HAMBURG – After four years of Donald Trump, his impending departure has sent hopes soaring. The Great Disruptor will be replaced by Joe Biden, an internationalist and institutionalist. He likes Europe and NATO, and, unlike Trump, he will treat America’s friends better than its traditional foes, including by honoring free trade. In the realm of security, he won’t clobber allies with threats amounting to “pay up, or we pull out!” Multilateralism will again guide American policy. It will be back to liberal hegemony instead of Trump’s narrow-minded illiberal version.

“Liberal” implies a rules-based international order, the promotion of democracy, and open societies. Trump not only ditched these principles, but also demonstrated a penchant for the world’s strongmen, alternately flirting with the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. (Of course, the United States’ coddling of Saudi Arabia cannot be pinned on Trump; every administration has adhered to the time-honored dictum: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”)

Trump’s game was strictly zero-sum, especially on trade. This was a marked departure from the post-war American tradition, which stressed positive-sum outcomes in which both sides won. Trump dragged the world back to nineteenth-century power politics: states have no permanent friends, on this view, only permanent interests.

Naturally, we now hope for a restoration of the old liberal order. Some reconstruction will happen under Biden, a president schooled for nearly a half-century in the habits of America’s liberal empire. But note that Trump was not a total aberration. America’s shift toward “more for us” and “less for them” precedes the Tweeter-in-Chief.

Recall that while Trump ordered the withdrawal of thousands of US troops from Europe in 2020, Barack Obama’s administration (in which Biden served as vice president) did the same thing in 2012. For all of Trump’s Europe-bashing, Obama also groused that, “Free riders aggravate me.” It was he who initiated the retrenchment of US power in the Middle East, cutting troops in Afghanistan and Iraq while refusing to intervene against Bashar al-Assad’s chemical warfare in Syria.

When Trump promised to end America’s “forever wars,” he was merely copying Obama. It was his progressive predecessor who began to experiment with neo-isolationism, proclaiming that “it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.” Trump echoed that line by pledging a $1 trillion infrastructure program – “America First” for the sake of domestic development and welfare.

The point is to show that America’s inward turn predates Trump, and will not be completely reversed under Biden. After all, protectionism – holding off foreign competition – appeals to both the right and the left. A generous immigration policy was fine as long as Democrats were in the opposition, depicting Republicans as mean-spirited nativists. But the Biden administration will hardly throw open America’s doors to the world’s huddled masses and tear down those parts of the Mexican border wall built under Trump.

Nor will the Biden administration abandon the power competition with China, whose own protectionist policies and appropriation of intellectual property are an abiding source of tension. The US will continue to assert itself in the Western Pacific, where a classic rivalry between a rising land power and an established sea power is escalating. Democrats and Republicans are largely committed to Containment 2.0, corralling regional players such as India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia.

In the Middle East, Biden has already confirmed that he will try to restore the Iran nuclear deal, albeit not in the well-meaning ways of his old boss, Obama. The incoming administration will leave intact the new anti-Iran alliance between Israel and Arab Gulf states, and it will not repeat the Obama administration’s mistake of pursuing a “reset” with Russia.

Since 2009, Putin’s Russia has turned into an expansionist power pressing on Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. While Europeans cheer Biden’s victory, they should be prepared for renewed American demands that they increase their defense spending. By the same token, Germany should expect more US pushback against the Nord Stream-2 pipeline, a joint Russian-German project that bypasses Eastern Europe and increases Germany’s energy dependence on Russia.

Even as Biden presents himself as the anti-Trump, he will continue to pursue some of the same core US strategic interests when it comes to China, Russia, and commercial competition with Europe. Still, as the French say, it is the tone that makes the music. The Biden administration will bring a most welcome change to the style of US diplomacy, replacing Trump’s brutishness with well-mannered professionalism.

As in private life, respect and civility go a long way in international relations. Beyond improving the tone, Biden will pursue fewer zero-sum, and more positive-sum, games. He will focus on common interests and seek to restore American leadership by winning consent, rather than through boorish unilateralism. For example, he intends to stop the withdrawal of US troops from Europe ordered by Trump.

In abandoning Trump’s “America First” doctrine, Biden will offer relief – but not a free lunch – to the rest of the Western world. As he wrote earlier this year in Foreign Affairs, his administration’s “policy agenda will place the United States back at the head of the table,” where it will lead “not just with the example of our power, but also with the power of our example.”

