By Robin Wright
In a recent conversation, Sir John Scarlett, the elegant former spymaster of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, or M.I.6, pondered the foreign-policy challenges facing Joe Biden when he enters the White House—and the jarring differences since he left it four years ago. The bottom line, Scarlett told me, is that America’s adversaries are now “more assertive, aggressive, and self-confident.” Many of the threats were building in 2017, but they have escalated exponentially. As Biden returns to power, the variety and depth of hazards facing the United States—from nations and non-state militias, jihadi terrorists, drug lords, criminal syndicates, and hackers—are greater than at any time since the U.S. became a superpower after the Second World War.
Biden has one advantage. He’s widely viewed as an internationalist, having travelled extensively to crisis and war zones and conferred with more than a hundred foreign leaders during his decades in the Senate and White House. But, on the eve of his own Inauguration, spymasters and generals long experienced with global crises are anxious about America’s ability to lead a world in disarray and deathly ill. They also wonder whether other nations will be as eager to collaborate with the United States as they were when Biden was last in office. “We will reclaim our credibility to lead the free world,” Biden told reporters last month. “And we will, once again, lead not just by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.” A lot has changed, however, because of the erratic and egocentric policies of Biden’s predecessor. Adversaries have also found more imaginative ways to exploit America’s internal turmoil and withdrawal from the international stage. Both allies and adversaries feel fewer constraints. The rules and institutions of the international order have weakened.
From the beginning of the republic, not one of America’s forty-five previous Presidents has had it easy when he took office. Poor George Washington had to create the Presidency in a war-ravaged nation that was little more than a political experiment with limited financial resources, raging feuds among the Founding Fathers, and no international presence. America was so polarized when Abraham Lincoln took office that South Carolina had already seceded, and Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee soon followed. Woodrow Wilson simultaneously faced the First World War and the influenza pandemic, which killed more than a half million Americans and almost felled him, too. Franklin Roosevelt inherited the Great Depression and was then confronted by the Second World War.
Biden inherits a mess on both the domestic and international fronts, compounded by a pandemic that has produced mass death, rampant unemployment, and a global economic crisis. America was popular when he and Barack Obama left office; its standing has plummeted since then. In his first weeks, Biden must make decisions on the final withdrawal from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an expiring arms treaty (and the last one) with Russia, an eroding nuclear accord with Iran, and how to begin to mend the fraying world order. “The Biden Administration is going to face a unique set of circumstances that, taken together, are going to make their challenges ever more daunting than I remember in any previous transition,” John Brennan, the blunt-talking former C.I.A. director, told me.
Two decades into the twenty-first century, Biden also takes over as the barometers of power have shifted, as is most evident in the rivalry between the United States and China. The great-power competition has only intensified over the past four years. Beijing is ambitiously flexing traditional military muscle across East Asia, but its reach is even wider because of its global influence through Huawei, the world’s leading seller of 5G technology. China’s edge threatens to create a digital iron curtain that could soon force nations to choose between Chinese and American technology. China’s burgeoning capabilities give it an advantage in espionage, too. China is on track to become the world’s largest economy—overtaking the United States—by 2028, according to a new report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, in London. That’s five years earlier than previous estimates. Ironically, the report warned, China, the epicenter of covid-19, is widely viewed around the world as having responded more effectively than the United States to the coronavirus. “The covid-19 pandemic and corresponding economic fallout have certainly tipped this rivalry in China’s favour,” the report said. China’s preëminence is no longer down the road; it’s in front of us.
What really worries the former spymasters, however, is the type of “hybrid war” that blurs the lines between war and peace and is a growing danger in the twenty-first century. The term was popularized in an article by General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, published in 2013. A hybrid war, Scarlett said in an e-mail, “inflicts the kind of economic, social, or physical damage which in the past would have required the use (and inherent risks) of military force.” It features a fluctuating—and often deniable—mix of cyberattacks, espionage, undercover or mercenary military adventures, disinformation campaigns on social media, and covert financial and economic subterfuge that work together to undermine confidence in specific governments or types of governance.
