Hal Brands
There hasn’t been much holiday cheer for Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy left Washington last week without any new US aid for his embattled state. That may be an omen of hard times ahead in 2024. The final year of President Joe Biden’s term will see the present world order facing trouble on every front — including the one on which it is most vulnerable, in the US itself.
Next year is shaping up to be ugly for Ukraine. Its much-touted counteroffensive has ended in disappointment. Its forces are bloodied and exhausted. Recriminations about whether Ukrainian timidity or Western avarice are to blame for that failure are playing out, predictably, in the US press.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, conversely, is feeling pretty smug. He has taken the best punch Ukraine and its Western allies can throw. His arsenal of autocracy is out-producing America’s arsenal of democracy. Now Washington is struggling to help Ukraine defend itself.
If Ukraine does receive a major infusion of US aid in 2024, it may still have to husband its strength, absorb Russian attacks, and prepare for the next big push — perhaps the last big push — in 2025. If it doesn’t get that aid, it may struggle to protect its cities from drone and missile attacks this winter and hold battlefield positions against superior Russian artillery and manpower next spring. The question going into 2023 was, how much land can Ukraine liberate? The question for 2024 is, can Ukraine hang on?
The outlook isn’t much brighter in the Middle East. Israel hopes it can wrap up the most intense phase of its war against Hamas by year’s end. The Biden administration hopes so, too.
Ending the conflict is key to lowering the diplomatic costs the US is paying as it supports an
eminently justified Israeli offensive that has, nonetheless, claimed a reported 20,000 lives.
Ending the war — and, perhaps, the tenure of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — is also
vital to restoring momentum toward creation of a Saudi-Israeli coalition against Iran.
Yet even in this optimistic scenario, lower-intensity conflict will probably continue for months to come. Meanwhile, the war has stoked violent, escalatory pressures on four fronts — the West Bank, the Israel-Lebanon border, the Red Sea, and in Iraq and Syria. It is also threatening to reinvigorate Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon, by unwinding the tacit agreement whereby Washington went easy on sanctions and Tehran went easy on uranium enrichment.
The demands on America’s military power and diplomatic savvy will remain significant in 2024 — as trouble gathers in the Western Pacific, as well.
With hindsight, we are likely to see last month’s meeting between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping as a high point in the US-China relationship, not a foundation upon which the two sides subsequently build. There’s no sign of the People’s Liberation Army slackening the military buildup — nuclear and conventional — that is alarming the Pentagon. China keeps trying to push a US ally, the Philippines, off disputed features in the South China Sea. Then there is the primary flashpoint, Taiwan.
If Democratic Progressive Party candidate Lai Ching-te wins presidential elections next month — he presently has a narrow lead — Beijing won’t be happy. Chinese officials view Lai as a pro-independence firebrand. His victory, the third straight for the DPP, would force Xi to confront the fact that hopes for peaceful unification are fading fast. So Xi might turn up the military pressure next year — through aggressive exercises and shows of force — to remind Taiwan’s population that disobedience has a price.
Handling a world full of crises would test any president. But Biden will also be facing the forces of illiberalism at home. His democracy-versus-autocracy rhetoric has always been about former President Donald Trump as much as Xi or Putin. And if Biden liked to say, early in his tenure, that “America is back” — well, now Trump is back, and he’s barreling toward a rematch with a president who seems to have aged a decade in the last three years.
The specter of Trump’s return is already influencing global politics: It is fueling Putin’s belief that he can win in Ukraine by outlasting the West. America’s allies realize that if Trump triumphs, his animosity toward them might sunder the free world — that he would inject instability, incompetence and unilateralism into US statecraft at a time of growing danger. There are many ways he could even weaken the democratic pillars of America’s global strength: firing civil servants en masse; prosecuting his enemies; weaponizing the power of the state to entrench himself in office.
The year that is ending had its share of nasty surprises, from Hamas’s attack on Israel to the apparent waning of the free world’s will to aid Ukraine. The year that is dawning will be even more turbulent, not least because of the way that America’s unsettled politics will interact with the world’s.
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