At the end of the day, however, power is power, and American power remains unrivaled across the board. All those who feared and despised Trump should be reassured by the 2020 election result. Biden will undoubtedly wield America’s mighty sword more judiciously, and with a friendlier face. Come Inauguration Day in January, America will be open for business once again. But the world should be prepared for some hard bargaining.

MADRID – With the US presidential election nearing its apotheosis, predictions about what will come after are dominating discussions well beyond the United States. When it comes to international relations, forecasts range from apocalyptic to cautiously optimistic. But what is needed is an actual way forward, grounded in realism.

By realism, I don’t mean the “realist” approach to international relations, which emphasizes the role of sovereign states as self-interested actors. By that standard, some have argued that while US President Donald Trump has bumbled and flailed, he has also managed to rein in an out-of-control foreign-policy establishment that has consistently failed to advance America’s interests, at least since the turn of the century.

Other so-called realists have acknowledged Trump’s utter failure in the foreign-policy arena, but insist that this has created an opportunity for a much-needed reset. They, too, advocate a more restrained strategy, in which the US takes a hands-off approach wherever possible. A policy of “offshore balancing,” for example, would have the US empowering partners to advance its interests and restrain hostile actors in their respective regions. (China may already be pursuing such an approach, to some extent.)

This new foreign policy would depend on bilateral ties between the US and its various regional allies, rather than multilateral institutions, which realists perceive as diluting America’s influence. With great-power competition on the rise, the logic goes, allies will be drawn to the US for its strengths and capabilities. America’s leaders thus don’t need to take the time to build close, mutually beneficial relationships via formal regional or global structures.

For a country that is paralyzed by polarization, beset by a kind of political exhaustion, and frustrated with decades of overstretched foreign policy, these proposals have significant appeal. They create the impression that US interests can be advanced far more efficiently. The US can achieve much more while spending far less blood and treasure to get it.

There’s just one problem with this plan: It won’t work.

For starters, would countries that are driven into America’s arms through sheer desperation really be effective proxies? Wouldn’t they do a far better job of supporting US interests if they were on a steadier footing, if they possessed agency and resources, and if they had a strong sense that they were advancing their own values and interests, too?

We might scoff at the notion of shared values as “idealistic,” not “realistic.” But in reality, they are good motivators and guides. That was the logic behind the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Charter. It should not be dismissed lightly.

Moreover, despite all the talk of a new cold war, the reality is that today’s world is fundamentally different from that of 30 years ago. Yes, elements of great-power competition have returned. But globalization has not been – and cannot be – reversed. As the COVID-19 pandemic has starkly demonstrated, the world still faces shared challenges, which raw clientelism simply cannot address.

What can help to address them are structures that foster and facilitate coordination. To be sure, current instruments and institutions are flawed and outdated; in many cases, they have been turned into fiefdoms, used more for peddling influence than making policy. But, rather than abandoning them, we must reform them.

That will require progress on an even more fundamental imperative: genuine leadership and vision. And it must be the US that provides it. While the US is no longer the sole global hegemon, it remains the only actor with convening power. And as a traditional realist would argue – rightly, in this case – leadership must come from power.

In the coming years, we cannot reasonably expect a reconstruction of the international system, as occurred after World War II, or even the rump institutional creation that followed World War I. Nor can we plausibly anticipate a return to the robust liberal international order of the past.

But we can realistically hope to avoid a wholesale – and deeply destructive – rejection of multilateralism. We can and should expect some semblance of direction and cohesiveness – first among like-minded actors, and then perhaps others.

The question is how to convince the US to take up the mantle of leadership again, whether in January 2021, when a President Joe Biden is inaugurated, or four years from now, after Trump’s second term ends. The answer begins with other actors – beginning with the European Union – demonstrating their ability and willingness to share burdens by bolstering their military, diplomatic, and other strategic capabilities.

More fundamentally, the EU and others should reaffirm core values that once inextricably linked them to the US, but that have been blurred, dismissed, or rejected outright in recent years. Only by reasserting these values can we revive those linkages and ensure that any future institution-building takes place on solid foundations, with the US providing direction but not dictating the rules of the game.

As consequential as the upcoming US election is, the relentless hype has fueled expectations that it must be followed by some grand or revolutionary transformation. A far more plausible hope is that, once the dust settles, international relations gets back to basics.

