US absence in the world is as dangerous as US weakness
Many lament the erosion of US strength abroad over the past three-and-a-half years. During the Biden administration, the world has become a more dangerous place, with the eruption of major wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and a resurgence of emboldened Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific. Many American conservatives rightly point to the feckless US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 as a precedent that has enticed aggressors and inflamed malign activity around the planet.
At the same time, US national security policies have been constrained by President Joe Biden’s excessive concerns that demonstrations of US strength will lead to escalation. In reality, US weakness has driven escalatory cycles that have been profoundly harmful to US interests in recent years. As it turns out, strength checks aggression while weakness entices it—a lesson that great leaders are quick to embrace.
Some on the conservative side of the political spectrum have bemoaned this weakness while at the same time eagerly trumpeting their isolationist impulses. Yet on the world stage, there are many similarities between a weak United States and an absent United States. Both foster an international environment that is harmful to US interests, objectives, and priorities. Thus, it is time for conservatives to reconsider their national security positions to avoid producing the same disastrous results that have been evident during the current administration. Weakness and absence are strategic cousins that degrade deterrence and make adversary aggression much more likely.
The ramifications of either US weakness or absence . . . would prove devastating to the quality of life of many Americans.
Deterrence relies on an adversary’s perception of the situation. Following the proper application of deterrence theory, leaders and policymakers seek to diminish the perceived benefits in the mind of an adversary of engaging in an unwanted activity, while increasing the perceived risks and costs of that activity. At the same time, the adversary is asking two questions: Does the United States have the capability to respond? And does it have the will to do so?
In the current national security environment, hostile actors generally believe in the enduring US strength of capability. They know that the United States has overwhelming global military might. Yet, these hostile actors likely sense a profound weakness in Americans’ will to stand up for US interests, objectives, and priorities. Such perceptions about diminished will are reinforced by every presidential comment and report about Biden’s fears of escalation. As deterrence has diminished, aggressors have taken steps in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Western Pacific that have benefited from a White House that is hesitant to act.
Just as weakness has eroded deterrence, so too would an absent United States, driven by isolationist impulses. A professed isolationism would provide a clear signal to an adversary that the United States lacks the will to engage in the global environment. Yet, isolationism has compounding effects on deterrence because US absence removes the proximity of its strength of capability. If the US military retreats from a robust global posture, its capability will not be available in the right quantity and adequate concentration to stop aggression. Thus, in the mind of an adversary, an isolationist US posture is characterized by a weakness in both capability and will—a dire situation for any strategy that relies on deterrence to prevent aggression. Such a retreat would diminish the United States’ ability to maintain a world order that is beneficial to its interests.
It is important to understand the major benefits that the United States enjoys from an international environment that is free, open, prosperous, and secure, even if just from a high-level economic perspective. More than a quarter of US gross domestic product (GDP) comes from international commerce. Additionally, the massive increase in global trade and investment since World War II has skyrocketed global GDP, and the United States has disproportionately benefited from this impressive increase. Whether the United States likes it or not, its well-being is inextricably tied to a global system that it helped create.
Yet, when that global trade faces barriers, prompted by US weakness, the impacts are immediate and harmful to US interests. The current situation in the Red Sea is instructive.
Houthi rockets, missiles, and drones started to target maritime activity in the Red Sea several weeks after Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Almost immediately, shipping costs from Asia to the East Coast of the United States increased by 55 percent. This spike has stabilized to more than triple the cost since the onset of Houthi activity, a massive inflationary input into a US economy at a time when Americans are already facing severe struggles with price increases. The inability or unwillingness of the US-led international order to preserve safe transit in this region has directly led to substantial internal price increases. Additionally, the world has suffered from a global inflationary rise of an additional 0.5 to 0.7 percent, as well as a loss of global domestic product of about 0.4 percent as a result of these disruptions. US weakness in this geographic area has ceded territory and initiative to a ragtag group of militants, while passing along economic harm to the US and global population.
This outsize impact has resulted from constraints on a maritime thoroughfare that provides passage for 15 percent of global trade. The implications of a similar shutdown in the Western Pacific, much more easily enforced by a world power far more potent than the Houthis, would be substantially worse.
Around 60 percent of maritime trade transits through Asian waters, and a third of global shipping passes through the South China Sea. And this isn’t just any trade, but vitally important trade. Taiwan and South Korea control a critical share of the world’s production of advanced processors, both sitting just off the coast of a resurgent China that strives to disrupt the global order in ways that are advantageous to its own interests. China is hungry for high-end semiconductors, spending more money on importing chips than it does on importing oil. The ramifications of either US weakness or absence, both of which would drastically diminish freedom of transit in this part of the world, would prove devastating to the quality of life of many Americans, who have come to rely on a world order that they have carefully created and maintained through a combination of strength of capability and will.
None of this is to say that the United States should disproportionately bear the burden of global security when its allies and partners are similarly reliant on such a system. A broad and trusting network of allies and partners is a US advantage that must be carefully cultivated, applied, balanced, and optimized. Yet, geopolitical demands, axioms, and examples must remind US policymakers and national security experts that if deterrence still matters, then it is best established by strength of both capability and will.
US absence or weakness—flip sides of the same disastrous geostrategic coin—are so similar in their ruinous outcomes that they must both be avoided by national security practitioners on both sides of the aisle. To lament weakness while supporting absence is to hypocritically stumble into the same strategic quagmire that conservatives have bemoaned all along.
United States Air Force Brigadier General John Teichert (Ret.) is an author and a leading expert on foreign affairs and military strategy. He served as commander of Joint Base Andrews and Edwards Air Force Base, was the US senior defense official to Iraq, and recently retired as the assistant deputy undersecretary of the Air Force, international affairs. Follow him at johnteichert.com.
Further reading
Tue, Jul 23, 2024
Biden will leave an enduring legacy of linking economic and national security
New Atlanticist By Josh Lipsky
The Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law revived the idea that economic security and national security are deeply interconnected.
Wed, Sep 11, 2024
Experts react: What the presidential debate revealed about how Trump and Harris would conduct foreign policy
New Atlanticist By
On Tuesday night in Philadelphia, the two candidates often presented sharply contrasting visions on a range of foreign policy issues, from tariffs to energy and immigration, and from China to the Middle East.
Tue, Jul 23, 2024
Biden’s legacy depends most of all on Ukraine
Inflection Points By Frederick Kempe
The US president has recognized that the world is at an inflection point. Now comes the part he cannot control.
Image: US President Joe Biden walks to board Air Force One at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, North Carolina, U.S., October 2, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein