A Thought Experiment Based on Biden’s Speech at the UN

Imagine yourself as one of those characters they call a “defense intellectual.” Someone pays you to think deep thoughts about defense issues that impact your country. You may be a military officer, diplomat, or university professor by profession. The powers that be in your country tasked you with analyzing your country’s relationship with the United States. “Things are changing,” they tell you. “Getting wobbly.”

Some things have not changed. As the old joke says: America is still the 900 lb. gorilla “who sits wherever it damned well pleases!” It still has more guns than anyone. Being on the gorilla’s good side remains much more relaxing than getting it angry.

China is rising. But China is a work in progress, a society trying to create capitalism with an authoritarian communist face. China’s growth has been legendary, but the system may be unable to withstand the stress. The mammoth error of Maoist demographic ideology cut the birthrate so harshly. At this point, China is like the rising young gorilla in the band. It doesn’t yet have the weight necessary to take on the older one, and much can happen to hold it back. China is not (yet?) an appropriate replacement for your country’s connection to the USA.

Your problem lies in America’s confusing approach to “victory.”  Since the American debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American leadership does not seem to believe in orienting toward decisive military victory. They appear to have made a surprising and accurate observation: The US has not won a war since 1945. Yet, where a 19th-century power might have collapsed beneath that failure, America rose to win a non-military victory in the Cold War, to create the largest economy in history, and to dominate the world’s politics. Military victory, as such, they appear to conclude, is an outmoded concept. For America, decisive military victory may be a counter-productive luxury. When the US chased the will-o’-the-wisp of military victory in Vietnam or Iraq, it came up empty-handed. When it pursued more – shall we call them “relational” - goals, working with local powers rather than judging and therefore threatening them, it had real achievements. Think of all the oil that flowed over the second half of the Twentieth Century when the US gave up on exporting democracy to the Middle East and cynically supported authoritarian regimes like Sadat’s in Egypt or the Al-Saud family’s in Saudia. The principle of disdaining military victory is a way to think of JCPOA, the “sort of agreement” with Iran, and the policy of accepting Iranian co-dominion in the Middle East that lies behind it.

Here is where the American concept may run afoul of the concrete interests of your country. Your country is not a 900 lb. gorilla that can set the conditions for interacting with smaller creatures. Your country may be more like Ukraine, faced with a brutal invasion from a powerful neighbor carrying out an expansionist agenda. Perhaps you are like Taiwan, a democratic country whose independence is not recognized by most nations, facing an aggressive neighbor who openly claims a right to invade and conquer. Or perhaps you are like Israel, faced with a less powerful but deadly neighbor pursuing a violent, bigoted, terrorist agenda. In short, your country may not have the options the 900 lb. gorilla has to wait out the enemy.

In Ukraine or Israel, they are under fire while the US seems to wobble in its support. Sometimes it shows total commitment. At others it puts the brakes on. Based on the experience of Israel and Ukraine, what can you expect from the USA under similar conditions?

The wars in Ukraine and Israel surfaced limits to partnership with America. Having lived their lives within the mind of that 900 lb. gorilla, the American defense and foreign policy establishments evidently have a hard time imagining life among smaller creatures. The stop-and-go nature of American military support for both countries shows that.

Reading President Biden’s valedictory address to the UNGA, it is hard to escape the impression of incoherence in American policy on Ukraine and the Gaza War with its Lebanon addendum. Stressing the right of Israel, an attacked country, to act so that such attacks can no longer occur, Biden nevertheless suggests a negotiated agreement. He leaves unaddressed how that can work if Hamas continues to run Gaza after the war. That failure undermines the seriousness with which we can relate to his words and the depth of thinking underlying the policies they reflect. There are several reasons this war has taken so long. One is the American luxury belief that it learned from its national experience as the 900 lb gorilla. For America victory is necessarily just one option. They sincerely seem to think that as it is for them, so it is for smaller, weaker countries.