For those wishing simply to reset U.S. foreign policy to the era before Donald Trump took the presidency, President-elect Joe Biden seemed to offer a glimmer of hope last week. “America is back,” he tweeted, adding in another tweet that his new foreign-policy team “is ready to lead the world, not retreat from it.” The subtext: Trump was but a blip in the story of the United States’ global leadership. But Biden’s choice for one of the most important members of his team tells a different story. Incoming National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has spent the past several years as part of a group working on a humbler, less ambitious approach to U.S. foreign policy—one that offers an honest, realistic assessment of how Americans’ own views on the their place in the world have changed over the past four years under Trump.
Beginning in 2017, Sullivan and a dozen others, mostly former officials in the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama, but also some veterans of Republican administrations, did something unusual for the Washington elite: They listened to what Americans outside the Washington bubble had to say. In a project organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and led by Salman Ahmed, a former Obama administration National Security Council official, the group conducted hundreds of interviews with small business owners, farmers, educators, state and local government officials, and others in Ohio, Nebraska, and Colorado, asking them what they wanted from U.S. foreign policy. The final result, published in September, was a report entitled Making U.S. Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class.
