America’s new declinists are deluded about the consequences of letting Putin win
Joe Biden entered office operating under the misapprehension that America was a spent force.
He gambled “that grisly images of desperate Afghans clinging to a C-17 [would] fade, replaced by collective relief that no more Americans will die in a murky, brutal war,” the Atlantic’s Peter Nicholas wrote in the bloody summer of 2021. Biden banked on the notion that American patriotism was transactional. If the voting public continued to live well enough, they would compartmentalise the historic national humiliation Biden engineered in Afghanistan. The fact that Biden’s job approval ratings never recovered from this tone-setting debacle suggests he bet wrong.
The outgoing President did not, however, revisit his assumptions as his presidency raked itself over one rocky shoal after another. Biden’s efforts to preserve Ukrainian sovereignty amid Russia’s war of naked territorial expansionism were similarly hamstrung by his dim view of America’s capabilities.
Biden’s “timid” national security team “bought into this notion that, well, if we give them too much, then Russia’s going to use a tactical nuke on us,” House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul observed in April. It was because the Biden White House lost faith in the deterrent power of the West’s nuclear and non-nuclear assets that the President seemed paralysed by the prospect of Russian escalation.
High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), tanks, cluster munitions, Patriot missile-defense systems, F-16 fighter aircraft, Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), and so on – the President agonised over the disbursement of these platforms only to give in well after the point at which they might have had maximum utility on the battlefield.
It would be a tragedy if the second Trump administration entered office possessed of the same delusions that contributed to its predecessor’s mishandling of American interests abroad. But there are those in Donald Trump’s orbit who appear to be similarly convinced that the United States is a declining power that must triage its priorities.
Elbridge Colby, Trump’s former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development, is often one of those voices. He has maintained that it is nothing short of a “delusion” to presume that the US can compete against Russia and China simultaneously. Thus, preventing Ukraine from being swallowed up by Russia is a “distraction” from what should be our foremost task: containing Chinese expansionism. “To be blunt,” he and his co-author wrote, “Taiwan is more important than Ukraine”.
Fair enough, but a hard-nosed calculation about competing interests doesn’t seem to be the only assumption guiding Colby’s diagnosis. Quoting a line from a Wall Street Journal article about the war imposed on Israel by the October 7 attacks – “The Gaza conflict has forced the US to refocus on the Middle East after years of redirecting diplomatic and military resources to counter a rising China” – he wrote on social media: “Distraction is also a choice, not just ‘forced’”.
The article he cited to justify his observation also noted that one of the Iran-backed terrorist groups at war with Israel – the Yemeni Houthis – has embarked on a successful campaign of maritime terrorism against shipping interests in the Gulf of Aden, to say nothing of US Navy assets. The erosion of US hegemony on the high seas, forcing commercial interests to shadow Russian and Chinese vessels as they transit into the Suez Canal, is hardly a “distraction”. Only if we conclude that the obligations of the world’s sole superpower and the guarantor of the global marketplace are the “distraction” does any of this make sense.
Those who advocate retrenchment as the remedy to what they see as the West’s various deficiencies do not dwell much on the consequences that would accompany their policy preferences. In Ukraine, those consequences could be grave.
Given the conditions Biden’s inconstancy brought about, it’s hard to see how the Trump administration can pursue its desire to see that conflict resolved absent a negotiated cease-fire. At best, that process will hand Moscow another “frozen conflict” – one that it will thaw out at its leisure.
In the meantime, the Kremlin will engineer a series of crises along the line of contact, just as it did when the Minsk frameworks were operative. Shorn of its industrial eastern oblasts, Ukraine will struggle to rebuild itself and reconstitute its forces, contributing to the anxiety of Nato members on the frontier with living memories of Russian domination. If those allies conclude that Washington’s collective security guarantees aren’t worth much and Ukraine comes to look like a failed state, those nations may take their security into their own hands – introducing far more complexity, instability, and prospects for conflagration into the mix.
How this dynamic results in a more secure America, only the advocates of retrenchment seem to grasp. If, however, the Trump administration 2.0 enters office set on engineering America’s retreat from the world stage, it will stumble into the same pitfalls that cost Democrats the trust of the American people.
Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review