WASHINGTON, DC – After several anxiety-filled rollercoaster days following the recent US presidential election, it is now all but certain that Joe Biden will become America’s next president on January 20, 2021. Whether Democrats also take control of the Senate depends on the outcome of two crucial run-off votes in Georgia on January 5. The more erratic and outrageous President Donald Trump’s behavior is in the coming weeks, the greater the chances of the Democrats flipping those seats.

But whatever happens in Georgia, Europe and much of the world have breathed a sigh of relief at Biden’s victory. The dominant global narrative in recent years has been the inexorable retreat of multilateralism and the rise of dangerous forms of great-power rivalry, even as huge challenges such as climate change, possible new pandemics, cyberattacks, and the misuse of new technologies require a coordinated global response. But this mismatch isn’t inevitable. Biden’s triumph at least creates the possibility of much greater international cooperation to confront these threats – and Europe needs to play a prominent role.

The European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, has previously outlined the bloc’s global strategy. It involves increasing Europe’s geostrategic cohesion and strategic autonomy, while reaching out to others and supporting universal principles, plurilaterally if necessary and multilaterally whenever possible. These two pillars are complementary but also reinforcing. A more cohesive and strategically autonomous EU can be more effective in seeking multilateral solutions, while a more cooperative world order would help to boost the bloc’s influence and vindicate its raison d’être.

A key question now is how Europe can work with the Biden administration to advance such cooperation by example, through initiatives that would crowd in support for multilateralism in the United States and elsewhere. Several possibilities stand out.

For starters, the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging on both sides of the Atlantic, and threatens the economic recovery. Notwithstanding recent encouraging news on the vaccine front, supporting the global economy will remain an immediate priority, together with making vaccines available worldwide.

To raise more resources on a global scale, the EU could propose a new $500 billion issuance of Special Drawing Rights (the International Monetary Fund’s global reserve asset) with the provision that rich countries make a portion of their new SDRs available to less developed countries, as Joseph Stiglitz and others have long argued. This would help the poorest countries while increasing the IMF’s overall lending capacity, notably to emerging-market economies hit hard by the crisis. Preventing an emerging-market debt crisis is important for the overall global recovery, including for more robust growth in the US and Europe.

Although a new issuance of SDRs may receive some bipartisan US support, the Biden administration could vote for it at the IMF in its first 100 days without explicit Senate consent. Such an early win for transatlantic cooperation could then open the door to other initiatives.

Moreover, such a proposal could be accompanied by France and Germany giving up one percentage point of their combined IMF quota of 9.84% and agreeing to a single joint executive director on the boards of the Fund and the World Bank, without waiting for the protracted negotiations on quota reform to conclude. This would demonstrate their sincere commitment to renewed and reformed multilateralism.

On trade and taxation, the EU could urge the US to support and reform the World Trade Organization and seek common ground on digital trade issues within the WTO framework. The bloc could take the lead in settling its dispute with America over state subsidies to Boeing and Airbus. It could also commit to refraining from unilateral taxation of digital services, provided the US joins the OECD-led global negotiations, and, more broadly, seek to persuade the US to cooperate on global corporate-taxation rules.

On the big issue of climate change, Biden has already promised to rejoin the 2015 Paris agreement immediately, and he favors introducing carbon border taxes. The EU could declare that it wants to coordinate such a border adjustment tax with the US, which would in effect establish a sort of customs union. By its economic pull alone, such an arrangement would compel other countries to join an environmental “race to the top,” although less developed countries would need transitional support.

On defense, most of the EU’s 21 NATO members should increase their financial contributions to the alliance and coordinate a common strategic approach that emphasizes emerging needs linked to cybersecurity and biosecurity. Seeing Europeans become more invested in their own defense will make America more comfortable with military burden sharing.

To encourage much-needed reform of the United Nations Security Council, France could declare its readiness to use its veto only if it reflects the wish of a double majority in the EU, representing at least half the bloc’s members and 60% of its total population. Although France would keep its permanent seat on the Security Council, such a bold move would create a de facto EU seat. And rather than being a merely symbolic act, it could help spur progress on the formation of a new council reflecting today’s geopolitical, economic, and demographic realities.

Both the US and the EU will need to pay sustained attention to the very difficult issues in their relations with China and Russia. In particular, their approach to China should recognize the country’s growing capabilities and give it the option of being part of a new multilateral order, provided it respects a rules-based system.

Europe will welcome a stronger and more sincere US stance on human rights. It should also engage with the US regarding Biden’s proposed summit of a “coalition of democracies,” but urge caution in view of the difficulty of deciding whom to invite. A too-inclusive list would signal a lack of sincerity, while an overly restrictive one would risk antagonizing all excluded countries. It would be better to invite a large number of countries to a summit to discuss progress on human rights and democratic freedoms rather than launch a formal new coalition of democracies.

