They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, To do something, to speak on their behalf Or at least not to close the door again. DEREK MAHON In foreign policy, the remedial efforts of the new administration, the post-Caligula administration may come down to this: the position of the United States in the world must be restored, but not too much. Sometimes, when people speak of all the damage that Biden must undo, they talk about giving us a fresh start by getting us back to zero. But zero is zero; and nobody in their right mind, in the terrifying social and economic crisis in which we have been living, would propose zero, a return to 2016, as the proper objective of domestic policy. In social and economic policy we must be ambitious, monumental, transformative, and finally translate the humaneness that we profess into laws and programs and institutions; we must assist and even rescue the weak and wounded millions in our midst. But the Rooseveltian moment is to be confined to our shores. Abroad, I fear, we will rescue nobody. We will be only national humanitarians. We are resolved to “repair our repaired alliances,” as we should — but this leaves the larger question of what we are to accomplish with our alliances, what we and our allies are to do in the world together. We are similarly resolved to “restore American leadership,” but we are also haunted by the prospect of genuine American leadership, grand leader-ship, leadership with power as well as politesse, unpopular but persuasive leadership, not least because we have distorted the modern history of American leadership into an ugly story, a sordid and simple tale of imperialism and exploitation, which is a calumny that will cripple us for the conflicts that are on their way, and are already here. One of the reasons that a return to 2016 will not suffice to recuperate our foreign policy is that the wayward course of the United States, its choice to abdicate global preeminence and to withdraw from decisive historical action, did not begin in 2016. We have been living contentedly in our shrunken version, in an increasingly Hobbesian world, in this springtime for Hitlers, for a dozen years. When historians record the history of American foreign policy in this century, they will be struck by the continuities between the Obama administration and the Trump administration, and thereby discomfit (I hope) many people. There are some differences, of course. Obama’s diplomatic diffidence was sold suavely, like everything he sells: an emotionally exquisite realism, a tender-hearted hard-heartedness, Brent Scowcroft’s policies with Elie Wiesel’s words. It was not, as in the case of Trump, animated by anything as coarse and candidly indifferent as America First, but in practice the callousness was the same. In the Obama era, no country, no ally, no democratic rebellion or dissident movement, no cleansed or genocidally attacked population, could count on America. (There was another difference: Trump, a swindler who hated to be swindled, at least got China right. The good news is that Biden appears to have noticed.) In 2016, in a radio interview, David Remnick, a wholly owned subsidiary of Obama, remarked to Ben Rhodes, another wholly owned subsidiary of Obama, that the president was “asking the American people to accept a tragic view of foreign policy and its limitations, and of life itself.” And he added, unforgettably: “Sometimes a catastrophe is what we have to accept.” What sagacity! But which catastrophes are the acceptable ones? So many atrocities, so little time. It takes a special kind of smugness, and politics, to be stoical about the sufferings of other people. Insofar as the new Biden foreign policy apparatus is the old Obama foreign policy apparatus — are they now the Blob? — there is reason to worry that their former leader’s aversion to conflict, and his soulful patience with the anguish of others, will live on in a busy cosmopolitanism that mistakes itself for a robust internationalism — a genial, worldly, multi-lingual era of good feelings and recovered sanities that will still offer no serious impediment to the designs of rivals and villains. We will soon see how far the return of truth to government will reverse the isolationist foreign policy that was developed during government’s recent adventures with falsehood. Returning from Trump to Obama will not suffice. They knew the truth in the Obama White House, they knew the facts, but it set nobody free. Those who are pleased by the reduction of America’s position in the world like to say that America should lead not by power but by example. It is a clever argument, in that it imposes no obligations upon us other than to be ourselves, which is always the laziest imperative of all. Unfortunately for those who recommend this historical leisure, this self-congratulatory lethargy, the City on the Hill is presently in ruins. Who on earth would want to be us now? I exaggerate, of course: we never were Weimar America, and we sent our orange strongman packing, and our Constitution held; but we are miserable. Even in the good times, there was nothing terribly helpful, it was even a little insulting, to say to the wretched of the earth, be like us. The only way any of them could be like us was to fight their own fights, in their own communities and in their own cultures, for the opening of their societies, ideally with the expectation that the United States would be there to assist them in their struggle for their particular inflection of the universal value of freedom. There was also another way in which they could be like us: they could come here and join their democratic and economic appetites with ours, which is why we should regard immigration as the definitive way of taking America’s promise seriously; but on immigration, too, we lost our footing years ago, and are a haven no more. How can we lead by example if
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