The use of hybrid tactics predates Gerasimov, but the term certainly explains a lot about what countries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are doing as Biden takes office. Vladimir Putin is more determined than ever to assert Russian power on the global stage, Scarlett and Brennan noted, evident in Russia’s SolarWinds hack of governments, technology firms, and research institutes on at least three continents over the past year. In the United States alone, Russia’s foreign-intelligence service covertly penetrated the Pentagon, Treasury, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, and National Institutes of Health for nearly a year before the stealth technology was detected. The damage will take months to evaluate, U.S. officials concede. The penetration may still be mutating or adapting despite its detection. That’s impressive for a country that, much diminished after the seven decades of Soviet power, now has an economy about the size of Italy’s.
Russia’s hack—named after the I.T. firm that provided software to the U.S. government and hundreds of U.S. and foreign companies—illustrates how the tools and tactics of adversaries have also changed as Biden takes office. For all their destructive potential, nuclear weapons are not the most immediate threat anymore, nor are conventional wars between countries as likely as they once were. In U.S. Central Command, the volatile theatre stretching across the Middle East and South Asia, where America still has thousands of troops, General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., cited “Costco drones” as a growing weapon of choice among non-state actors. “I remain extremely concerned about the small, unmanned platforms that are very inexpensive, that you can buy and operate cheaply,” he told me. They both spy and carry weapons. “That’s a new plane that’s come in over the last four to five years.”
In hybrid wars, resource-poor nations are honing asymmetric skills that allow them to inflict immeasurable damage on major powers like the United States, Scarlett added. North Korea is about the size of Mississippi, with a much smaller economy. Yet, over the past four years, its cyberattacks have been more disruptive to the United States, short-term, than its nuclear or missile programs, which are simultaneously accelerating. North Korea’s Bureau 121, which carries out hacking operations, has grown from a staff of a thousand experts in 2010 to six thousand in 2020, the U.S. Army chronicled in a three-hundred-page report, in July. Many now operate outside the hermit nation, in Belarus, China, India, Malaysia, and Russia.
“It seems like every year, every month, every day there are new technological advancements in the digital domain that just underscores how important that domain is to our security and our prosperity,” Brennan, the author of a new memoir, “Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad,” told me. “It is overwhelmingly now the environment where most human activity takes place. So it’s going to be the venue of interaction, but also for confrontation and for disagreements and for tension.”
Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972, before the advent of either personal computers or cell phones, and two decades before the public had access to the worldwide Web. Almost a half century later, he takes office at a time when there is still no national consensus on the appropriate role of government—particularly the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the National Security Agency—in dealing with cyber issues that pit national security against privacy and civil liberties. The American legal system has yet to come to terms with the digital age, Brennan said.
America’s forty-sixth President also faces a long slog proving that Washington can again be a reliable partner—and that it won’t keep whipsawing on policies from one Administration to the next. “Biden is not going to be able to build back the United States’ dominant role on the world stage,” Brett Bruen, the White House director of global engagement during the Obama Administration, told me. “Instead, we will continue to struggle for influence and to shore up our credibility.”
In his first weeks, Biden should expect nations large and small to probe his responses and fortitude. Putin could test Biden with more aggressive steps on Ukraine or Belarus. Other authoritarians could as well. “In North Korea, Kim Jong Un may decide again to test the Biden Administration with a nuclear test, as he did in the early days of the Trump Administration,” Brennan warned. China could be more aggressive on Hong Kong or Taiwan. “It’s always been ambiguous when it comes to the aid of Taiwan if China really decides to assert itself. How is the Biden Administration going to respond?”
The stakes go beyond Biden. America’s reputation and future place in the world are also at risk. “Allies now question whether the American democratic system can deliver at home and abroad,” Doug Lute, a retired lieutenant general who was the U.S. ambassador to nato and served on the National Security Council in both the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, told me. Biden will now have a harder time forging the coalitions required to counter flash points in security, economics, health, or climate, which increasingly intersect.
America’s acrimonious political divide, far deeper than it was in 2017, will make any Biden initiative on the world stage more difficult to sell at home. More than eighty per cent of Trump voters still believe that Biden did not legitimately win the election, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. More than three-quarters of Republicans and Democrats also have less respect for people in the rival party than they did four years ago, a separate survey by Public Opinion Strategies reported. The most troublesome scenario for Biden, Lute warned, “is a self-absorbed, gridlocked American democracy that opens the door to international competitors and disruptors.”
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