies like Australia and Japan to contribute more to collective deterrence and security.
U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently wrote about developing a “self-reinforcing cooperative grid” in which America’s friends cooperate more with each other and with Washington.
So the nature of U.S. security relationships in the Indo-Pacific region is changing.
Rather than following a NATO-like approach, U.S. ties in Asia were built using a “hub and spoke” model.
These close bilateral agreements were originally intended in part to rein in pro-Western but potentially trigger-happy autocrats in countries like the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan.
Today, the United States is forced to create a more collective security model, interspersed with new mini-groups such as AUKUS and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, to deal with China.
The more important all of these relationships become, the greater the incentive for China to test what the United States is willing to do in addition to its formal alliances to support them.
Security situation in Asia endangered by Trump?
The third factor is perhaps the most obvious: Donald Trump.
This year, concerns about U.S. credibility will grow in Asia amid the prospect of the former president's return.
Many in Asia supported Trump's tough stance on China.
But they also remember his combative attitude toward allies.
Viewed from Manila, Seoul and Tokyo, the coming year will raise all sorts of doubts about whether existing U.S. commitments will still hold when he returns to office.
You will therefore want less ambiguity and more clarity.
All of this requires a delicate balancing act.
Making ambiguous commitments clearer is not a panacea.
On Taiwan, Biden's team shows no signs of believing that "strategic clarity" is wise.
Both ambiguity and clarity can create perverse incentives.
An ambiguous policy may lead China to test where the red lines really lie.
More explicit guarantees could even reduce deterrence, as former White House official Ivan Kanapathy noted, since such guarantees can also provide a target for China.
“The terms in such a statement, by establishing geographical and political boundaries, would invite China to exploit those very boundaries and question the credibility of the United States,” he wrote in Foreign Policy in 2022.
Either way, a world in which allies expect the United States to show rather than tell is placing greater demands on an already overstretched military.
This results in two far-reaching options for Washington.
One is to pool resources to offer fewer guarantees to fewer people, thereby strengthening the credibility of those who remain.
Historian Paul Kennedy recently predicted this path in an essay marking the 35th anniversary of the publication of his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
anniversary of the publication of his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
“The American security blanket will be tighter, smaller and limited to the familiar places like NATO Europe, Japan, Australia, Israel, Korea, perhaps Taiwan and not much else,” he wrote in the New Statesman.
Biden does not appear to be deviating from his course
Might be.
But so far, at least from Biden, there is little sign that he wants to scale back his commitment.
Rather the opposite is the case.
That leaves a second option, which is to spend more on defense and demonstrate the results of that investment more often.
Biden recently signed a new $886 billion military budget.
But even this seemingly huge amount is much lower relative to national income than in the last period of geopolitical rivalry during the Cold War.
“The way the United States has envisioned its national security is no longer sustainable,” former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recently told Bloomberg TV.
“We will need to invest significantly more in all aspects of national security.”
The obvious risk is that the United States will avoid this difficult decision by neither reducing its commitments nor spending enough to meet them.
This might work for a while.
But Washington will still be under pressure to do more to reassure anxious allies worried about congestion, declining collective security and political instability at home.
It is clear that the United States cannot meet its obligations to 50 allies at once, just as a bank cannot repay all of its deposits at once.
Whether they are able to do so depends crucially on having enough confidence to avoid the geopolitical equivalent of a bank run.
This prospect is still slim at the moment.
Still, it would be better to avoid even a hint of ambiguity about Washington's determination to do so in the future.
To the author
James Crabtree
is a columnist at Foreign Policy, former executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies-Asia and author of The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age.
Twitter (X): @jamescrabtree
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” on January 22, 2024 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.