BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY
CONTRIBUTING WRITER, The Japan Times

U.S. President Joe Biden has steadily deepened America’s involvement in what is now a war of attrition with Russia in Ukraine. The U.S. congressional approval, after months of wrenching debate, of a $95.3 billion foreign assistance package came after CIA Director Bill Burns warned that, without additional American aid, Ukraine could lose the war to Russia by this year-end.

The assistance package reflects the Biden administration’s skewed strategic priorities: It provides $60.8 billion to help sustain Ukraine’s war effort (with much of the funding going to U.S. defense contractors and the Pentagon), $26.4 billion for Israel and America’s supporting military operations in the Middle East and a stepmotherly $8.1 billion for Taiwan and other security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s center of gravity.

Strategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific are mounting, with China stepping up coercive pressures on Taiwan and pursuing aggressive tactics in the South and East China Seas. Meanwhile, the tense military standoff along the long Himalayan frontier between China and India — triggered by furtive Chinese encroachments — is entering its fifth year.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, after snuffing out Hong Kong’s autonomy and redrawing the geopolitical map of the South China Sea, appears to be preparing his country to unify Taiwan by force, although that self-governing island, for most of its history, had no relationship with China and has remained fully outside Chinese control for the last almost 130 years.

Under Xi, China has invested heavily in building up amphibious-assault and other sea power and missile capabilities to overwhelm Taiwan’s defenses and deter the U.S. from coming to its aid. Xi bluntly told Biden at their summit meeting last November that his regime will absorb Taiwan and that the only matter left to be decided is when to take over the island. And recently, Xi cautioned Biden during a phone conversation that Taiwan is “the first red line that must not be crossed in China-U.S. relations.”

One would expect the Biden administration to respond to the looming threat by strengthening deterrence, including urgently bolstering Taiwan’s defenses. Yet, there is a huge backlog in U.S. military sales to Taiwan, with weapons deals announced as long ago as 2017 still unfulfilled.

In fact, Biden is the third straight U.S. president to commit to shifting America’s primary strategic focus to Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific, a region central to the global balance of power and peace. Yet, as he nears the end of his term, Biden, too, has been unable to make that pivot, with U.S. attention and resources now focused squarely on the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

The congressional breakthrough on the security assistance package, after a monthslong logjam, will help to shore up Biden’s credibility when his leadership has been questioned on the global stage. But this likely will be a short-lived boost unless Biden uses his new political capital to persuade Europe to take a leadership role on Ukraine and get Israel to end its devastating war in Gaza, whose staggering human toll is also affecting America’s moral standing in the world.

The new Ukraine-related funding can become a significant political asset for Biden in his reelection campaign if he leverages it to push Moscow toward a peace deal, thereby yielding a cease-fire before November. If not, Biden could open himself to political attack at home for sinking tens of billions of additional tax dollars in an endless war that, by deflecting America’s attention away from the pressing Indo-Pacific challenges, is making Taiwan more vulnerable to Chinese aggression.

Indeed, without a peacemaking component, Washington’s new funding for Kyiv could take the pressure off European governments to step up and take primary responsibility for Ukraine.

Without a cease-fire effort, there is also the risk — given how Russia’s military-industrial complex is churning out new missiles and munitions at a frenetic pace — that Russian forces could triumph over Ukraine in a longer war of attrition, despite the fresh U.S. assistance package.

The Biden administration has already provided Ukraine more than $44 billion worth of weapons, maintenance, training and spare parts since the 2022 Russian invasion. Ukraine has also been receiving battlefield targeting data from Western powers.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has faced some flak for inadvertently exposing the role of Britain, France and possibly the U.S. in militarily helping direct attacks on Russian targets from Ukraine through “target control.” Scholz said that if Germany followed Britain and France in supplying Ukraine long-range missiles, it would make it a “participant in the war,” too.

Ukraine, however, is losing hope of regaining the 20% of its territory already occupied by Russia. The additional massive U.S. assistance of $60.8 billion may help Ukraine to stave off defeat but it is unlikely to dramatically reverse its fortunes. Indeed, the longer the war extends, the greater the devastation in Ukraine, making reconstruction very costly and onerous.

It would be in America’s own interest to encourage quiet, back-channel diplomacy to explore ways to bring about a cease-fire in a war that continues to have an adverse global impact, including through higher energy and food prices.

A long war could profoundly reshape America’s position in the world, especially by further emboldening its main rival, China, which, despite U.S. threats of punitive action, has become the principal contributor to strengthening the Russian military-industrial complex.

An extended Ukraine war could even formalize a Sino-Russian strategic axis while opening greater space for Xi to accomplish his “historic mission” of incorporating Taiwan.

The plain fact is that the more the U.S. has deepened its involvement in the proxy war against Russia, the more it has hamstrung its China policy, compelling the White House to pursue an approach that is now clearly more carrot than stick.

Faced with difficult choices, leveraging the latest $60.8 billion U.S. funding for Ukraine to bring Russia to the negotiating table is the least bad option for Biden. A cease-fire will create a frozen Ukraine conflict that will keep Moscow preoccupied while letting the U.S. focus less on Russia, the world’s most-sanctioned country, and more on a globally expansionist China.

Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”