Welcome to Trump’s second term

President Biden’s emphatic assertion that ‘America is back’ at the Munich Security Conference last month was met with a lukewarm reaction from European leaders. ‘Europe has moved’, William Galston explained in a Wall Street Journal column pointing to a recent survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that revealed a persistent distrust of the United States among Europeans and a resistance to taking the US side in America’s competition with China.

Yet there is another side to the story. America is not really back. True, president Biden was quick to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and to extend warm and fuzzy feelings toward our traditional allies. But the sentiment that Donald Trump successfully tapped into – namely, the notion that the United States’ global role comes at the expense of interests of ordinary people at home – will continue to shape Biden’s policies as much as Trump’s, even if the style, the rhetoric and the level of thoughtfulness will vary.