| Summary/Abstract |
The Biden administration came into o*ce with a clear and
unambiguous foreign policy priority: countering a rising
China. The administration’s public statements, its early national security planning documents, and its initial diplomatic forays
have all suggested that pushing back against Beijing’s growing global
in+uence will be Washington’s national security focus, alongside
transnational threats such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. The question ofhow to deal with Russia, by contrast, has taken
a back seat, returning to the fore only when Russian troops amassed
on Ukraine’s border in April. That crisis served as a reminder ofthe
danger oflooking past Moscow—yet by July, President Joe Biden was
back to declaring that Russia was “sitting on top ofan economy that
has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else.”
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