Source: CGTN    Published: 2023-07-11

With his re-election campaign about to go into full swing, his ratings sagging and more than two-thirds of those polled thinking he is "too old for another term," the last thing President Joe Biden needs is a foreign policy disaster, but he is about to get one.

Since the start of his presidency, he has staked his foreign policy on uniting the world's democracies and Vilnius is about to put disunity on full display.

Hungary is likely to continue opposing Swedish membership in NATO. French President Emmanuel Macron has publicly opposed extending the remit of NATO to Asia to target China and given the economic gravity of China, he undoubtedly has silent supporters.

However, Biden's foreign policy disaster will involve the all-consuming issue of the day: Ukraine. Here, disagreements are so profound that it is no longer clear what the question is.

Is it Ukraine's immediate membership of NATO? That is not opposed just by Germany. Even President Biden, after months of dangling membership before Ukraine, now says he will not "make it easy" for Ukraine to join. He now says that the hapless country, which has squandered untold treasure and lives in war, and has lost vast territory and suffered practically irreparable damage to society and the land, will have to wait until after it has concluded a peace treaty before it can join.

The turnaround this represents for President Biden, who has insisted that the U.S. will back Ukraine "as long as it takes" to win against Russia, is bound to further set back his credibility at home and abroad.

How many of NATO's 31 members, all of whom will have to agree, are willing to induct a country whose borders will likely remain in dispute even if Ukraine is dragged back to the negotiating table and concludes a peace agreement with Russia?

Will the question finally boil down to little more than continuing the current levels of support for Ukraine? Even this is considerably less feasible than might appear at first glance. Billions in military aid to Ukraine have not only been controversial in the sending countries, but it has also tested supply capacities.

Ukraine has suffered enormous casualties. Despite this aid, Ukraine has failed to gain any significant ground (only Russian tactical retreats, as in the Kharkiv or Kherson regions, could be celebrated by the compliant Western media as gains), and Ukraine's failure to mount a spring offensive has produced a deafening battlefield silence.

In the circumstances, the long-standing game of full-throated rhetorical support for Ukraine may have reached an end. The U.S.'s promise to supply widely-banned cluster bombs to Ukraine is an instance of the sort of pass the West has reached.

To appreciate just how serious this is, consider the following. While many were surprised at President Biden's continuation of President Donald Trump's policies, it was a continuity with a difference. President Trump sought to pit the U.S. against China, uncaring of how much he alienated the U.S.'s traditional allies. President Biden has sought to rally the world's countries to the enterprise, beginning with the U.S.'s NATO allies.

As U.S. power weakened in the new century – its economic woes, its military failures, culminating in Afghanistan, and its loss of diplomatic influence, most recently manifest in the China-brokered reestablishment of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, between whom the U.S. has so long sought to fester hostilities – Europe increasingly asserted its autonomy from the U.S. As it has since German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, this assertion has taken the form of increasing closeness to Russia to support the region's industrial economies.

Biden's chief purpose in waging his proxy war on Russia has been to so resolutely sunder the Europe Union's relations with Russia that the EU will not have any chance but to go along with the U.S.'s aggression against China.

Unfortunately for President Biden, fortunately for Russia, China and the world, including Europe and likely even Ukraine, this enterprise is finally and unmistakably failing. The NATO Vilnius Summit can be expected to show that. The only unknowns are the form in which this failure will become manifest, and what will happen thereafter. Will the rest of Europe follow President Macron's unwillingness to target China? One can only hope so.

(Radhika Desai, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada.)