The world is running out of ‘inflection points’ in the war against authoritarian rule

During his term in office, President Biden has declared almost a dozen times that the United States and the West are “at an inflection point” in facing the existential challenge from the world’s authoritarian powers. He is right; his administration is currently coping with confrontational relationships with Russia and China, as well as the perpetual tensions with Iran and North Korea.

If an inflection point is defined as a trending major event in international relations that has the potential to affect the thinking and actions of malign international actors and influence the direction of world affairs in significant ways, there has been a series of such historic points involving China and/or Russia over the last three decades. Each has set the stage for a successor decisive point. As it happens, Biden personally and/or veteran members of his present administration participated in all but one of those decisive turns of the wheel.

Inflection Point 1: China. In 1995-1996, in what became known as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, the most dangerous U.S.-China confrontation over Taiwan to that point, China conducted live-fire exercises near Taiwan and fired missiles toward the island, closing the Strait to international sea and air commercial traffic. The Clinton administration sent two aircraft carriers toward the Taiwan Strait, but when Beijing threatened a “sea of fire” if they entered the Strait, the ships turned away.

Kurt Campbell, then a Defense Department official and now Biden’s China hand, has described the episode as “my own personal sort of Cuban missile crisis.” When Chinese officials asked his boss, Assistant Secretary Joseph Nye, how America would respond if China attacked Taiwan, he replied, “We don’t know […] it would depend on the circumstances.” Only one U.S. carrier battle group has transited the strait in the 27 years since.

Inflection Point 2: Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, which Vladimir Putin later called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Washington, London and Moscow prevailed upon Ukraine to surrender its nuclear weapons. In the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, the three powers reciprocated by guaranteeing Ukraine’s permanent sovereignty and territorial integrity.

In 2008, the George W. Bush administration pressured NATO to declare that Ukraine and Georgia eventually “will become members of NATO.” Months later, Putin’s Russia invaded Georgia. Neither Washington nor NATO took any significant action to reverse the occupation which persists today.

Inflection Point 3: Russia. In 2012, President Obama promised Putin he could “be more flexible” after his reelection. In 2014, Putin invaded Eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Despite their earlier assurances, Washington, London and NATO did nothing. Putin also dispatched Russian forces to Syria to prop up Bashar Assad in the face of Obama’s red lines about Assad using chemical weapons against his people.

Inflection Point 4: Afghanistan. In their presidential campaigns, both Donald Trump and Biden railed against America’s “forever wars” and promised to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. In the Doha Agreement of February 2020, the Trump administration reached an agreement with the Taliban, whom Trump had originally intended to invite for negotiations at Camp David.

The U.S pledged to withdraw all its forces from Afghanistan by May 2022, “subject to the Taliban’s fulfillment of its commitments” — no support for terrorist organizations, no attacks on U.S. forces, good-faith talks with the Afghan government on the country’s future. The Taliban violated virtually all their commitments for the duration of Trump’s term and 18 months of Biden’s, but he proceeded with his disastrous pull-out anyway. It was an exponential vindication of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s scathing judgment that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every foreign policy issue for the last four decades.”

Inflection Point 5: China. After Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan in August 2022, Beijing unleashed the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, eclipsing the 1995-1996 episode in firepower, missile launches and number of ships and planes deployed, imposing a temporary blockade of Taiwan, This time, the chastened Democratic administration, laden with Clinton and Obama veterans, did not bother even to mount a lame effort at defense or deterrence.

Inflection Point 6: Russia and China. In February 2022, Putin visited Xi Jinping for the opening of the Beijing Olympics, where they issued a 5,000-word manifesto that effectively declared a new Cold War against the rules-based international order led by the United States and its allies and partners.

Three weeks later, Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine he had been telegraphing for months, brazenly defying the Biden administration’s threats to impose punishing sanctions, which the China-Russia partnership was well-prepared to undermine. China has progressively increased its purchases of Russian oil and expanded its sanctions-busting measures to keep Russia’s economy afloat, fund the war and provide dual-use systems, weapons parts and other “non-lethal” support that ends up killing Ukrainians.

Biden and NATO take justifiable pride in the quantity of “unprecedented” military aid they have provided Ukraine, which is eons ahead of what they did after Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine — that is, nothing — but far less than what Ukraine needs to eject the Russian invaders from its land. Meanwhile, Russia continues to wreak death, suffering and destruction as it seeks to obliterate Ukrainian civilization and identity in a national genocide.

Along the way, lesser, more localized tests of wills have occurred. In 2012, China seized Scarborough Shoals from the Philippines in violation of a U.S.-negotiated mutual withdrawal agreement. In 2015, Xi promised Obama China would not militarize the artificial islands it had illegally built in the South China Sea. In 2016, a United Nations arbitral tribunal rejected all of China’s expansive territorial claims, but no international enforcement followed.

The cumulative effect of these successive inflection points has been to strengthen the position of the West’s enemies and weaken the capacities and will of many in the West, though the final outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine hangs in the balance. If U.S. will to defend Taiwan remains as opaque as it is under the policy of strategic ambiguity, and as dilatory as it has been in helping Ukraine, China will continue to press its advantage until strategic miscalculation brings the world to perhaps the final inflection point.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA