U.S. foreign policy wanders aimlessly
Rome Giorgia Meloni was the winner of last week’s Group of Seven meeting. Whether giving French President Emmanuel Macron the stink eye or stitching up a deal to increase Italy’s clout in the European Union, the Italian prime minister had a good summit. Once stigmatized as a neofascist from the fringes of Europe’s hard right, Ms.
Meloni has firmly entrenched herself at the center of European politics. She has become a role model for figures like Marine Le Pen in France, and the European Union seems to be moving in Ms. Meloni’s direction on issues like migration and climate change.
Joe Biden, by contrast, is struggling. While administration supporters denounced what they called a cropped and misleading video of a befuddled-looking president wandering across the lawn, the image aptly depicted the state of an American foreign policy that has largely lost its way. The problem isn’t lack of activity.
If frequent-flyer miles could be redeemed for Nobel Peace Prizes, Team Biden would have a fistful of medals. But that isn’t where we are. In the Middle East, Europe and the Far East, the U.S.
and its friends are less secure than they were in January 2021. Great-power conflict is closer today than at any time in decades. The heart of the problem is conceptual.
Team Biden was slow to grasp the connections between the challenges it faces, and slower still to draw the appropriate conclusions. For too long they ignored the steadily growing elements of common strategy and purpose among major revisionist powers like China, Russia and Iran and lesser powers like North Korea and Venezuela. The merits of the American-led world system were so obvious to Team Biden that they assumed other countries mostly agreed with us about how the world
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