European initiatives of the type suggested above would help the Biden administration. They could also strengthen the position and resolve of those in America who want to help build a new, open, and more equitable international order fit for the twenty-first century.

BERLIN – For four years, US President Donald Trump’s administration demonstrated that it had little use for alliances. But the fact remains that the US-German partnership is indispensable and will remain indispensable. The “2+4” negotiations that reunited East and West Germany after decades of separation by the Iron Curtain are but one example of how Americans and Germans have stood shoulder to shoulder throughout the post-World War II period.

As in any relationship, there have been ups and downs, with Trump’s presidency representing a near-unprecedented low. But the ties that bind Germany and America rest on more than just history or sentimentality. Not only do we share core values, but we also share core interests.

Each country’s constitution enshrines the belief that all human beings are born equal, and that our freedom is inalienable: government does not bestow it and cannot revoke it. Our liberty is protected by democracy, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and freedom of expression and assembly. These shared principles have shaped the outlook on both sides of the Atlantic for decades.

But the world is quickly changing, and it is clear that Germany and the United States will need to continue to work together to meet new global challenges. China’s confrontation with the West – and with the post-war order more generally – is just the start of it. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of our interconnected and interdependent world. Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events and natural disasters, which, together with violent conflict – often stemming from or exacerbated by climate-related resource scarcity – is in turn fueling new waves of mass migration.

Moreover, as the post-war non-proliferation regime has eroded, the danger of a worldwide nuclear arms race has increased dramatically. The same digital technologies that have brought the world closer together have also given rise to global terrorist networks, wars, and conflicts disproportionately affecting the world’s poorest people. While humanity has grown more prosperous than ever, the gap between rich and poor has widened to potentially destabilizing levels.

The pandemic has shown why no country can expect to overcome such challenges alone. Neither viruses nor wildfires discriminate between their victims or observe political borders. The consequences of rising inequality and weakened social cohesion eventually are felt far and wide, be it through refugee crises or international terrorism. Without an effective, widely supported non-proliferation regime, any country that feels threatened will see every reason to go nuclear. Without a global framework for the regulation of data and artificial intelligence, information will continue to be weaponized. And without a credible defense alliance, maintaining peace will become more and more difficult.

In light of these challenges, the common values and interests that characterize the US-German partnership have never been more valid. After a period of uncertainty and volatility in our bilateral relationship, it is time to start rebuilding mutual confidence and trust. We urgently need to develop a forward-looking agenda that can realize the promise – for us and the world – that our democratic, free, and open societies represent.

There are several key principles that should guide our common agenda. First, we must work together to develop a pandemic recovery program, with the provision of personal protective equipment and vaccine research and production given top priority. We also need to start rethinking multilateralism and reforming the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, and other bodies so that they are fit for purpose, and equipped to manage challenges that threaten to widen social inequality.

Moreover, close cooperation will be needed to provide an economic counterweight to China. This challenge is best understood not as a “cold war” but as an economic competition. Here, Germany and the US should take the lead in reviving the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, pursuing new fair- and free-trade agreements – not least in Africa – and offering a transatlantic infrastructure initiative to serve as a transparent, democratic alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Both countries also have a mutual interest in fostering the green technology needed to combat climate change. Instead of quibbling over individual pipeline projects, we should be developing a joint strategy to achieve energy security by expanding the relevant infrastructure (including new liquid natural gas terminals in Europe), supporting joint research projects (such as in “green hydrogen”), and jointly backing the Three Seas Initiative in Europe.

Similarly, the US and Germany could come together to secure a leading role in ensuring that the next phase of digital innovation abides by Western ethical standards. The absence of a Western alternative to the Chinese 5G giant Huawei is astonishing.

Finally, our two countries must work together to repair the non-proliferation regime and reinvigorate NATO. The recent spats over transatlantic and European defense considerations have been unnecessary; at the end of the day, we share the same security concerns.

To be sure, this is an ambitious agenda, and merely reciting the transatlantic success stories of the past will not be enough to meet the new challenges of an ever-changing world. But the history of the US-German partnership shows what people and states are capable of when they have the political will and courage to work together. In less than a generation, the bitter enmity between former enemies grew into a reliable partnership, and eventually into a close friendship. In light of the daunting challenges facing Germany, Europe, and the US, working together is the only viable option.

