“We’re back in the game,” says Joe Biden, a president who cannot take his dog for a walk without falling over it and twisting his ankle. He will lose his footing in the first foreign-policy crisis that comes along.
A SUCCESSFUL foreign policy begins at home. So does an unsuccessful one. Older readers may recall the days when American foreign policy represented a stable, shared understanding of the national interest, but American foreign policy has now polarized into two foreign policies: two sets of irreconcilable attitudes, each treating the world as a stage for the enactment of domestic partisan differences, one leg kicking away at the other. Since 2008, Americans have launched themselves into one of their periodic recastings of their society. After Barack Obama and Donald Trump, two varieties of hope and change, just about everyone’s nerves are frayed. Domestically, the Biden-Harris administration should recognize that it was elected as a kind of half-time breather to give the public a break from politics, that it did not win in a “blue wave,” and that the right response is to encourage a national cool-out. Will it follow this course and seek to incorporate the successes of the Trump interregnum? Certainly not: the purpose of partisan government is to erase the traces of the previous regime and prevent its revival in the next elections. Will America’s rivals encourage this pause and the continuity in foreign policy that might ensue? No way. They’re winning. The bipolar discontinuity between the Obama and Trump administrations’ foreign policies was not a freak event. It is the new normal. The Biden administration will be staffed by veterans of the Obama administration, and will revert, as far as possible, to Obama-era policies. Yet the 2024 elections are more likely than not to issue in a Republican presidency that flips back to Trump-era policies. This oscillation will persist until consensus, which collapsed during the George W. Bush presidency, is restored on a realistic footing. Until then, the United States will continue to be an unreliable ally.
