Biden’s massive military aid package neglects the real strategic threat: China

The congressional breakthrough on the $95 billion foreign assistance package after months of political wrangling provides President Joe Biden’s administration with arms outlays that are larger than the defense budget of every country other than the United States, China and Russia. Biden now has considerable leverage to further conflict or deterrence across three large geographic regions encompassing more than half of the world — Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.

The package effectively opens the floodgates to the greater flow of sophisticated American weapons, especially to Ukraine. In fact, even before Biden signed the foreign assistance bill into law, Ukraine began using longer-range ATACMS missiles against Russian forces that the U.S. had secretly supplied. And as the law took effect, the Pentagon immediately rushed $1 billion worth of American weapons to Ukraine.

The package reflects the Biden administration’s skewed strategic priorities: It provides $60.8 billion for Ukraine in its war of attrition with Russia, with much of the funding going to U.S. defense contractors and the Pentagon; $26.4 billion for Israel and America’s supporting military operations in the Middle East; and a relatively miserly $8.1 billion for Taiwan and other security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region — the world’s center of gravity where America’s main rival, China, is incrementally changing the territorial and maritime status quo.

The congressional logjam over the package had jeopardized the centerpiece of Biden’s foreign policy, which has focused America’s attention and resources on the wars in Europe and the Middle East. But the region central to the global balance of power and peace is the Indo-Pacific.

The longer the U.S. remains involved in the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, the greater will be the likelihood of China invading Taiwan. It is telling that, under Biden, an overextended America is seeking to dissuade Chinese President Xi Jinping from launching an attack on Taiwan more through diplomacy than deterrence.

Biden’s latest defense budget, and the small outlays for the Indo-Pacific in the $95.3 billion package, show that deterrence against China has assumed a subsidiary policy role. The budget not only underfunds key enabling capabilities for the Indo-Pacific but also cuts programs, including slashing the production goal for Virginia-class submarines from two per year to just one.

China, on the other hand, is engaged in a frenzied naval buildup. China’s surface naval fleet is now already much larger than the American fleet. In terms of number of submarines, China, by embarking on a new generation of nuclear-armed subs, possibly with Russian assistance, is set to go beyond its current near-parity with the U.S. Meanwhile, qualitative improvements in battle force ships and more aggressive tactics by the Chinese navy are already making it more challenging for American ships and submarines to operate in China’s maritime backyard.

The Ukraine war, for its part, has helped raise the specter of the U.S. realizing its worst geopolitical nightmare: a Sino-Russian strategic axis. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken this month called China “the primary contributor” to Russia’s defense industrial base.

The conflict has already exposed NATO’s military shortcomings, including its struggle to scale up weapons and munitions manufacturing to match the output of Russia’s war economy. Chinese President Xi Jinping seems to be aiding the Kremlin’s war machine in an apparent effort to keep the U.S. tied down in Ukraine and further deplete Western arsenals before invading Taiwan.

Against this background, the massive new U.S. funding for Ukraine will further deepen American involvement in the conflict without any prospect of changing the tide of the war. U.S. officials now acknowledge that there is little prospect of Ukraine regaining the 20 percent of its territory already occupied by Russia.

The Biden administration’s narrative on the war has evolved through three distinct phases. In the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion, the “save Ukraine” narrative was dominant, before being overtaken by the “bleed Russia” narrative, which presented the Western supply of weapons and battlefield intelligence to Ukrainian forces as a cost-effective investment to severely “weaken” an adversary militarily.

Even after the much-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive floundered last summer, dashing NATO’s hopes of a major military breakthrough against Russia, the administration — anxious not to lose public support for the war — continued to peddle the line that Ukraine was winning the fight against Russia.

The third phase, “help Ukraine stave off defeat,” began more recently, when CIA Director Bill Burns warned that Ukraine could lose the war to Russia by year’s end absent additional American aid. The shift in the narrative from “Ukraine is winning” to “Ukraine may be facing defeat” was jarringly abrupt.

Make no mistake: Even if the new U.S. assistance of $60.8 billion helps Ukraine avert defeat, it is unlikely to dramatically reverse Ukrainian fortunes on the battlefield against a much stronger foe. Indeed, the longer the war extends, the greater is likely to be Ukraine’s devastation, making reconstruction more costly and onerous.

By sending more lethal and longer-range weapons to Ukraine, the U.S. funding, however, carries the risk of triggering a direct NATO conflict with Russia, which has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Western powers have also increasingly provided Ukraine battlefield targeting data and even some actual assistance on the ground near the front lines.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz faced some flak in February for inadvertently exposing the role of Britain, France and possibly the U.S. in militarily helping direct attacks on Russian targets from Ukrainian soil through “target control.” Scholz said that if Germany followed Britain and France in supplying Ukraine with long-range missiles, it would make it a “participant in the war,” too.

Throwing good money after bad and hoping for a miracle isn’t a strategy. Yet that exactly is the basis of the new foreign assistance package.

A wise course for Biden would be to leverage the package by quietly pushing for a ceasefire in the Ukraine war through back-channel diplomacy. The alternative is to sap America’s strength by continuing to invest heavily in a failing war, thereby creating more strategic space for China to overthrow U.S. global preeminence.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).