It is still too soon to know whether the foreign policy of the Biden administration will fall on the left or the right side of the liberal internationalist consensus among centrist Democrats. Indeed, U.S. President Joe Biden’s team can’t know the answer themselves, for it is only in reaction to unforeseen events that a president’s foreign policy fully reveals itself. Nevertheless, there are telltale signs, and both sides are eager to assign them meaning.
No appointment that Biden has made has provoked as much controversy as his choice of Robert Malley, most recently the head of the International Crisis Group, as special envoy to Iran. (See, for example, this recent piece in the New York Times.) Matt Duss, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s top foreign-policy advisor, welcomed the announcement as a sign that Biden wouldn’t back down in fights with “hardliners.” In the New York Times op-ed page, on the other hand, Bret Stephens declared that the decision “beggars belief” and demonstrates that “Biden’s foreign policy will be coldly transactional.”
