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.