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With war raging in Ukraine indefinitely and instability flourishing in the Middle East and trade wars overwhelming our relations around the globe — and more generally with American leadership in the world deafeningly absent — the world appears to have been so completely transformed by Donald Trump’s foreign policy that precedents may seem irrelevant to our understanding of our current situation. If we lead anything now, it is to make it worse. It may seem useless to look back even a few years, to the neolithic age when the Democratic Party was in charge of American foreign policy. But look back we must. For the obligations and the challenges of managing America’s international relations will outlast any American government, and one day a Democrat will sit in the Oval Office again. When that happens, a return to what we used to think of as normalcy will be progress enough, though the magnitude of Trump’s destruction of our position beyond our borders will take a long time to correct. But real success — the restoration of a rational and moral calculus of interests and values — will require that the right lessons, including the cautionary lessons, be learned from the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations.