In his first hours as president, Joe Biden recommitted the US to the World Health Organisation. Within a month, the country was back in the Paris Climate Agreement. When he preserved and then topped up the German army bases that Donald Trump had aimed to prune, the howls from Palm Beach were inaudible over the cheers of US allies. Biden’s downpayments on his vision of American leadership could not have been more prompt.
They were also, in retrospect, the lowest-hanging of fruit. Six months into his presidency, Biden can boast a more cohesive west. The OECD accord on corporate tax gives substance to a multilateralism that can sometimes descend into a love of form. What he cannot claim, however, is a total break from his predecessor.
On China, he was never going to ease what has become a clash of governing systems as much as of national interests. What is more surprising is the continuity of means. Protectionism, so shocking when Trump revived it, infuses the administration, both in the crude guise of tariffs and in softer forms. This is where the Democratic left meets the national security state. It is hard to square the national bias in procurement or in industrial policy with a liberal world order of positive-sum relations. In competing with autocracies, Biden must beware inadvertently granting their dream of a de-globalised economic system.