This spring, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden agreed with his former primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders to form joint task forces on health care, criminal justice, climate change, the economy, education, and immigration. It is clear from the reports of those bodies, issued earlier this summer, that under a President Biden U.S. domestic policy would shift well to the left of where it would have been under a President Hillary Clinton in 2016.
But none of those committees covered foreign policy as traditionally defined. The ideological flames fanned by Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and then brought to a white heat by the Black Lives Matter movement, have barely touched foreign affairs, which is often isolated from domestic politics. A Biden promise to return to the status quo ante would be a brain-dead response to a transformed world, but it would not be politically costly.
