‘We’re going to be back in the game,’ our presumptive and somewhat previous new president tells us. ‘It’s not America alone.’ But America was never out of the game under Donald Trump and never alone.
Look who is also back in the game: Tony Blinken, Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, will be Biden’s secretary of state. Jake Sullivan, once one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is going to be Biden’s national security adviser. John Kerry, the disastrous diplomat who gave us the Iran nuclear deal, is Biden’s climate emissary.
And it was all going so well. Trump might not have built his wall, but he had the first successful foreign policy of any president since Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down that earlier wall. Of course, the Euros moaned. They are, as Barack Obama so memorably said of the British, ‘freeloaders’. It was a considerable achievement to force the Germans, Europe’s richest nation, to promise to pay their 2 per cent to Nato.
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