BERLIN – Elections tend to bring differences to the fore. That is certainly true of the United States’ recent presidential election, in which votes are still being tallied. Among the most bitterly contested elections in the country’s history, the outcome will have profound implications for many aspects of US policy. And yet there is one issue on which both parties seem to agree: the need to “stop” China.

The US government – and, increasingly, the European Commission – now largely believes that China has secured its economic and technological gains unfairly, thanks to its government’s pervasive influence over the economy. Geostrategists often push this view, imagining that a government can achieve technological superiority by investing in the fashionable sectors of the day.

But a more thorough analysis shows this to be misleading, at best. The most “successful” grand economic-development plans usually go with the grain, focusing largely on targets that, given the economy’s fundamentals, would be achieved anyway. Crediting state intervention when those targets are met is thus inappropriate.

Japan provides a cautionary tale here. During its post-1945 growth spurt in the 1970s and 1980s, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) acquired an almost mythical global reputation for the apparent success of its efforts to channel resources toward strategic sectors. Many countries were advised to emulate its model.

But in the 1980s, Japan’s real-estate bubble burst, and growth slowed significantly. As it turned out, many of the sectors MITI supported had not actually succeeded. What had really been driving Japan’s growth was not MITI’s prescience, but a high savings rate and the rapidly increasing education level of a disciplined workforce – much the same factors that have driven China’s development.

Until fairly recently, China’s leaders seemed to understand the limits of state intervention. In fact, the Communist Party of China’s general advice to authorities was to scale back the state’s involvement in the economy, because state-owned enterprises (SOE) generally remain far less efficient than private firms, and only about one-third as profitable.

And yet, while SOEs continue to underperform, compared to private firms, China’s leaders have radically changed their views on intervention. Now, the conventional wisdom is that the country owes its progress – and, indeed, its emerging global dominance – in some high-tech sectors to the state’s guiding hand.

The true driver of China’s success, however, is its high savings rate – nearly 40% of GDP, or more than twice the rate in the US and Europe. This gives China massive resources for investment in establishing the fundamentals for technological leadership. Notably, the country has made enormous investments in improving both the quantity and quality of education.

Regarding secondary education, China has already fully caught up with the West in attendance. And testing by the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment suggests that Chinese secondary-school students are far better at solving problems than their American or European peers.

Moreover, tertiary education – the real key to technological leadership – has exploded in China over the last two decades. According to the US National Science Foundation, China now produces more than twice as many engineers, and more peer-reviewed science and engineering publications, than the US. Similarly, it has surpassed the European Union in spending on research and development, and on current trends, it should catch up to the US over the next decade (some think it already has).

The US is haunted by the specter of a technologically dominant China – and keen to ensure it never materializes. And yet, given China’s fundamentals, there is little the US could do to hamper, let alone arrest, its progress. Huawei is just one example of a firm that has capitalized on China’s pool of millions of engineers to develop new products. Even if the US manages to destroy Huawei, many other Chinese high-tech companies are destined to emerge, driven by the same talent.

The so-called dual-circulation strategy that is set to shape China’s next Five-Year Plan is perfectly in line with the aforementioned fundamentals. As China’s economy grows, it is naturally becoming less reliant on exports, and its newly minted engineers will master a growing number of technologies. In other words, the government’s plans for the coming years would probably materialize, even without state intervention.

By contrast, the US strategy – which begins with an economic “decoupling” from China – has little chance of success. To be sure, the decoupling itself might be feasible. But it would also be counterproductive.

Trade always implies a two-way dependency. And while the US might like the idea of being “liberated” from China by severing trade ties, it would pay a high cost for “liberating” China from it. Shutting Chinese suppliers out of the US market provides an implicit subsidy to higher-cost producers. Ultimately, the effect of reducing bilateral trade would be equivalent to that of Trump’s failed tariffs against China: an implicit tax on US consumers.

And for what? Limiting China’s access to some key US technologies might make a difference in the short term, but it is unlikely to slow down China’s development appreciably. The sheer scale of the human and financial resources China will be deploying over the next decade means that it is well positioned to dominate many high-tech sectors, with or without US inputs.

The conclusion is clear: The next US administration should accept China’s continued economic and technological rise. It may not like the idea of China overtaking the US – a milestone that will probably be reached within the next decade. But further attempts to stave off that outcome would be not only futile, but also very costly.

