IF THERE WAS NO WAR...

The war in Ukraine has escalated from an armed confrontation between the two countries to a global problem, driving up energy costs, food shortages and inflation around the world. It has also triggered a major political and economic conflict between the West and Russia that could ultimately have a far greater impact on global stability.

The war is also likely to increase tensions and competition with China, which is steadily upgrading and increasing the efficiency of its army to be equal or surpass the US in military, economic and technological power by 2030-2040.

Even before the war, the White House officials claimed that China was likely to observe Washington’s reaction to the Ukrainian crisis to predict its attitude to Beijing's more aggressive actions against Taiwan. Therefore, since the start of the war, Washington has considered the willingness to provide financial and military support to Ukraine, the rapid introduction of sanctions against Russia and the increase of European defence budgets as an unambiguous signal to China.

The emerging multipolar world with nuclear, biological, chemical, large-scale high-precision conventional weapons and cyber-competition is increasing the potential of small powers to pose serious threats. Internal or local tensions and conflicts lead to massive refugee problems, famine, occupations and strategic resource plundering that can threaten the lives of millions of people.

Events in Ukraine will only boost instability in many parts of the world, while Russia and China will increase their rivalry with the US and its strategic partners in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

It is quite logical to assume that all these factors have forced the Biden administration to urgently begin revising the country's National Security Strategy (NSS), which it had originally planned to present in March but postponed because of the events in Ukraine.

Putting things in order

The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act was designed to bring order to the US military torn by rivalries between different structures. After serious coordination problems, such as the Vietnam War, the Iranian embassy hostage rescue operation in 1980, and the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the relevance of radical changes in the US military management was obvious.

However, NSS is much more important to the US than just security coordination. The strategy has been developed by every administration since the presidency of Ronald Reagan and is one of the key documents guiding the US foreign policy. Approved by the Congress, NSS is designed not only to set the administration's budgetary priorities for national security, but also to articulate the current US presidential administration's relationship to allies, partners and adversaries.

The previous Trump administration published its strategy in December 2017, which focused on so-called 'American sovereignty'. The Biden administration produced an Interim National Security Strategic Guidance in March 2021 that sets the agenda. But no full updated version has yet been made public.

Trade vs. conflicts

From the very first NSSs, their constant dominant message has been that increased trade between countries is the basis for increased global prosperity and therefore a way to contain conflicts.

The West believed that countries and people who expand trade relations are less likely to wage wars against each other, as their prosperity will be mutually intertwined. For example, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was also committed to this philosophy. Thus, she built relations with Putin's Russia with this in mind, forcing the EU to follow the same strategy as well.

The US has also set as its strategic goal the promotion of trade, as it was assumed that a prosperous world would make the US more secure.

Each US government agency developed its strategy on the NSS. For example, the Office of the US Trade Representative considered it as a mandate to negotiate further free trade agreements. The Department of Commerce used the NSS to justify its efforts to promote the US business abroad. The US State Department expanded the economic departments of US embassies and placed a strong emphasis on trade issues in bilateral and regional diplomacy.

At first glance, the expansion of free trade has nothing to do with the military establishment. However, it is the US military missions that secure global free trade. Thus, it has become a key strategic objective of the US military, notes the American Institute for Foreign Policy Studies.

Harmful stubbornness

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has become so much obsessed with promoting free trade that it has failed to create effective national military plans, programmes and budgets to counter Russian, Chinese and other threats, limiting itself to cheap rhetoric instead of real planning and analysis, states the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

As the US faces a growing threat from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and other adversaries, it spends on national security less than half the share of its GDP that it spent during the Cold War against the USSR alone (7%+ then and 2.7-3.2% now), CSIS reports.

In the 1960s and 1990s, the US also had more support from its strategic partners in NATO and the rest of the world than it does now. Instead of working towards a more effective common force, Washington has urged the NATO countries to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence.

The stubborn demand for increased military spending, especially under the Trump administration, has ignored, among other things, the fact that security should be based on each country's plans and not on NATO's overall objectives. Indeed, no attempt has even been made to ascertain what level of spending was actually needed to eliminate a particular country's drawbacks or whether a spending level of 2% would be adequate for this purpose.

As a result, the overall potential of Europe's national armies have hardly changed since the 1980s. Moreover, the Eastern European countries could not get rid of the ageing and deteriorating weapons of the Soviet-era.

Europe has remained unprepared for a serious increase and change in its military power, while the US was focused on China and the military balance in the Indo-Pacific region. The Russian invasion of Ukraine showed how dangerous this approach to regional security can be.

Rumours

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's recent address on the US foreign policy offers one possible scenarios of how the NSS will weigh threats from Beijing and Moscow. Russia, according to Blinken, poses "a clear and present danger", while China is "the most serious long-term challenge to the international order”.

More fundamentally, the strategy likely argues that neither Russia's challenge in Europe nor China's challenge in Asia can be solved in isolation, Bloomberg reports.

The new draft is rumoured to emphasise the importance of both Europe and Asia to US national security interests, a departure from an earlier version of the strategy that focused more on China and Asia. The document claims that developments in Europe and Asia are inextricably linked.

According to officials in Washington, the revised national security strategy has expanded the US dialogue with Asian countries about developments in Europe and with European countries about developments in Asia. While discussions with European countries about the Indo-Pacific region during the Obama administration were "difficult, complex, often suspicious," they are now "very productive," White House Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell said in May.

NAS is also expected to more clearly articulate the link between emerging transnational threats, such as climate change and traditional geopolitical competition. Outer space, for example, is a transnational issue with major geopolitical context, Bloomberg reports.

No more ignorance

Were it not for the war in Ukraine, the final version of the US Security Strategy would almost certainly still focus on China, formally note the threats from Iran and North Korea, and completely ignore Russian claims. It would have remained just as empty as it was under the Trump administration, CSIS experts suggest.

The interim national security strategic guidance that the Biden administration released in March 2021 did not provide any detailed plans, programmes or projected budgets, CSIS noted. There was no indication that the US has new plans to change its global strategic partnerships.

Judging by the White House statements, thanks to the war in Ukraine, the US has realised that it could not afford a strategy that focuses only on one major threat or one region and ignores the interests of its main strategic partners.

The question that remains is whether the US will restore its traditional foreign policy, or will change direction with each new administration, as it happened in 2017 and 2021.