The stability of American foreign policy in terms of the containment strategy in relation to geopolitical rivals allows us to assert that the structural confrontation with Russia and China will continue regardless of the election results, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Andrey Sushentsov.
The 2024 US presidential campaign has seen a number of unprecedented events: a series of lawsuits against one candidate and relatives of another, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a campaign rally, and, finally, Joe Biden being forced out of the race by his own party’s activists. All this makes the election marathon exceptional.
The domestic political life of the US is “spilling over” onto the rest of the world — this is also connected with the growing discontent among the countries of the “world majority” with Washington’s intensive attempts to maintain its leadership. At the same time, one should not attach excessive importance to the results of these elections: both candidates have embraced the foreign policy strategy of American dominance.
The neoconservative group is still quite noticeable in the Republican Party, whose members’ worldview is built around the idea of force as the only instrument for maintaining US leadership. At the same time, such a worldview does not depend on personal attitudes or beliefs, but is a derivative of the place occupied in the political establishment. For example, Senator Joe Biden once put forward a large number of constructive initiatives during his tenure in Congress. Among other things, he was against the accession of the Baltic countries to NATO; once fellow party members even condemned Biden for his overly peaceful foreign policy line. However, once in the Oval Office, Biden began to successfully reproduce the usual American logic of global leadership. The defence budget under his administration broke all records set during recent decades. The stability of American foreign policy in terms of the containment strategy in relation to geopolitical rivals allows us to assert that the structural confrontation with Russia and China will continue regardless of the election results. The dynamics of this confrontation — in Ukraine and around Taiwan — will be determined by the military budget, a draft of which has already been developed and will be approved before the inauguration of the new president.
Against the backdrop of the election campaign, it is particularly interesting to see how much harsher the rhetoric has become, how it has become filled with catchy, populist initiatives. The headline-making plan of former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to achieve peace in Ukraine by force proposes, among other things, to quickly include Ukraine into NATO, so that “European allies bear the burden of its defence.” The result of such a scenario would be a direct military conflict between NATO and Russia and is therefore unlikely. Such statements, which do not demonstrate a systemic understanding of the situation, in principle do not necessarily have to be long-term ones. Their function is to mobilise the “hawks” in the establishment and the electorate in order to show that a forced escalation of the conflict is one of the possible scenarios. It should be noted that during his tenure as Secretary of State, Pompeo generally established himself as a person who made a series of resonant statements that did not result in large-scale action. Nevertheless, his quote should be kept in mind in the context of the fact that there is currently no political force in the United States that would consider the development of the Ukrainian crisis as an opportunity for reconciliation with Russia.
The conflict of interests between Washington and Kiev is noteworthy here. The Ukrainian government, well aware of the exhaustibility of its own resources, is feverishly trying to cling to any chance to remain at the top of the Western coalition’s priorities, often acting rather opportunistically, like in Russia’s Kursk region. Kiev hopes to force Western countries to directly take part in the conflict by offering them a visible military success. The Americans see this impulse from Ukraine, but they are not interested in such a scenario. The United States needs Ukraine as a proxy tool that they can use for as long as possible. Ukraine’s potential as an instrument of US foreign policy indicates that the US-Russian crisis will be long-term. The rising curve of the US defence budget will not change its trajectory regardless of the election results. Russian foreign policy and military planning is based on a scenario where military conditions and the strategic rivalry with the United States persist, regardless of who turns out to be the new American president.
