The Pitfalls of Biden's Partnership Proliferation

Some of Biden’s most high-profile agreements among allies have been built on shaky foundations.

Stephen Walt criticizes the Biden administration’s version of “Pactomania”:

Even when states are united by a shared perception of threats, however, the ultimate value of the partnership depends in part on whether the members agree on a common strategy and are willing to share the burdens appropriately. Adding weak and vulnerable members to an alliance may not strengthen it, and long-standing partnerships become less effective if some members let their own military capabilities languish. When this happens, Uncle Sucker ends up bearing an excessive burden, and the partnership’s ability to achieve its stated goals will be jeopardized.

Indeed, in today’s world, what U.S. officials like to call “alliances” or “security partnerships” are more like protectorates. In many cases, the United States has agreed to defend weak and vulnerable countries that can’t do much to help the United States no matter how much they might want to. Such arrangements may still be useful if the country in question is in a critical location or controls other valuable assets, but that determination needs to be made on a case-by-case basis and in an unsentimental and hard-headed way.

Walt is right about all that. There are a couple more reasons to worry about the further proliferation of partnerships and would-be alliances under Biden. The first is that the U.S. is already overstretched with the commitments that it currently has, so taking on more is an invitation for trouble and failure. As Walt says, “The more commitments you have, the harder it is to honor them all,” and sooner or later the U.S. will not have the bandwidth and resources to make good on all its promises. Now is the time to start pruning and reducing outdated and unnecessary commitments instead of inventing new excuses to expand on existing ones. Biden is going in the opposite direction.

The other danger is that some of Biden’s most high-profile agreements among allies have been built on shaky foundations. The trilateral summit with South Korea and Japan that the U.S. touted as a significant upgrading of the relationships with both allies was made possible by the unilateral and unpopular actions of the South Korean president. The political opposition in South Korea is strongly against what Yoon did (the opposition leader has even gone on a hunger strike to protest Yoon’s leadership on this and other issues), and Yoon’s attempt to force rapprochement with Japan will likely be undone by his successor. The closer trilateral cooperation that the U.S. hoped to institutionalize could evaporate in just a few years because the underlying disputes between South Korea and Japan have only been papered over and not seriously addressed. Dylan Stent offered a blunt assessment last month: “Any trilateral agreement will be torn to shreds and discarded when the Korean left makes it into office, whether in 2027 or later in the future.” 

At the same time, the current South Korean government has become increasingly illiberal in its treatment of the press and other critics. E. Tammy Kim writes:

Yoon has since intensified his attacks on the press. In May, police raided the home of Im Hyeon-ju, the MBC journalist who reported the hot-mike comment. (Her alleged offense, this time, was forwarding personal information about South Korea’s justice minister to another journalist.) Earlier this month, prosecutors searched and confiscated materials from the offices of the investigative outlet Newstapa and the TV network JTBC, and from the homes of several journalists. The stated reason was again criminal defamation of Yoon. In early 2022, Newstapa had reported on the existence of a recorded interview in which a source alleges that Yoon, then a high-ranking prosecutor, covered up a banking and real-estate scheme. Yoon called this interview fake news—claiming the tape may have been manipulated—and accused Newstapa and JTBC of circulating it just before the Presidential election to undermine his campaign. The Journalists Association of Korea and other media groups compared the recent raids to a “military operation” and condemned the ruling party’s disregard for “the rule of law.”

The Biden administration has tied itself and its ambitions in East Asia to an erratic, unpopular leader with authoritarian tendencies. That’s probably not going to work out very well for the administration’s plans.

AUKUS was one of the first big initiatives of Biden’s presidency. At first glance, the arrangement seems to have solid political backing in the U.K. and Australia, but the nuclear-powered submarine component is proving to be quite controversial in Australia and there is growing opposition to both AUKUS and the closer relationship with the U.S. that it requires. As I noted in my review of Sam Roggeveen’s The Echidna Strategy, AUKUS faces a lot of criticism because of its cost and its implications for Australian sovereignty, but another big problem is that it isn’t really necessary for Australian security. Roggeveen writes:

Australia is embarking on its largest ever defence contract so that it can take the fight to China, yet there is no obvious reason to do so, and nobody asked us to do so. In the process, we will make Australia less secure because we give China a reason to take a more aggressive position towards us, and because we tie ourselves to a defence partner that is becoming increasingly unreliable.

In both cases, the Biden administration has jumped at the chances to establish closer ties with allies, but there is a great deal of political uncertainty about whether key members of these agreements will still support them in the near future. AUKUS is such a slow, long-term, and expensive project that there will be plenty of opportunities for Australia to have second thoughts. There are already a lot of Australians that don’t like the direction their country is going with AUKUS, and that number will likely increase over time.

In the Middle East, the administration’s big idea is to bribe the Saudis with U.S. guarantees to get them to grant recognition to Israel. This remains a long shot gamble that may lead to nothing, but it’s a really terrible gamble because the U.S. ends up losing even if it “works.” The administration’s ambition is to add more commitments and liabilities in a region where the U.S. has already wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in fruitless conflicts, and all so that two of its bad clients can make their clandestine cooperation public and official. This goes beyond being Uncle Sucker. At least a sucker is supposed to be clueless that he is being fleeced, but in this case the mark is eagerly offering up his money and begging to be taken to the cleaners.

What all of these initiatives have in common is that they are unnecessary for the security of the states involved. One of the reasons why the first two are so vulnerable to being upended is that there is significant disagreement in one of the critical partner states about whether these partnerships are worth the costs. The third also faces major obstacles because the costs for the U.S. are unacceptably high. If these initiatives end up falling apart or don’t get off the ground, it won’t put these states in greater danger, but it will be embarrassing for the administration that invested so much time, energy, and prestige into them.