For all the failings of the Biden administration, none is more clear-cut than the disaster that is its national security policy. The trail of misjudgments, failed negotiations and rank incompetence has no parallel in American history. Team Biden conducting national security policy is like watching a troop of baboons fly an airplane: You know it’s going to hit a mountain, you just don’t know when.
It all starts with deterrence, which the new breed of Democratic foreign policy boffins considers a relic.
Deterrence is instilling fear in your opponent, preventing or at least significantly reducing the risk of aggression. It is part of game theory, the study of how multiple actors may act to maximize benefit in a given scenario. The goal may be to “win” or to reach a stable equilibrium, depending on the situation — a geopolitical poker game.
Understanding and applying game theory is fundamental to geopolitics, particularly in times of potential and real conflict. It is not a relic, and the multi-year Biden policy fiasco in Ukraine proves it.
Deterrence gets a bad rap from the Cold War doctrine of “mutual-assured-destruction.” American and Soviet policy was to launch a full-scale nuclear response in the face of a nuclear attack. On its surface, that’s crazy —nuking the planet to cinders based on a theory is nonsense. But it worked.
Since the end of World War II, Europe had the longest run of peace between its great powers in history — over 70 years, far beyond its previous record of 43 years (1871 to 1914). That ended with the Obama administration and its dismissal of deterrence in favor of “proportionate response” and economic sanctions.
Why did Russian President Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine? For the same reason wars are always started — Putin thought he could get away with it. And he was partly correct. The first reaction from Team Biden was to give up and run away. It was only resoluteness by Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, that forced the West’s hand.
The timid aid process for Ukraine has hardly restored deterrence. Team Biden has seen Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro thumb his nose and steal another election, Hamas and Israel ignore Team Biden’s entreaties, and Iran arm their Houthi proxies and attack Red Sea shipping.
Failure at deterrence was bad enough, but their strategy during the war is even worse because it’s really no strategy at all. Team Biden just stumbled forward in ad hoc fashion. Petrified of Putin’s imagined “red lines,” they would spend months debating what weapons to supply and their limitations, only to approve them eventually and unpredictably, seemingly with no consideration as to what was actually happening in the war at that point or what the present needs were.
Their incompetence has lengthened the Ukraine war, made it more dangerous and jeopardized domestic political support — a barely comprehensible trifecta of post-modernist neurotic bumbling. Even worse, a dynamic has developed due to Team Biden’s incompetence: Their weakness has encouraged Putin to bluster and bluff. Finding that his nuclear threats caused very public trembling in the West, Putin became quite cavalier about it.
But given the parlous state of Russian arms and the difficulty of maintaining nuclear weapons, Putin could hardly assume that any given device would work. A fizzle would be a humiliating disaster. This means that any real nuclear threat would be preceded by a test, which would take time to prepare; those preparations would be clear well before any nuclear strike. Moreover, crossing the nuclear threshold would be a massive gamble that risks Chinese (and other nations’) support.
Eventually, even weak-willed bedwetters like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan figured out Putin’s obvious bluffing. This in turn has triggered a dangerous dynamic: Western nations would moot more military aid, Putin would issue nuclear threats, the West would ignore Putin, and the Russians would be humiliated. But public humiliation is truly intolerable to Putin, necessitating a response.
The result? Instead of creating a balance of fear or a rough equilibrium (a key goal in proper game theory behavior), Team Biden ignorantly created a cycle of escalation.
What Biden should have done early in the war is make public a simple doctrine: whatever Russia does to Ukraine; Ukraine can do to Russia with American arms. If Russia sends missiles 100 miles into Ukrainian territory, the Ukrainians can do the same into Russian territory.
Although this still would have ceded Putin the initiative on the level of violence, it also would have placed responsibility squarely upon him for any destruction wrought on Russian soil. The endless public debate in the West over Putin’s possible “red lines” would have disappeared. Putin would reveal his red lines by choosing how to prosecute his war.
Without this balance of fear, the Russians have acted with absolute impunity. They have indiscriminately bombed Ukraine, massacred civilians, destroyed energy infrastructure and possibly used poison gas. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians have been prevented from even attacking Russian troop formations on Russian soil preparing to advance on Ukrainian positions. It’s pure idiocy.
As a result, a political “doom loop” has formed in the West. Russia destroys key vital infrastructure and economic parts of Ukraine, causing the need for more funds to keep Ukraine afloat, raising the costs for the West, which undermines domestic political support for helping Ukraine, which encourages more Russian violence.
The fools in the Biden administration were never able to figure this out.
For all the sanctimonious wailing on the left about how President-elect Donald Trump will sell out Ukraine, at least Trump and his national security team understand deterrence. They are not afraid of their own shadows. Trump plays the game of chicken better than any American politician. Even the Ukrainians recognize how awful the simpering Biden national security team has been.
Trump hates to lose. His incoming team is hardly interested in starting their tenure giving anything up to anyone. No doubt there is uncertainty about what Trump will do. But given the impotence of the current administration, populated by the world’s worst poker players, both Ukraine and America are better off with a hard-nosed Team Trump than a weak, directionless Team Biden.
Keith Naughton is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm, and a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant.
