While the U.S. is not at war, it is now a primary supporter of two nations in major wars, making Biden a two-war president. Indeed, he is the first president to ever visit two active war zones. While former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama each visited Iraq and Afghanistan while U.S. troops were still involved in counterinsurgency operations, they stayed within environments controlled by U.S. troops. The situations in both Ukraine and Israel are more precarious; Biden was putting himself in harm’s way, within range of hostile missile strikes in both countries.

In some ways, Biden might be the most-qualified president ever to hold office during a time of international global crisis. His foreign policy experience is extensive. As a senator, he served for 12 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, twice as the committee’s chair. While serving as vice president under Obama, he took the lead on foreign policy issues ranging from relations with Ukraine to the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Such experience likely underpins his confidence that the U.S. can do it all: support both Ukraine and Israel at war, contain China, thwart Iran, regulate and secure the U.S. border and address a host of other security crises now facing the world. When asked by the “60 Minutes”news programon Oct. 15 whether supporting wars in Ukraine and Israel was more than the U.S. can take on at one time, Biden forcefully responded, “We’re the United States of America, for God’s sake! The most powerful nation in the history of the world!”

Despite his confidence, however, the current situation may be too much even for Biden to handle. Not because he doesn’t have a grasp on the diplomatic nuances and decision-making necessary to handle international crises, but because of domestic politics. This is most evident with respect to ensuring the proverbial “sinew of war”: money.

Simply put, it’s not clear that Biden can secure the funding needed to support both war efforts. The U.S. already provides Israel with a lot of military aid and has long done so. It is also providing significant aid to Ukraine. Now Biden is asking for more for both.

In relative terms, the amounts are trivial. For a country with a $6.3 trillion federal budget last year, what’s a few billion dollars more? As U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet recently asserted, the U.S. can “absolutely afford” to support Ukraine and Israel. But war financing for a major power isn’t just about accounting and the bottom line. It’s also—even mostly—about politics. And the politics in Washington right now are not looking good.

The House of Representatives’ Republican majority only just managed to select a new speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson, after several weeks of chaos and paralysis. While Johnson had stated his intention of bringing Biden’s requested aid package to the House floor, he has since suggested they should be addressed separately. In any case, it’s unlikely that he’ll seek bipartisan compromises to make sure the legislation passes.

This puts funding for Ukraine especially at risk. With few exceptions, support for Israel in its war is likely to continue no matter who is in office. Indeed, Republicans are highly supportive of Israel, and aid to it stretches back decades and across both Republican and Democratic administrations.

But assistance to Ukraine is more recent and more controversial. Recall that former President Donald Trump infamously threatened to withhold aid to Kyiv while in office, when Ukraine was fighting a low-intensity war against Russian-backed separatist forces in the east. Following Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Biden made support to Kyiv the central pillar of his foreign policy. For better or for worse, assistance to Ukraine is associated with Biden.

On the one hand, this is good news for Ukraine. Even if Congress doesn’t authorize new funds, Biden can draw on other resources to make good on his promise, just as Trump did to build his wall along the U.S. southern border. On the other hand, there is potentially long-term bad news for Ukraine. Because U.S. support for Ukraine is now squarely associated with Biden as his signature foreign policy achievement to date, it makes it a partisan issue, one that Republicans might use against him when he seeks reelection next year.

To be clear, Ukraine won’t become a political football if Biden faces a relatively moderate Republican in 2024, such as Mike Pence and Nikki Halley. They too support aiding Ukraine against Russia. But that’s not the case with the far-right MAGA Republicans. The current front-runner for the Republican nomination—Mr. MAGA himself, Trump—is opposed to further aid to Ukraine. The same is true of other Republican candidates who lean further to the right, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. As the Republican nominee, both Trump and Desantis would likely emphasize on the campaign trail that Biden’s support to Ukraine harms U.S. interests by diverting resources from other foreign policy priorities, such as supporting Israel, or domestic needs, such as protecting the U.S. border. As Trump asserted at a Save America PAC event last May, “The Democrats are sending another $40 billion to Ukraine, yet America’s parents are struggling to even feed their children.”

There is much concern within the U.S. foreign policy establishment that the current confluence of conflicts might be stretching the U.S. beyond its capacity to respond. Indeed, some of the initial munitions given to Israel following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas actually came from stockpiles originally earmarked for Ukraine.

Then there’s the human factor. As former Defense Secretary Bob Gates recently told Axios, “There’s this gigantic funnel that sits over the table in the Situation Room. And all the problems in the world end up coming through that funnel to the same eight or 10 people. There’s a limit to the bandwidth those eight or 10 people can have.”

One of those people is Biden. Again, if there is a president who can handle multiple international crises at once it is him. But even Biden will find it too much to handle without money.

***Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/us-foreign-policy-biden/