The past few weeks have shown how difficult some of those will be.
Mr. Biden was undercut by Saudi Arabia, which he visited over the summer, when the kingdom led a movement in OPEC last week to cut oil production after telling him it would increase it. The OPEC move contributes to inflation, and it also aids Russia’s effort to finance the war in Ukraine. Mr. Biden said on Tuesday that he would reconsider his relationship with the Saudis and make them pay a price.
China’s cooperation on climate issues has slowed to a near halt; “strategic stability” talks with Russia on limiting nuclear arsenals have ended.
“Russia now poses an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and stability,” the document says, a sharp departure from decades of strategies that discussed working to integrate Russia and the West. “The is not a struggle between the West and Russia. It is about fundamental principles of the U.N. Charter, which Russia is a party to, particularly respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and the prohibition against acquiring territory through war.”
Mr. Putin clearly sees it differently: He claims Ukraine was always part of Russia, back to the era of the czars, and has described this moment as driven by the West’s effort to contain and starve Russian power.
But what leaps from the pages of Mr. Biden’s strategy, which was drafted by the National Security Council with input from around the administration, is a relentless focus on China. This was also the theme of a speech this week by Jeremy Fleming, the chief of Britain’s cyber and signals intelligence agency.
Much of the military strategy described in the administration’s document is meant to counter China in space, cyberspace and at sea — all of which require different hardware, different strategies and different talents than containing Russia. It describes a more aggressive U.S. effort to enhance cybersecurity and urges work with allies and the private sector to “withstand attempts to degrade our shared technology advances” by limiting Chinese and other investment in the United States and controlling exports of key technologies to China.
Some critics of the strategy fear that it does not move fast enough. “China’s plans for Taiwan center around 2027,” Kori Schake, who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview. “The budget does not envision modernization at that speed.”
