OPINION:
The US under Joe Biden is in irreversible decline and has lost its will to power. That, in essence, is the Chinese government's view of America today. China's diplomats no longer camouflage their contempt for American "malaise". Judging by his military strutting on the Ukrainian border, Russian president Vladimir Putin shares that perspective. Both Beijing and Moscow see America's exhaustion as a chance to settle unfinished business — in the South China Sea and in former Soviet territory. They may be dangerously misjudging America's capacity to change its mood.
The US public turned against overseas militarism when the Iraq war began to go wrong under George W Bush. It has stayed that way ever since. Fifteen years on, it is easy to presume American "non-interventionism" has become the settled view of its people. But US history — and common sense — suggests that the climate can switch rapidly from cold to hot when confronted with new facts. Think of what happened after 9/11. Now imagine hordes of Ukrainians fleeing as Russian tanks churn up their towns this winter.
America has been expensively misjudged before. In 1950, North Korea misread the US secretary of state, Dean Acheson, when he omitted South Korea from a map of America's "defensive perimeter" in Asia. Three years of bloody fighting ensued on the Korean peninsula. April Glaspie, US ambassador to Iraq in 1990, told Saddam Hussein that America had no opinion on "Arab-Arab conflicts" as divisions amassed on Iraq's border with Kuwait. Within three months of Kuwait's occupation, the US assembled a several hundred thousand-strong force in Saudi Arabia.
In 1999, Serbia's leader, Slobodan Milosevic, bet that Nato unity would collapse after a few days of air strikes on his country. Seventy-eight days later he conceded Kosovo's independence. Even 9/11 was a misjudgement. Papers retrieved from Osama bin Laden's final redoubt showed that he thought the 2001 terrorist attacks would trigger America's exit from the Muslim world. We know what happened.