Biden’s Global, Muscular Liberalism is an Indefensible Foreign Policy in 2021

The central theme of President Biden’s foreign policy is a global, muscular liberalism. Ensuring that democracy “will and must prevail,” Biden told the Munich Security Conference, is “our galvanizing mission.” This appears to mean taking on threats to democracy wherever they lie — challenging both China and Russia, which Biden has said posits “just as real” a threat as Beijing — while continuing the “forever wars,” halting reductions of U.S. forces in Europe, sanctioning the new military government in Myanmar, signaling a firm line against North Korea and more.

This might have been a defensible policy decades ago, when U.S. wealth dwarfed that of the Soviet Union and China. Or in 1999, before China’s rise, the sapping wars in the Middle East or the profound effects of the financial crisis had all been felt. But it is not a sensible policy today.

The Washington Post