In corners of the State Department and embassies abroad, diplomats are playing a quiet waiting game. They “are keeping their heads down and waiting for [Joe] Biden to rescue them, rather than engaging with a Secretary who is seen as pursuing an ideology alien to the Department and the Service,” a former ambassador told me. With Donald Trump’s polling looking shaky, literally thousands of foreign policy experts have glommed onto his Democratic challenger, advising the Biden campaign in the hopes of being welcomed back into the fold if he manages to win the White House. But even under a potential Biden presidency, there are pressing questions about what shape U.S. foreign policy might take—questions that are growing all the more urgent as the Democratic Party platform comes into focus. As a second former ambassador put it, “From the foreign policy standpoint, absolutely there is no going back.”
Figures in Biden’s circle have nodded to this reality. “The next administration will have to reinvent U.S. alliances and partnerships and make some hard—and overdue—choices about America’s tools and terms of engagement around the world,” William Burns, a Biden adviser and retired career ambassador who served in the Obama State Department, wrote last month. “If ‘America First’ is again consigned to the scrap heap, we’ll still have demons to exorcise—our hubris, our imperiousness, our indiscipline, our intolerance, our inattention to our domestic health, and our fetish for military tools and disregard for diplomacy.” While the possibility of a Biden administration might be met with optimism at State, it is accompanied by “a heavy dose of realism at the enormity of the task to rebuild,” a current State Department official told me. “It won’t happen overnight, and some things have changed permanently.”
A handful of currents would make swimming backward all but impossible, including the international rise of populism; the accelerating power struggle between Russia, China, and the U.S.; and the growing influence of the progressive wing. Not to mention the coronavirus pandemic, which has had a ripple effect on global power. And then there’s Trump himself, whose “America First” rhetoric and bashing of interventionism tapped into a sentiment that helped propel him to victory in 2016. As COVID-19 ravages the country, leaving more than 160,000 dead and millions unemployed, the emphasis on taking care of Americans at home has only become more resonant. The Democratic Party’s draft policy platform seems to acknowledge this: “For too long, the global trading system has failed to keep its promises to American workers,” it reads, promising to “aggressively enforce existing trade laws and agreements,” and to hit pause on new trade deals without “first investing in American competitiveness at home.”
At the outset, Biden is expected to grab for low-hanging fruit, reaffirming America’s commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and rejoining the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization. This would signal to the rest of the world that the U.S. still wants a seat at the table—a message experts say can’t come soon enough. “There is considerable discussion about the future of the [foreign service] and of foreign policy. Some say both are doomed forever,” a former high-ranking State Department official told me. “I’m in the camp that says the U.S. can easily get back our convening power—even now others lament that we are absent.”
A return to multilateralism and rebuilding relationships with allies are major themes of the draft platform. But it also contains progressive fingerprints. “Democrats believe our military is—and must be—the most effective fighting force in the world. To keep it that way, we need to bring our forever wars to a responsible end, rationalize our defense budget, invest in the forces and technologies of the future, repair civil-military relations, and strengthen our covenant with service members, veterans, and military families,” it reads.