Ever since Hamas went on its sadistic rampage last month, President Joe Biden has skillfully played a role he never asked for: restrainer. Publicly, he\u2019s expressed America\u2019s steely determination to support Israel and deter Iran and others from widening the war. Privately, he\u2019s been telling the Israeli allies that they must be proportionate in their response, lest a disastrous situation turn apocalyptic. <\/p>\n
As the body count in Gaza increases, that balancing act is becoming harder to maintain. In that way, the situation in the Middle East \u2014 where Biden also needs the Saudis and various other difficult protagonists to show restraint \u2014 is beginning to resemble U.S. foreign policy globally.<\/p>\n
Look at Eastern Europe. If the U.S. hadn\u2019t taken the lead in supporting Kyiv against the genocidal and neo-imperialist aggression of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Europeans and other Western allies would have dropped off by now. Ukraine might well be under Putin\u2019s boot, with Moldova and other former Soviet Republics \u2014 perhaps even the Baltic NATO members \u2014 in the Kremlin\u2019s sights.<\/p>\n
Throughout his stalwart stand with Kyiv, however, Biden has also been murmuring into the ear of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that he must restrain his war strategy, to keep the Russo-Ukrainian conflict from becoming a Moscow-NATO clash or even World War III. That approach has dictated which weapons the U.S. has supplied at which time, and therefore also the armaments provided by European allies such as Germany, which take their cues from Washington. (1)<\/p>\n
Biden\u2019s public message to Kyiv has been: We\u2019ll never dictate your strategy or foist compromises or peace negotiations on you. The private message has been: Defend Ukrainian soil, but don\u2019t massively threaten Russia itself, or Putin personally. <\/p>\n
Something subtler but similar is happening in East Asia. There the U.S. has been counseling its South Korean allies to incorporate plans for a relatively limited counter strike against North Korea in the event of an attack by Kim Jong Un, the dictator of Pyongyang. The American fear \u2014 as in the clash with Putin \u2014 is that Kim might react to the superiority of the U.S. and its allies in conventional firepower with a tactical nuclear strike, which would make subsequent escalation imponderable. <\/p>\n
The pattern holds from Taiwan to the Philippines. In both places, Biden publicly warns China not to kindle, while privately telling Taipei and Manila not to provoke. <\/p>\n
All over the world, the former superpower is increasingly turning into a super restrainer. The reason for this evolution is that reality keeps forcing the U.S., and Biden, to adjust the country\u2019s grand strategy. <\/p>\n
The big idea during the Obama administration, in which Biden was vice president, was a \u201cpivot\u201d in U.S. foreign policy. The plan was gradually to expend less diplomatic, military and strategic energy in Europe, the Middle East and other parts of the world, and more in Asia, where the U.S. faced its biggest challenger, China. But Putin, the Iranian mullahs and other rogues and villains kept disrupting their respective neighborhoods, causing geopolitical problems only the U.S. can contain. <\/p>\n
In that way Biden has rediscovered that the U.S. is the one nation in the world that can\u2019t afford to pivot, from Europe or anywhere else, because it\u2019s needed everywhere. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said, and as Biden recently repeated, the U.S. is \u201cthe indispensable nation.\u201d Without its leadership, the world would descend into anarchy.<\/p>\n
That realization raises a dilemma. The motivation for pivoting \u2014 that is, prioritizing and conserving energies through selective retrenchment \u2014 was a perception of overstretch. For a long time, America\u2019s strategic plans assumed that the U.S. must be able to win two wars at once. The rise of China as a veritable peer makes that two-war planning iffier \u2014 it now has the world\u2019s largest navy and intends to equal the U.S. in nuclear weapons in about a decade. <\/p>\n
Worse, the plausible emergence of a de facto axis between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea renders that posture all but untenable, because it turns a two-front scenario into a multiple-front one. The nuclear weapons wielded by three of the potential axial powers \u2014 and, soon, perhaps the fourth \u2014 make that situation even scarier. <\/p>\n
That prospect is what worries a bipartisan congressional commission that\u2019s just released its report on the \u201cstrategic posture\u201d America needs in this complicated new world. It calls on the U.S. to invest huge sums in its conventional military, to be able to deter or defeat Russia, China, North Korea and Iran all at once, and in all domains from sea to space. The alternative would be to expand America\u2019s nuclear arsenal so vastly that it could, in theory, match Russia and China escalating in concert. But that would mean starting a new arms race. <\/p>\n
A dire outlook, to be sure. Better, therefore, to buy time and keep regional wars from getting out of control or becoming entangled with one another.<\/p>\n
This logic explains why Biden no longer seeks to retrench from any region, but is trying instead to keep America\u2019s foes and friends alike from escalating. That\u2019s true from the South China Sea to Crimea and now Gaza. If there\u2019s an emerging Biden doctrine, it might be a twist on Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s famous phrase: Carry a big stick, and whisper restraint to your allies.<\/p>\n
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(1) That, incidentally, is why continued U.S. help to Kyiv is not only necessary but also connected to aid for Israel and other allies – as Democrats and Republicans in the Senate grasp, but some Republicans in the House apparently don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.<\/p>\n
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.<\/p>\n
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