In the weeks after President Joe Biden decided not to run for reelection, there was a surge of hope among policymakers anxious about Washington’s willingness to sustain its global security commitments. Though opinion polls indicate that the battle between the Democratic Party’s new candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former President Donald Trump will remain tight, the emergence of a viable electoral challenge to Trump’s brand of isolationist MAGA Republicanism has revived optimism among those who remain convinced that only U.S. leadership can resolve dangerous geopolitical crises. Yet even as senior figures in Washington continue to assert, as Republican Sen. John Cornyn recently did, that “nothing happens without American leadership,” the ineffectual nature of the Biden administration’s response to armed conflicts that could destabilize the global order indicates how diminished U.S. influence has already become in many parts of the world.
The declining ability of U.S. governments to shape outcomes in key conflicts was already visible long before President Biden took office in January 2021. While the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the 1990s had their share of foreign policy failures, the U.S. was still able to exert decisive influence over most geopolitical flashpoints. The Soviet Union’s collapse had thrown Moscow into chaos, Beijing remained focused on economic growth and the attention of EU leaders was consumed by complex institution-building. Over time, however, the United States’ struggle to balance failing counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan with growing great power competition from China and Russia meant that Washington’s capacity to engage with every major conflict decreased.
This gradual waning of American influence outside of core areas of strategic focus rarely features in ferocious debates in Washington between those who believe that the U.S. should remain deeply involved in global affairs and the so-called Restrainers on the left and MAGA Republicans on the right who are skeptical of security commitments outside U.S. borders. With attention focused on conflict between Israel and Iranian-backed groups, Ukraine’s war for survival against Russia and Chinese pressure in East Asia, many policymakers and commentators in Washington have barely registered how other escalating conflicts could over time disrupt key nodes of global trade and security, and they struggle to grasp how little leverage they now have in several key global regions.