Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep.
This week, we’re closely monitoring the geopolitics of Taylor Swift’s world tour to see whether Singapore’s exclusive concert deal with the pop megastar would fuel wider tensions in Southeast Asia. (We hope not, but rest assured, we’ll report back if it does.)
All right, here’s what’s on tap for the day: A preview of President Joe Biden’s big State of the Union address, a new U.S. plan to build a port for humanitarian aid in Gaza, a German military leak that looks like a Russian influence operation, and more.
U.S. President Joe Biden will give his annual State of the Union address tonight, traditionally a rhetorical victory lap for the president to tout his accomplishments before Congress.
This will be his fourth, and potentially last, such address, depending on how elections go in November. In last year’s State of the Union, Biden largely skirted foreign-policy issues, but that’s unlikely to happen this time, experts and administration insiders told Foreign Policy.
Threading the needle. The White House is deeply involved in supporting not one but two major foreign wars that have drawn in the bulk of Washington’s attention and resources abroad—Ukraine’s war with Russia and the Israel-Hamas war—and Congress is muddling through a monthslong blockade on billions of dollars of new national security funding to address them. All the while, competition with Washington’s global geopolitical rival, China, looms in the background, along with the threat that it could invade neighboring Taiwan in the coming years.
It’s going to be hard for Biden to thread the needle on this year’s State of the Union: He has to dive deep into top policy issues, but not too deep, cover a wide range of domestic and foreign affairs, but not too widely given the limited time, and address a deeply divided Congress defined by hyperpartisanship, gridlock, and far-right antipathy toward the president in a high-stakes election year.
Congress has hit a wall on a $118 billion funding package for national security, including some $60 billion for Ukraine, due to opposition from a small flank of far-right Republicans in the House. Western defense officials and Ukrainian officials warn that the situation on the front lines is desperate now and could turn in Russia’s favor without further U.S. aid. That argument has failed to sway the far-right flank of the GOP.
A port in a storm. But the right side of Congress won’t be Biden’s only challenge. He has also faced anger and frustration from the progressive flank of the Democratic Party over his continued support for Israel in its controversial war against Hamas, which has turned Gaza into the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Progressive foreign-policy experts told SitRep that some progressive Democratic members will wear pins with the word “ceasefire” on them, reflecting their anger that Biden has not used U.S. leverage on Israel to push for such a halt to the fighting in Gaza to end the humanitarian catastrophe.
More than a dozen family members of Israeli hostages still trapped in Gaza will be at the U.S. Capitol to attend Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday night, as well as at least one former hostage who was freed from captivity.
Biden is expected to address the mounting criticisms over the dire situation in Gaza by announcing during his speech that the United States will construct a temporary port in Gaza to deliver relief supplies, several administration officials said. The plan would entail delivering supplies from Cyprus using U.S. military engineers operating from ships off the coast of the Gaza Strip, and would not require U.S. troops to be deployed to Gaza, the officials said.
Campaign concerns. Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman and Obama-era diplomat, told SitRep that Biden would do well to play up foreign policy in his speech to draw a distinction between him and his presidential campaign rival, Donald Trump. (Malinowski knows a thing or two about these addresses—he used to help write State of the Union speeches while serving on the National Security Council under former U.S. President Bill Clinton.)
“I would be arguing, if I had the job I used to have, that if you’re running against a guy who may want to pull America out of NATO and just encouraged Russia to invade Europe, you might want to make national security a pretty important part of the speech for substantive and political reasons.”
The president traditionally leads or ends with the (now somewhat tired) refrain: “The State of our union is strong,” and then holds for applause, but it’s going to be a challenge for Biden to convince the American people of that this year. A new CBS News poll found that 61 percent of Americans described the state of the union as “divided” and 45 percent as “declining.” Only 15 percent described it as “strong.”
Experts on the right are unforgiving about Biden’s foreign-policy record, Carrie Filipetti, the head of the conservative foreign-policy group the Vandenberg Coalition, told us.
“Considering America is now facing a major war in Europe, a major war in the Middle East, a likely major war in Asia, a nearly entirely open border, and the threat of a military conflict between Venezuela and Guyana in the Western Hemisphere, I would say—no, President Biden doesn’t have many foreign policy successes to tout,” she said.
