Lost Authority: US allies losing respect for Biden’s approach to escalation management

America's allies believe the Biden administration's credibility is deteriorating on the world stage and it has lost control of escalation management in conflict zones, namely the Middle East and Ukraine. This Washington Examiner series, Lost Authority , will look at the reasons why.

In the hours after Russia launched more than 200 missiles and drones at targets across Ukraine , officials in Kyiv assessed the damage — and vented about President Joe Biden ’s restrictions on the use of U.S. weapons to hit Russian military targets beyond the range of Ukrainian weapons.

“So they're allowed to use their territory … to shell us, and we're not allowed to hit these sources of the shelling,” Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian parliament, told the Washington Examiner. “It's ludicrous. It's absurd, from the point of view of logic, not only from the point of view of military necessity.”

U.S. officials have aimed to aid Ukraine without provoking Russia, a sliding calibration that prevents the use of ATACMs beyond a given distance from Ukrainian borders — a range that leaves key Russian bases shielded from the most effective attacks. Yet deference to U.S. risk calculations is eroding — and not only in Kyiv. A group of officials from a NATO member held a recent discussion about how to respond to a hypothetical attack from Russia.

“We are allies, but our strategy is basically that, if we will be hit, we will hit back as deeply into Russia as possible,” a senior European official who participated in a recent internal strategy discussion told the Washington Examiner. “And we are not asking whether Washington is thinking it's escalatory or not.”

Within NATO, this disenchantment for U.S. risk assessments remains a prospective problem in the sense that Russian President Vladimir Putin, with his forces mired in a war that he expected to win within days, is not in a position to mount a war against NATO. At least, he won’t be for another five or so years, if German defense officials are correct. And the allies closest to Russia regard the outcome of the war in Ukraine as a key indicator of the likelihood that Russia will renew its ominous strength and a signal also of how U.S. strategists might respond to that threat.

“Now, if you look at this from a Baltic perspective, for instance, well the writing is on the wall. … ‘OK, we're part of NATO, but under certain circumstances, maybe there are more important things to worry about than just the populations of three tiny Baltic states?'” Janis Kazocins , who retired as a general from the British army before ending his government career as national security adviser to the Latvian president from 2016 to 2023, told the Washington Examiner.

For two embattled U.S. allies and partners, however, Israel and Ukraine, the consequences of these calculations feel immediate and painful. And a series of recent, high-profile operations in their respective wars point to an erosion of the respect that Biden’s team can command when it comes to deciding what kinds of military operations would bring too much risk that the conflict will expand, and thus endanger U.S. forces and interests.

“If the U.S. puts itself in a defensive and nonescalatory position, that affects everybody else's calculus,” former Ambassador Kurt Volker, whose diplomatic career includes a stint as the ambassador to NATO and special representative for Ukraine, told the Washington Examiner. “In the case of Israel, it’s, ‘We're going to have to do this on our own.’ ... [For] the Ukrainians, it’s, ‘We have to be careful not to piss the U.S. off too much because we really do depend on their weapons supply, so we have to be careful, but at the same time, if we listen to the U.S., we’ll be defeated. … So we have to do things, but do them carefully.'”

Those dynamics have come to the fore in dramatic fashion in both theaters: the twin assassinations of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh during a trip to Tehran and a senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr in Beirut, followed just days later by the stunning surge of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of Russia — an operation that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged was kept quiet in order to avoid the kinds of objections that have thwarted his appeals for unrestricted use of long-range U.S. missiles.

“Putin remains true to himself ... a sick creature. This has long been clear to everyone,” Zelensky said Monday, before issuing a sharp rebuke of Western officials. “But it is also clear that he can only do what the world allows him to do. Weaknesses and lack of decisions in response feed terror. ... The United States, the United Kingdom, France, and other partners have the power to help us stop terror. We need decisions.”

In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, confronted with a grinding multifront war and an Israeli populace outraged by his approach to ceasefire and hostage negotiations, reportedly angered Biden by authorizing the assassinations of Haniyeh and Shukr.

Setting aside Washington’s frustration, Netanyahu has emphasized that Israeli forces can “hit the soft underbelly of our enemies” at will and stand ready to “prove it again even more vigorously,” as he put it last week during a visit to an air base in northern Israel. Netanyahu’s defiance of Biden is partly a political calculation, another European official suggested, but only partly.

“He believes … his political life will be longer than Biden's political life,” said the second European official, who is based in Israel. “This is something where Netanyahu has different ideas … something that the U.S. administration sees [as] escalatory, for Israelis, they just have different interpretations. So probably for them, the assassination of Haniyeh was probably smart and not escalatory.”

An analogous dispute has unfolded within NATO in recent years, where the allies most concerned about threats from Russia disagree substantially with U.S. and Western approaches to managing risk. And it’s the nature of the dispute that each side tends to regard the other’s strategic instincts as a driver of the risk.

“We're extremely risk-averse,” another senior European official said. “We may have a different view to some others on how the dynamics of this war function … not because we're not being risk-averse. It's extremely risky to lose wars in Europe.”

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The real question, for these allies, does not center on whether the Biden team is in control of escalation management.

“I would turn it around: The U.S. has lost control of Iran, North Korea, Russia,” the first senior European official said. “Their deterrence has not worked. And then the ones who suffered needed to take certain actions. ... Definitely something had happened with U.S. credibility that those rogue states started to test the leader of the wolf band.”