CAMBRIDGE – Donald Trump may have despised international institutions, but his presidency has reminded the world of the importance of effective and resilient ones. In the 2016 election, Trump campaigned on the argument that the post-1945 multilateral institutions had let other countries benefit at American expense. His populist appeal rested on far more than foreign policy, of course, but Trump successfully linked domestic resentments to foreign policy by blaming economic problems on “bad” trade deals with countries like Mexico and China and on immigrants competing for jobs. The post-1945 liberal international order was cast as a villain.

As I show in my book Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump, American presidents were never perfect institutional liberals. Dwight Eisenhower’s support of covert action in Iran and Guatemala, and John F. Kennedy’s in Cuba, were inconsistent with a strict reading of the UN Charter. Richard Nixon broke the rules of the Bretton Woods economic institutions and levied tariffs against our allies in 1971. Ronald Reagan ignored an International Court of Justice ruling that found his administration’s mining of Nicaraguan harbors illegal. Bill Clinton bombed Serbia without a Security Council resolution.

Nonetheless, prior to 2016, American presidents in most instances supported international institutions and sought their extension, whether it was the Non-Proliferation Treaty under Lyndon Johnson; arms control agreements under Nixon; the Rio de Janeiro agreement on climate change under George H.W. Bush; the World Trade Organization and the Missile Technology Control Regime under Clinton; or the Paris climate agreement under Barack Obama.

It was not until Trump that an administration became broadly critical of multilateral institutions as a matter of policy. In 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo proclaimed that since the end of the Cold War three decades ago, the international order has failed the United States, and “multilateralism has become viewed as an end unto itself. The more treaties we sign, the safer we supposedly are. The more bureaucrats we have, the better the job gets done.” The Trump administration took a narrow transactional approach to institutions and withdrew from the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization.

Institutions are not magic, but they do create valuable patterns of behavior. Multilateral institutions are more than formal organizations, which sometimes ossify and need to be reformed or discarded. Even more important is the whole regime of rules, norms, networks, and expectations that create social roles, which entail moral obligations. A family, for example, is not an organization, but it is a social institution that assigns to parents a role that entails moral obligations toward the long-term interests of their children.

Realists argue that international politics is anarchic and thus zero-sum: my gain is your loss and vice versa. In the 1980s, however, the political scientist Robert Axelrod used computer tournaments to show that games in which there is a rational incentive to cheat if you play once can be transformed when there is an expectation of a continuing relationship. Reciprocity and tit for tat proved the best long-term strategy. By enhancing what Axelrod called “the long shadow of the future,” international regimes and institutions encourage cooperation with policy consequences that go beyond any single transaction.

Of course, institutions can sometimes lose their value and become illegitimate. The Trump administration claimed that institutions such as the WTO had “Gulliverized” the US: Lilliputians were using multilateral institutional threads to constrain the American giant from using the power it would have in any bilateral negotiation. By renegotiating various trade agreements in a manner that damaged the WTO and US alliances, the Trump administration showed that the US, as the world’s most powerful country, can break these threads and maximize its short-term bargaining power.

But the US can also use such institutions to bind others to support global public goods that are in its own and others’ long-term interests. Whereas Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, likened US foreign policy to the work of a patient gardener, Trump’s conception of policy rested on a very different conception of how power should be exercised. To use a different metaphor, Trump complained about free riders, but the US gets to steer the bus.

In this century of transnational interdependence, isolation is not an option, and nationalism versus globalization is a false choice. A virus or a carbon atom has no respect for political frontiers. We must learn to combine a strong national identity and global concern. As the historian Yuval Harari has put it, “Like it or not, humankind today faces three common problems that make a mockery of all national borders, and that can be solved only through global cooperation – nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption.”

The US needs a network of multilayered partnerships with others. Foreign partners help when they want to, and their willingness is affected not just by America’s hard military and economic power but also by its soft power of attraction, based on an open and inclusive culture, liberal democratic values, and policies that are widely perceived as legitimate. A Jeffersonian “decent respect for the opinions of [human]kind” and the use of institutions that encourage reciprocity by bringing to bear “the long shadow of the future” will be crucial to the success of US foreign policy. As Henry Kissinger rightly said, world order depends on the ability of a leading state to combine power and legitimacy. Institutions are indispensable to that end.

Now, with less preponderance and facing a more complex world, the US must cooperate with others, and use its soft power to attract their cooperation. America will need to exercise power with as well as power over others. The success of Joe Biden’s foreign policy will depend on how quickly we can relearn these institutional lessons.