The challenges facing the incoming president may demand more than a return to normalcy
January 18, 2021
By Andrew Bacevich
Spectator
Regarding America’s role in the world, Joe Biden’s ascent to the presidency offers this bit of prospective good news: the random flailing about of the Trump era will end. No more diplomacy conducted via Twitter. A modicum of consistency and predictability might once more become emblems of American statecraft. Some version of normalcy will be restored.
While all this will be welcome, it prompts a fundamental question: will a return to pre-Trump normalcy suffice as a response to the challenges that Biden is about to inherit? After all, the post-Cold War version of normalcy — the policies as pursued by presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — created the conditions that gave rise to Donald Trump in the first place.
By any measure, the normalcy of the post-Cold War era flopped. It underwrote delusions, the United States infamously anointing itself as history’s ‘indispensable nation’. It defined American global leadership primarily in military terms. Normalcy found expression in rampant military activism that left US forces mired in multiple unwinnable wars. All of this came with a price tag: something in the order of $6 trillion (thus far) plus tens of thousands of US troops dead or wounded, many grievously. Journalists are making much of the fact that Joe Biden is the oldest person ever to assume the office of the presidency. Arguably more relevant than age, however, is Biden’s exposure to and participation in a specific chronicle of events. As a politician, our next president has been a fixture on the national political scene going back as far as the Cold War — he was first elected to the US Senate in 1972 when the Vietnam War was still underway.