America Now Has Three “Main Enemies”: Russia, China and International Terrorism

David E. Sanger

September 4, 2014

Commitments on Three Fronts Test Obama’s Foreign Policy

President Obama faces challenges from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; an ascendant China, led by President Xi Jinping; and the ambitions of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Credit From left, via Associated Press; Nelson Almeida/AFP - Getty Images; Alexei Nikolsky, via RIA Novosti

WASHINGTON — In vowing in Estonia on Wednesday to defend vulnerable NATO nations from Russia “for as long as necessary,” President Obama has now committed the United States to three major projections of its power: a “pivot” to Asia, a more muscular presence in Europe and a new battle against Islamic extremists that seems very likely to accelerate.

American officials acknowledge that these three commitments are bound to upend Mr. Obama’s plans for shrinking the Pentagon’s budget before he leaves office in 2017. They also challenge a crucial doctrine of his first term: that a reliance on high technology and minimal use of a “light footprint” of military forces can deter ambitious powers and counter terrorists. And the commitments may well reverse one of the critical tenets of his two presidential campaigns, that the money once spent in Iraq and Afghanistan would be turned to “nation-building at home.”

But the accumulation of new defensive initiatives leaves open the question of how forcefully Mr. Obama is committed to reversing the suspicion, from Europe to the Middle East to Asia, that the United States is in an era of retrenchment. In his travels in Europe this week and a lengthy tour of Asia planned this fall, the president faces a dual challenge: convincing American allies and partners that he has no intention to leave power vacuums around the globe for adversaries to fill, while convincing Americans that he can face each of these brewing conflicts without plunging them back into another decade of large military commitments and heavy casualties.

Russian soldiers near a Ukrainian military unit outside Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula, in March. Credit Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“There is a growing mismatch between the rhetoric and the policy,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior national security official as the war with Iraq loomed a dozen years ago. “If you add up the resources needed to implement the Asian pivot, recommit to the Middle East and increase our presence in Europe, you can’t do it without additional money and capacity. The world has proved to be a far more demanding place than it looked to this White House a few years ago.”

It is not a world that requires, at least for now, the kind of deployments that marked the Cold War, when the United States kept roughly 100,000 troops in Europe and only slightly fewer in Asia. But the prospect of drastically shrinking the military after the post-9/11 era, in which total national security spending more than doubled, now seems highly unlikely. And at a moment when Mr. Obama is still answering critics for saying last week that, “We don’t have a strategy yet,” to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, he now needs to articulate several strategies, each tailored to problems that in the last year have taken on surprising complexities.

In facing the more than 10,000 ISIS fighters, he must find a way to confront a different kind of terrorist group, one determined to use the most brutal techniques to take territory that the backwash from the Arab Spring has now put up for grabs. The American bombing campaign against ISIS targets in Iraq does not approach the costs of invading and occupying that country, but Pentagon officials say the weapons, fuel and other expenses of taking on the Islamic extremists are running up bills of about $225 million a month, a figure that will rise if Mr. Obama has to take that fight into Syria.

ISIS “is not invincible,” Matthew G. Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a talk at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday, and ISIS does not yet pose the kind of direct threat to the United States that Al Qaeda did before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But it is “brutal and lethal,” he said, and defeating it will require a long-term commitment of a kind Mr. Obama clearly did not anticipate earlier this year.

A Chinese vessel using a water cannon on a Vietnamese ship on the South China Sea, where China placed an oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam. Credit Vietnam Marine Guard, via Reuters

In the Russia of President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Obama faces a declining power, afflicted by a shrinking population, a strident nationalism and an economy vulnerable because of its extraordinary dependency on oil exports. Washington is betting that while sanctions are having little effect now, over time they will hollow out Mr. Putin’s poll ratings. But the short term is more complex. For months now, arguments inside the administration have been over how directly and where to draw the line. In Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, on Wednesday Mr. Obama drew it at NATO’s own boundaries. The question is whether Mr. Putin believes him.

In China, the president faces the opposite challenge: a rising power with growing resources and a sense that this is China’s moment to reassert influence in Asia in a way it has not in hundreds of years. Here, the surprise to Mr. Obama has been the aggressiveness shown by Xi Jinping, China’s president, in embracing efforts to press territorial claims against Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines, rather than focusing on the domestic economy.

Fighters for ISIS during a parade in Raqqa, Syria. Credit via Associated Press

“We didn’t see this coming,” one former member of Mr. Obama’s national security team said this summer, “and there’s a lot of debate about how to counter it.”

The statement could be true for each of the challenges confronting Mr. Obama. It explains why the administration is having difficulty explaining how this combination will affect its future plans.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was put in his job in part to find ways to shrink the military, on the assumption that America’s Iraq commitments were over and as the official combat mission in Afghanistan ends this year. But Mr. Hagel has been either unable or unwilling to articulate the long-term implications of the new commitments.

“There is a chronic disconnect, not just in this administration, between the policy, the budget guidance, and the classified strategies,” said Shawn Brimley, the director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, who served as the director of strategic planning at the National Security Council during Mr. Obama’s first term. That is what Mr. Obama needs to do for a “lasting legacy” of rethinking America’s defenses, Mr. Brimley said, but “if you don’t do it in the next six months, it’s too late.”

So far, the administration has twice delayed the publication of its second term report, “National Security Strategy of the United States” — events have overwhelmed it. There are still plans afoot to shift the American presence to the Pacific over the next six years, aiming toward the moment when 60 percent of America’s forces abroad are in the region. But many Asian leaders question whether Mr. Obama and his successor will carry through. Many Europeans and Middle Eastern leaders see those efforts and shudder.

Mr. Obama floated several American-led efforts to deter Russia in his speech in Tallinn, from NATO’s impending “rapid response” forces, to increased training missions, to “investing in capabilities like intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance and missile defense.” The last was an interesting allusion, because in the past he was always careful to say that missile defense was aimed at deterring outlier states — clearly meaning Iran — rather than nuclear powers like Russia. This time, he made no such disclaimer.