Stephens: Next president must think hard about world that awaits

By Bret Stephens / The New York Times

Some questions for the next American president:

If necessary, are you willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons or China from subjugating Taiwan; two events that may well take place on your watch? Will you use the threat of an arms embargo to compel Israel or Ukraine to agree to cease-fire deals they do not want? Are you prepared to increase military spending to Cold War levels to contend with great-power competitors and new asymmetric threats, such as from the Houthis?

Above all, do you believe that maintaining our global primacy is worth the price in effort, treasure and sometimes blood?

If the answer to that last question is “no” — an answer that has the virtues of honesty, modesty and frugality — then you can mostly ignore the previous questions. You can also comfort yourself with the fantasy that the world will leave us alone in exchange for us leaving it alone.

The world doesn’t work that way. Unlike, say, New Zealand, we are not a pleasant and remote country under the implicit protection of a benign ally: Nobody will protect us if we do not protect ourselves. We have globe-spanning territorial, maritime and commercial interests that require us to police the global commons against bad actors, from China in the South China Sea to Iran in the Strait of Hormuz to Russia in the cyber domain. We stand for a set of ideas, centered on human rights and personal liberties, that invariably attract the violent attention of despots and fanatics.

We’ve also tried isolationism before, in the 1920s and 1930s. It ended badly.

All these points used to be no-brainers. Not anymore. When J.D. Vance said in 2022 that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he was implicitly suggesting that he was — or was at least close to — rejecting the costs of global primacy. When Kamala Harris said in 2020 that “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need,” she was, too.

Both these statements were foolish when they were made. Now they’re dangerous. Russia, Iran, North Korea and China have joined hands in a vast Axis of Aggression that finds victims from Kharkiv to Tel Aviv to the Spratly Islands off the Philippines. Beijing has doubled its nuclear arsenal in recent years and may double it again by the end of the decade. Tehran’s nuclear breakout time — the time needed to produce a bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium, though not a bomb itself — is “now probably one or two weeks,” according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Moscow seems to have pressed pause on its plans to arm the Houthis with missiles, but the threat of it gives the Kremlin leverage elsewhere in the world.

What all this amounts to is what a Leninist maxim calls probing with bayonets. The next line: “If you find mush, you push.”

Mush was George W. Bush’s feeble response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, followed by Barack Obama’s equally feeble one to Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014. It was Donald Trump’s threats to withdraw from NATO, his attempt (foiled by his own advisers) to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria, his pathetic hopes for a deal with the Taliban. It was President Joe Biden’s heedless execution of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was the slow-rolling of critical weapon systems deliveries to Ukraine and the feeble response to attacks by Iranian-backed militias against U.S. troops, which, predictably, resumed this week.

There’s a third turn to the maxim: “If you find steel, you withdraw.”

At his best, Biden provided the steel — and spine — that helped Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion. He did so again by bringing Finland and Sweden into NATO, deterring Hezbollah from invading northern Israel after Oct. 7, deepening military alliances throughout the Pacific and promising to fight for Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.

History will remember this side of the Biden legacy well. The question is whether the next president will build on or retreat from it.

There’s a convenient belief that it doesn’t really matter what the candidates say or even think about the role the United States should assume: Considerations of national interest and prestige, the thinking goes, will dictate roughly similar foreign policies under either a Harris or a Trump administration, both of which will maintain the status quo. That’s a delusion.

Signals of weakness or strength that the next administration sends in its first weeks or months in office will shape fundamental decisions by our increasingly united and willful adversaries; as well as by our increasingly skittish allies. The MAGA people who think we should abandon Ukraine for the sake of confronting China should ask themselves how abandoning one ally in the West somehow won’t embolden an adversary in the East. The progressives who say we spend too much on defense might ask how much it might cost to restore peace once it’s been lost.

The invasion of Ukraine and Oct. 7 were supposed to be the alarms that the long nap from history was truly over. We can’t just keep hitting the snooze button.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.