(The U.S.-Mexico border is more fortified than ever before, but an ongoing humanitarian crisis caused by an increase in migrants trying to enter the United States has become a major political issue for Biden.)
Nikki Haley has officially dropped out of the presidential race after losing 14 out of 15 Super Tuesday primaries to former U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this week. She did not immediately endorse Trump, who is now in pole position to reclaim the Republican presidential nomination (not that he wasn’t already).
Rep. Dean Phillips is also dropping out of the presidential race on the Democratic side. He has since endorsed Biden’s bid for a second term.
Breaking late last Thursday, Biden tapped several new nominees for key foreign-policy roles. Dana Banks, the former senior director for Africa on the National Security Council, is Biden’s choice to be the U.S. director of the African Development Bank. Biden has nominated Elizabeth Horst as the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka, Joshua Harris as the U.S. ambassador to Algeria, Troy Fitrell as the U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, and Mary Daschbach as U.S. ambassador to Togo. All are career foreign service officers.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has tapped former military chief Valery Zaluzhny, to be the country’s next ambassador to the United Kingdom, as the Kyiv Independent reports.
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Taurusgate. Pro tip: If you’re a senior Western military commander needing to talk about sensitive arms transfers to Ukraine, maybe hold the chatter until you’re on a secure line. Because the Russians are always eager to listen. That’s the lesson from a scandal that erupted this week when leaked audio of high-ranking German Air Force officers discussing the merits of sending Taurus long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine ended up on Russian state media.
It turns out that one of the German officers joined the call via an unsecured line in a Singapore hotel. He and other European officials were in town to attend the Singapore Airshow, making unsecured communications in the various local hotels a potential gold mine for any nosy Russian intelligence officers who happened to be listening in.
The leak, experts say, looks like a vintage Russian influence operation. “For the Russians, this is a moment of joy,” said Alina Polyakova, the head of the Center for European Policy Analysis. “This seems to me like a very clear Russian influence operation, a hack and leak. They’ve done this many times.”
The scandal posed yet another embarrassing setback for Germany as it faces pressure from other NATO members to ramp up its military support for Ukraine.
Come Gantz With Me. Top officials in Washington and London lined up to meet with Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, this week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reported to be livid about the trip by his political rival, but despite this, Gantz’s itinerary made for an impressive roll call, including U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretaries of Defense and State Lloyd Austin and Anthony Blinken, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In London, Gantz met with the British Foreign Secretary David Cameron; the country’s national security advisor, Tim Barrow; and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
The roster of officials meeting with Gantz, who is widely regarded as the most likely candidate to unseat Netanyahu, demonstrated a thinly veiled rebuke of the Israeli prime minister, who has frustrated Western allies over the brutality of the war in Gaza and the throttling of aid into the besieged territory.
Done deal. Blinken and Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom met today to formally bring Sweden into NATO. It’s a historic moment for the Scandinavian country, which has now ended two centuries of nonalignment in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In a ceremony at the State Department on Thursday, Blinken presented Billstrom with the Washington Treaty—NATO’s founding document—for Sweden’s signature to make adding a 32nd member to the alliance official. (For more reading on this, check out Jack’s deep dive on how Sweden has made the most of sitting in NATO’s waiting room.)
Out of luck. The State Department’s special immigrant visa program that resettled thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. military during its two-decade war in Afghanistan appears to be headed toward a standstill. Reuters reports that the State Department is expected to hit its congressionally mandated limit of 38,500 special immigration visas by the August anniversary of the 2021 U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Congress is not expected to approve Biden’s request to issue more. That could leave hundreds of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S.-led war efforts stranded in the Taliban-controlled country or other countries that they managed to flee to.
Friday, March 8: Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban are set for a meeting at the former U.S. president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Blinken is set to meet with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan in Washington.
Sunday, March 10: Portugal is set to hold early parliamentary elections. The Academy Awards take place at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles.
Monday, March 11: Four-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a pandemic. Biden is due to submit his annual budget to Congress.
Tuesday, March 12: Biden is set to meet Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Andrzej Duda at the White House.
“We are definitely approaching a moment in our Europe where there will be no place for cowards.”
—French President Emmanuel Macron, appearing to double down on the possibility that NATO troops could be deployed on Ukrainian soil.
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