“Democracy” is invoked no less than 47 times in the 24 pages of US president Joe Biden’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance. In particular, the new administration insists on the need for democratic allies to stand together against authoritarian great powers such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China. Based on the past week, however, the US is firmly resolved to go nose-to-nose not just with its challengers, but also with its allies.
Last Wednesday, Biden agreed with the description of Russia’s president as “a killer”. A day later, US secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan very publicly clashed with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage.On that same day, the secretary of state had issued a terse statement on Nord Stream 2, a pipeline intended to bring Russian natural gas via the Baltic Sea to Germany, circumventing the key transit route through Ukraine and Poland. Blinken called it “a Russian geopolitical project intended to divide Europe and weaken European energy security”. He warned that “any entity involved . . . risks US sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline.”
The Russians and Chinese promptly gave as good as they got. Putin mockingly challenged Biden to a public debate. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi treated Blinken to a furious harangue. But the Europeans — to be precise, the Germans — were left blinking in the headlights.
While the pipeline is owned by Gazprom and co-financed by five European companies (France’s Engie, Austria’s OMV, the Dutch-British Shell, and the German Uniper and Wintershall), its political ownership resides in Berlin. Most other European governments oppose it; some German policymakers devoutly wish it would go away. Yet German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government had been counting on being able to persuade Washington to accept a pragmatic solution for a construction project that is 95 percent complete.
But the Biden team is itself in a double bind. It wants to stand up to Russia, but improve US-German relations, which had fallen to a nadir in the Trump era. At home, a bipartisan drum section in Congress has been clamoring for more companies to be put on the sanctions list. A report is due in May.
Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, a Trump ally and 2024 presidential hopeful, has been gleefully using the statutory deadline to block the government’s senior political nominations. Biden’s choice for CIA director William Burns was confirmed by the Senate immediately after Blinken’s tough