Under the new structure, the domain of the Indian-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell, will grow, while the board overseen by Brett McGurk, coordinator in the Middle East, will be more limited, several current and former officials have said.
The changes are essentially the structure of the Obama-era NSC, where the board in the Middle East was much larger than it is now and the Asia portfolio was managed by a handful of junior staff members. In Obama’s second term, there was an onslaught on national security threats and priorities stemming from the Middle East, from the Islamic State and Iran’s nuclear power to the Libyan and Syrian conflict and the consequent migration crisis in Europe.
But Biden and his team now believe the biggest security challenges will stem from the so-called superpower competition between the US, China and Russia, say the current and former national security officials, and shift their resources accordingly.
“What we have seen over the last few years is that China is becoming more authoritarian at home and more assertive abroad,” White House Press Minister Jen Psaki said on Monday. And Beijing is challenging our security, prosperity and values in key ways that require a new American approach. ‘
Biden’s team also wants to avoid another swamp in the Middle East and strengthen the core ties in Asia and Europe, which they say have been neglected or destroyed under former President Donald Trump, current and former officials have noted.
“Given the structure of the NSC staff, I think they are pretty determined to stick to their affirmative priorities instead of being sucked into the Middle East,” a former Obama official said. Sullivan’s professional credo – which makes foreign policy work for the American middle class – is also a factor, given the enormous interests that the US and Asia have in each other’s economic prosperity.
“The transfer of policy resources from the Middle East to Asia is a better reflection of America’s economic reality,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a Middle East expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Asia policy is directly relevant to American farmers, corporations and technology enterprises in a way that is not the Middle East, especially not considering America’s domestic energy sources,” Sadjadpour noted. “After two painful decades in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is also little bilateral support for more in the Middle East.”
The new priorities are evident from the initial outreach of the Biden team to key European and Asian allies. Sullivan’s first calls, a day after Biden’s inauguration, were, according to his readers, with his counterparts in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan, and he also spoke with the South Korean national security adviser. Biden’s first calls were to the leaders of Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom, and he spoke to Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga this week (he also made a loyal call to Russian President Vladimir Putin). While Sullivan has been talking to peers in Afghanistan and Israel, Biden has yet to reach out to the countries’ leaders, according to a White House review.
As it stands now, the Middle East portfolio will be handled by McGurk and one senior director under him, Barbara Leaf. The Indo-Pacific portfolio overseen by Campbell now has three senior directors – Laura Rosenberger as senior director for China, Sumona Guha as senior director for South Asia, and Andrea Kendall-Taylor as senior director for Russia and Central -Asia. At the Obama NSC, the China portfolio was not at the level of ‘senior director’, and the Asia portfolio did not have an overarching coordinator, a former official said.
“This is basically a continuation of the pivot of Asia without perhaps saying so much in public,” the former Obama official said, referring to the new NSC’s expansion of the portfolio in Asia.
In 2011, Obama publicly stated that he had instructed his national security team “to make our presence and missions in the Asia-Pacific a top priority”, as he indicated that the United States was focusing on Europe and the Middle East must rebalance. after failing to confront China’s rapid increase. The move became known as the “pivot to Asia” following the statement by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the US was “at a pivot” as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weakened.
Campbell, who is now the leader of the Indo-Pacific portfolio, was a key driver for the new strategy as Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and the Pacific during the Obama administration. But its success was mixed, and it was viewed skeptically by the Middle East and European allies.
The former official said the silent restructuring – without fanfare or grand proclamations of a new foreign policy – therefore seemed deliberate. “We saw the reaction when Obama spoke in public about the ‘pivot to Asia,'” he said. ‘We probably got less credit in Asia than setbacks in the Middle East. It’s better to just do it than to just talk about it. ”
The apparent shift is not just limited to the NSC. Asian experts are being sown in the new administration, including at the Department of Defense, where Biden’s former assistant Ely Ratner has been named chief defense adviser, Lloyd Austin, over China and Kelly Magsamen, who serves as chief deputy served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia and Pacific Security Affairs until 2017, was named Austin Chief of Staff.
Austin, a former commander of Centcom, is well aware that the Biden government wants to shift the emphasis from the Pentagon to the east. “Globally, I understand that Asia should be the focus of our effort,” Austin said during his confirmation hearing. “China presents the most important threat going forward as China rises.”
One of Austin’s first steps in his new job was to install three special advisers on key issues – China, the Covid-19 pandemic and climate. The Middle East in particular was absent.
At the State Department, Asia-Pacific expert Mira Rapp-Hooper was installed as senior adviser to China in policy planning and at the United Nations, Jeffrey Prescott, who served as deputy national security adviser and senior adviser to Asia for then-vice president Biden, has been appointed deputy ambassador.
The heightened emphasis on Asia comes after a presidential campaign in 2020 in which China featured a lot, with both Trump and Biden considering each other about who would be more difficult with Beijing.
“China is a special challenge,” Biden wrote in a headline for Foreign Policy magazine last year about how he would “save” US foreign policy after Trump. “I have spent many hours with his leaders and I understand what we are facing.”
However, there is only so much that Biden can control. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for example, did not anticipate the war in Iraq or the Arab Spring when they set out their foreign policy priorities for the first term.
“Every foreign policy agenda starts with a pivot to Asia and ends with divots in the Middle East,” one foreign policy expert noted. ‘You may not be interested in war, but war is in you. It’s not surprising to me that this is how they start, but things are almost unpredictable. ”