Biden’s burden: can he save the free world?

Joe Biden talks a lot about restoring America’s standing in the world. But the truth is that if he now has the chance to reshape America’s relationships for a new era, it’s because Donald Trump has already done the awkward stuff. The question is: can Biden and his team swallow their collective pride and build on Trump’s legacy, or will vanity and partisanship send the American Atlas tumbling to his knees?

Trump won the 2016 election by forcing the difficult questions on to the national agenda. In office, he developed an alternative to the spent consensus of the 1990s. Call it vulgar realism, the lowest common denominator of American interest. He named and shamed the self-dealing swamp creatures of Washington, DC: corrupt politicians, complacent bureaucrats, thoughtless think-tankers, the bottom-feeding media. He went after the follies and false friends with whom the Washington consensus, and especially the Obama administration, had tied America’s hands and had set it stumbling towards second-rank status: open borders and outsourced factories, the Paris and Iran deals, the freeloaders in Nato and the fantasists at the UN.

Trump’s critics have a point when they complain that he was better at breaking ties than making them. They are right to point out that if the boss had troubled to read the manual before yanking the levers of domestic policy-making, and if the staffing of the White House hadn’t resembled a particularly savage episode of The Apprentice, he might have achieved more with less fuss.

Still, Trump cleared the ground. And he did more than lay the foundations of a new foreign policy. The outlines of the new architecture are already visible in the Pacific, and from the Himalayas to the Atlantic; they would surely have developed further had Trump won in November. As it is, the one-term outsider has arguably the most successful foreign policy record of any president since the end of the Cold War.