The Biden administration took office intending to inject strategic focus into U.S. foreign policy. The president and his team promised to end the United States’ forever wars and make the country’s international engagements serve the needs of a disaffected public. In its first year, the administration terminated the two-decade-old war in Afghanistan, pledged to “right-size” the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, and even pursued a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia. By placing less emphasis on certain regions, the logic went, Washington could concentrate on what most affects U.S. interests: managing competition with China and tackling transnational threats such as climate change and pandemics.

Today that vision lies in tatters. The United States is now immersed in multiple wars in Europe and the Middle East, precisely where the administration sought to keep things quiet. Meanwhile, relations with China and Russia have deteriorated so strikingly as to raise the realistic prospect of the first major-power conflict since 1945.

One can hardly blame U.S. policymakers for the turmoil. It was Russian President Vladimir Putin who decided to invade Ukraine in 2022, and Hamas that chose to attack Israel in 2023. No one had a crystal ball to predict these shocking actions years in advance. Yet American officials bear responsibility for making a failed wager of their own. They hoped entire regions of the world would sit still because they preferred to turn their gaze elsewhere, even as the United States remained ensconced in those regions’ security arrangements. The Biden administration wanted to prioritize what in its view mattered most while declining to disentangle the United States from what mattered less.

This is a form of wishful thinking—perhaps as naïve as invading countries to liberate them—and ought to be recognized as such. The Biden administration is not the first to indulge in it. The rationale for American global dominance after the Cold War, as articulated by the Pentagon in 1992, was that by maintaining military primacy in most world regions, the United States would suppress competition among other countries, dissuade challengers from emerging, and keep the peace at a reasonable cost to Americans. But the unipolar era is over. Going forward, the United States’ options are stark: it can selectively retrench and control costs and risks, or it can stick with global primacy and lurch from crisis to crisis.

From his inauguration through the autumn of 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden appeared to consider pulling U.S. forces back from the Middle East and possibly elsewhere. He initially directed the Defense Department to review the United States’ global force posture and align it with the priorities defined by the White House. Then, in August 2021, he ended the war in Afghanistan. Yet specific circumstances had largely forced Biden’s hand: along with an agreement reached by his predecessor to withdraw from the country, he inherited so few troops there that he would have had to escalate the failing and unpopular war effort if he did not pull out. By November, the Pentagon had announced that the U.S. force posture, having been duly reviewed, was basically correct.

Ever since, the Biden administration has avoided making structural reductions to any portion of U.S. global primacy—to the political objectives, defense commitments, and military positions that Washington has accumulated over eight decades. At the same time, it has continued to try to set priorities, privileging security requirements in the Indo-Pacific above those in Europe and the Middle East. In its National Security Strategy, released in October 2022, the terms “priority,” “priorities,” and “prioritize” appear 23 times, even as the United States’ globe-spanning alliances and partnerships are described as “our most important strategic asset,” tantamount to ends in themselves. In essence, the administration wished to keep certain regions off the president’s desk while remaining the paramount security actor in those same places.

There are two possible ways to make sure low-priority regions stay that way, absent any changes to U.S. objectives, commitments, or positions. First, the United States could employ deft diplomacy to accommodate the grievances of actors such as Iran and Russia that seek to revise the status........

© Foreign Affairs