Here’s a litmus test for you: How do you feel when U.S. President Joe Biden declares that the United States will resume its place as “leader of the free world”? Do you say, “It’s about time”—or “That way hubris lies”? It is, at bottom, a question not about power—about America’s ability to lead—but about moral standing. Biden may have earned the right to lead America, but in what respect has America, in 2021, earned the right to lead the world?
This is an old question; it’s one I grew up with. I became politically conscious in 1969, when I was 15; I handed out leaflets against the Vietnam War at the train station where my father and his friends commuted to New York City. I would have barked with laughter at the argument that the Cold War was a struggle between good and evil. Domestic policy, I would have told you, was the sphere in which justice might be done; foreign policy was spy versus spy.
