Ukraine war ushers in ‘new era’ for US abroad
Categories: FOREIGN COUNTRIES
The war in Ukraine has prompted the biggest rethinking of US foreign policy since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, infusing the United States with a new sense of mission and changing its strategic calculus with allies and adversaries alike.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 reenergized 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 U.S. 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 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 galvanize policies among Asian and European allies to contain them both. America’s approach to the world was already undergoing a major shift, with the U.S. 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 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.”