The past few weeks have shown how difficult some of them will be.
Mr Biden was undermined by Saudi Arabia, which he visited over the summer, when the kingdom led a move within OPEC last week to cut oil production after he was told that he would increase it. The OPEC decision contributes to inflation and also helps Russia finance the war in Ukraine. Mr Biden said on Tuesday he would reconsider his relationship with the Saudis and make them pay a price.
China’s cooperation on climate issues has all but stopped; “strategic stability” talks with Russia on limiting nuclear arsenals have ended.
“Russia now poses an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and stability,” the document says, a sharp break from decades of strategies that sought to integrate Russia and the West. “This is not a fight between the West and Russia. These are the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter, to which Russia is a party, in particular respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and the prohibition of acquiring territory by war.
Mr Putin clearly sees things differently: he says Ukraine has always been part of Russia, back in the days of the czars, and has described that moment as driven by the West’s efforts to contain and starve power Russian.
But what emerges from the pages of Mr. Biden’s strategy, which was drafted by the National Security Council with input from the entire administration, is a relentless focus on China. It was also the theme of a speech this week by Jeremy Fleming, the head of Britain’s cyber and signals intelligence agency.
Much of the military strategy outlined in the administration document is aimed at countering China in space, cyberspace and at sea – all of which require different hardware, different strategies and different talents than those containing the Russia. It outlines a more aggressive U.S. effort to bolster cybersecurity and urges working with allies and the private sector to “resist attempts to degrade our shared technological advances” by limiting Chinese and other investments in the United States and controlling exports of key technologies to China.
Some critics of the strategy worry that it is not moving fast enough. “China’s plans for Taiwan are centered around 2027,” Kori Schake, who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview. “The budget does not envisage modernization at this speed.”