As we crossed yesterday the threshold of six months in office for the Biden administration, much of the focus is on the historic spending and domestic priorities they and their allies in the mainstream press jointly champion. But on foreign policy less attention was paid, at the same time that a worrying number of trends require examination. Outside of the prominent ‘We’re back’ multilateralist messaging designed for and happily consumed by Western European audiences, there is little salience to the Biden’s administration’s foreign policy messaging. That’s because events have overtaken any incoming momentum the administration had.
Underwhelming responses against acts of cyber-subversion against the homeland, and military aggression from adversaries in Iraq, Syria, the Black Sea, and Afghanistan risk creating a Deterrent Collapse. In just six months, each recalcitrant power – Russia, China, Iran – tested the United States. In some cases, these were escalations in ongoing tit-for-tats but with new tactics: Iranian weaponry advances in Iraq, Russian spoofing of U.S. ship data in the Black Sea, Chinese use of criminal civilian contractors for cyber-espionage. Others were precedent-setting attacks with disruptions to our supply chain, attacks apparently accepted by this administration as a new normal.
Let’s review a few of these provocations and the administration’s response to them.
Cyber-Subversion Against the United States:
Attackers shut down our major Eastern fuel pipeline and also targeted our food supply, the RNC, and two important service providers: Microsoft and a supply chain services firm called Kaseya. The latter case came from Russian hackers who’s ties to the Russian regime are unclear, the attack on Microsoft Exchange servers used by U.S. organizations came from civilians in China whose ties to the main Chinese spy agency are clear. That attack by Chinese intelligence targeted a wide swath of U.S. industrial, academic, and non-profit organizations.
In response to the hack by Chinese intelligence, we made a formal accusation against the government joined by our allies. In other words, we announced an announcement. No sanctions or other consequences, and only vague language about further actions to come. In response to the Russian attacks, we’ve possibly shut down the public-facing website used by the criminal group responsible to solicit bidders for their services. Other than that, we’ve announced the creation of some new programs and administrative steps to be taken by the DOJ and the State Department as it relates to ransomware more broadly. The most aggressive of those steps involves using your tax dollars to pay those who provide us information on ransomware attacks or attackers. In fact, when Presidents Biden and Putin discussed ransomware in their much-hyped summit, those talks ended with the U.S. and Russia jointly agreeing, per Biden, to task their cybersecurity experts to together “follow up on specific [cyber incidents] that originate in either of our countries.” That quote is unlikely the statement of a U.S. president that delivered a sufficient message in private.
A ‘steady stream’ of Iranian attacks on U.S. soldiers and facilities:
These provocations in Iraq and Syria include a new tactic, the use of bomb-laden drones crashing into targets. These join the rocket attacks we’ve accepted as a matter of operating in the region for our small contingent of forces there at the request of the Iraqi government. Iranian sponsored militias conduct these attacks at the encouragement of Iran’s leaders using Iran-supplied weapons or Iran-sourced parts.
Proving the insufficient nature of our response, the heaviest week of attacks – with rockets fired against an Iraqi airbase and the U.S. embassy, an intercepted drone likely targeting an oil field in a Kurdish area of Syria, and a bomb-laden drone that struck near the U.S. base on the grounds of Erbil airport all in a 36-hour period – actually followed the administration’s retaliatory airstrikes in early July.
We responded to that violence not with further retaliatory strikes but by announcing the opening of talks with the Iraqi government on an eventual withdrawal from Iraq. We kicked off those talks the same week as we essentially completed the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Iran’s neighbor to the east, despite the public focus on a 31 August pullout date. The choice by Khamenei of a hardliner to serve as the public face of the Iranian administration shows that Iran recognizes its leash is long as nuclear negotiations drag on and further tilts the ledger towards the years-old criticism that the nuclear deal would embolden Iran’s other war-making activities across the region.
On Afghanistan, a bipartisan realization is starting to unsettle some in Washington, but not as many as it should. The Biden administration continually uses the phrase ‘over the horizon’ to describe the counterterrorism approach it intends to deploy in protecting the homeland from terrorist attack. Except that underneath the phrase is shockingly little meat: there is not really much of a plan, and basic questions of sustainable overflight rights, basing agreements, and response times to immediately actionable intelligence remain conspicuously unanswered.
Under Biden, each of these security risks and aggressions will be tolerated in the pursuit of joint progress on issues like climate and nuclear non-proliferation that the administration does not have sufficient domestic support to make stick beyond its four or eight years. They are willing to accept the short-term national security risk on our behalf in pursuit of what they believe are higher order goals. Not only accepting short-term risk, but conceding strategic losses like the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that so strengthens Russia and the abandonment of accountability for China over its COVID origins information coverup.
However, the fatal flaw in their calculation is the meta-risk that arises when each of these individual aggressions is allowed to stand. As credible deterrence disappears, a collective realization replaces it: the U.S. will allow provocations, it will take hits, and it will hesitate to intervene. This is the type of environment in which supply chains get disrupted, military fortifications in the South China Sea get built, borders get changed, and planes are shot out of the sky. A cascade effect applies where a greater realm of provocations and interventions are now in the realm of possibility, and that new reality creates more risk than that of any individual attack.
This is dangerous territory. Ignored red lines create green lights, and even temporary disruptions to sensitive nodes of our infrastructure – designated ‘Critical’ or not – create unintended consequences far outside of the cyber realm. More importantly, our failure to punish aggressors carries a cost that you and I will bear, all political calculations aside. We saw this pattern play out in the late 1990’s as attacks from non-state actors escalated and escalated until we were met with catastrophe. We shouldn’t need to be reminded of this again.
Finally, this level of passivity in the face of brazen attacks on U.S. companies and facilities doesn’t just invite more aggression from others. It’s of a degree above that: to have our bluff called this early in the Biden administration invites an era of destabilization. Three and a half more years of increasing aggression – with potentially significant consequences.
For all the realism we celebrated over the past decade, we can see now on the horizon the end of the era where the bipartisan U.S. strategy of generally looking away as rising powers change borders and create new territory is consequence free. Six months in, Biden is speeding us towards those consequences.