In announcing his national security team late Tuesday, US president-elect Joe Biden declared that “America is back”. That ringing affirmation is repudiation of the defeated incumbent Donald Trump’s “America First” framework. Throughout his campaign, Biden attacked Trump for abandoning America’s global leadership, retreating from foreign military commitments, trashing US security alliances, wrecking global institutions like the WHO and WTO, closing America’s borders, walking out of agreements on mitigating climate change and containing Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. Biden’s criticism has huge resonance in the US establishment that reacted with shock and anger to Trump’s challenge to all the major premises of American internationalism after the Second World War. Now the appointment of many familiar figures from the Obama Administration suggests a return to the old order in Washington. Biden’s team comes as a big relief to America’s friends and partners who have struggled to cope with the administrative disorder and policy disruptions unleashed by Trump. China, too, will hope that an internationalist Biden might be more open for a reset in bilateral relations and eschew the all-out confrontation initiated by Trump.
So is Trump’s “America First” an aberration that is about to be turned into an amusing anecdote in US political evolution? Not so fast. Trump was merely channeling the deepening popular discontent against the ravages of endless wars, and a globalism that was seen to decimate American jobs and open American society to a massive influx of immigrants. That the contest for the presidency was a close one in the American heartland suggests that the resistance to the restoration of globalism will not simply disappear with Trump’s defeat. Equally important is the palpable disappointment of the progressives who backed Biden with great gusto. They disapprove of his turn to the old ruling caste.
