U.S. President Joe Biden outlined his big new foreign-policy idea in a speech on Feb. 4: rebuilding the U.S. middle class. “There’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy,” he said. “Every action we take … we must take with American working families in mind.” On the surface, this sounds exactly like the kind of sloganeering you’d expect from a Democrat, along with its sister promise of a “worker-centered” trade policy. Skeptics in the party’s left wing worry such pledges could amount to nothing given Biden’s heritage as a free trade enthusiast. But this agenda deserves to be taken seriously. It echoes traditional progressive concerns about trade’s impact on labor and environmental standards. At a deeper level it flows from a wide-ranging rethink, led by the likes of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, about the costs that two decades of hyperglobalization have imposed on U.S. society.
Worthwhile though this rethink is, it also presents Biden with a new foreign-policy dilemma. The U.S. president wants simultaneously to support workers at home and to reassert U.S. economic leadership abroad—especially in Asia. At the very least, these two aims are in tension, and in many ways they are mutually exclusive.
