Not since Ronald “Morning in America” Reagan has a new administration come to office with so tenuous a grasp of the realities facing the United States — and so evident a determination to flinch from them. Look squarely across those oceans and you find diplomatic, political, and economic drift. An age of alliances? Not on Washington’s terms. As things stand, Joe Biden’s presidency is destined to mark an age of isolation.

Hardly two weeks after Biden’s November victory at the polls, 15 Pacific Rim nations signed what HSBC reckons is the largest trade accord in history, dwarfing anything the U.S. has sought to organise in recent years. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which come into effect by midyear, covers a third of the planet’s GDP ($26 trillion in 2019) and the same proportion of its population.

Who signed it? All 10 members of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan.

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And China. All of America’s bedrock allies and partners in East Asia just agreed an extensive trade pact that can also be taken broadly as a plan to get along with the mainland. This is, in effect, an Asia-for-Asians accord. Not to be missed, it is the first trade agreement that puts Japan and China on the same piece of paper.

In his Senate testimony, Blinken made it clear the Biden administration expects America’s traditional allies to stand with it as it faces up to China. “We have to start by approaching China from a position of strength, not weakness,” Blinken told his interlocutors, “a position of strength when we are working with, not denigrating, our allies.” This is the sort of bureaucratic diplo-speak, wanting in all specificity, that gets Washington in trouble in one instance after another.

The RCEP, however, is a subtly rendered but direct repudiation of this view. The accord, which sets down a variety of economic and investment rules from tariffs to intellectual property, is the Pacific Rim’s declaration that it does not recognise the ideological red lines the US insists on drawing across the region — “techno-democracies” as against “techno-autarchies,” in Blinken’s histrionic terms. These nations evince absolutely zero interest in any kind of Cold War 2.0 with the mainland.

Yet the United States seems incapable of retiring the 20^th century’s binaries into the past and addressing our diverse, multifarious new era. Certainly, its ties with Asia are more strained now than may meet the eye: the continued presence of American troops, to cite one example, has long been a politically contentious question among the Pentagon’s principal hosts — South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.

ASEAN’s desire to settle sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea at the negotiating table, as opposed to displays of power at sea, are another. Indeed, they are fully aware that Washington’s obsession with the South China Sea has nothing to do with security, as it claims: it has everything to do with supremacy.

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And so the Biden administration assumes office at a key moment in America’s trans–Pacific relations. It inherits alliances and partnerships of many decades’ standing, and no one at the far end of the Pacific, not even the Chinese, wants the US out of the region. But continue to get the China question so wrong and Biden’s national security people will severely damage Washington’s trans–Pacific ties, with the result that an incipient isolation will begin to assume a permanent character.

Something of the same obtains in Washington’s trans–Atlantic relationships, which now bear the character of irritated friends discovering they do not have as much in common as they once did. It is uncanny, indeed, how similarly Washington’s predicament unfolds in Europe. In the final days of 2020, China signed a bilateral investment treaty with the European Union that is at least as ambitious as the RCEP. In one interview, Valdis Dombrovkis, the EU trade commissioner, said it provided for “the most ambitious outcomes that China has ever agreed with a third country”. Are the E.U.’s 27 members really going to line up with Washington as it conjures a confrontation with China?

Critics immediately complained that the EU–China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment was poorly timed — a slap in the new American president’s face, a “kick in the teeth,” a “strategic mistake.” Implicit in this is the assumption Europe should continue playing follow-the-leader with Washington and has no business acting in what it judges to be its own interests. However, The CAI, as it is known, was seven years in the making and also bears broader interpretation. It, too, can be read as an indication that the Continent is no more interested than East Asians in Washington’s Sinophobic plans for some kind of decisive, king-of-the-hill reckoning.

It is Russia, however, as well as China, that has caused the Atlantic to grow wider in recent years. While the US has become increasingly hostile toward the Russian Federation, Emmanuel Macron has argued strenuously for some time that Europe must re-engage Russia as a key step toward a more independent foreign policy altogether. Angela Merkel has been less vocal on this point, but it will be interesting to see where her successor, Armin Laschet, lands on these questions.

Laschet is avowedly an Ostpolitik man, favouring friendly ties with Moscow and China alike. Should he take over as chancellor in September, among his early decisions will be whether to defy American objections and proceed with the highly contentious Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is to connect Russian gas fields with German ports and the European market. All signs are he will see through the project, which is now 95% completed.

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Of course, we should not forget that America’s relations with Europe and Asia were growing increasingly distant well before Biden won the White House  — and, let us not be mistaken, before Donald Trump’s singularly disruptive term, too. Why has the U.S. been so consistently in denial about this? The best I can do is suggest that Washington, after seven decades of primacy, suffers an institutional inertia that prevents it from registering the 21^st century’s defining currents.

Anyone familiar with Washington’s foreign policy cliques understands that they have simply not had to make any fundamental decisions since the 1945 victories, and must learn again how to respond to changing circumstances. The reality is that Washington’s policy cliques just don’t seem ready to accept the multipolar world we all find out our windows. The Nixon­–Kissinger opening to China in the early 1970s stands among the few exceptions to the rule. Yet today’s policy planners condemn that highly imaginative move as a mistake, preferring, in effect, to take cover in the anachronistic thought that America’s place as a global leader is just as it was during the post-war decades.

A year ago Biden published a much-remarked essay in Foreign Affairs under the headline: “Why America must lead again.” This is what the president and his national security people mean when they talk of alliances and partnerships: Let us all work together — we the commanding officers, other nations adjutants following our lead. Barack Obama and his administration — many of whom will now serve under Biden — made the same mistake.

Does this mean the United States will find itself isolated as our new century unfolds? Quite possibly, though it is not inevitable. Isolation, if it comes to be the case, will prove a choice, not a fate. The United States could accept — indeed, participate in — the transformations in motion in Asia and Europe were it willing to do so as an equal partner with others. But all signs indicate that Biden and his foreign policy people have no intention of squarely addressing the complexities of our time, and will insist on sustaining a primacy of a bygone era.

It is almost 70 years since Luigi Barzini published Americans Are Alone in the World. It was a work of admiration for a nation that stood unambiguously above others after World War Two. Now, the noted Italian journalist’s observation has been turned upside down. Unless the Biden administration alters course — an unlikely prospect by any sound reckoning — Americans stand to be alone because they are falling behind.

All was well before Donald Trump came along and all shall be well again now he is gone. This is the product Biden has on offer, but it is shoddy goods on two counts: all was not well before Trump took the White House, and all will not be well if, as Biden’s appointments indicate rather clearly, our forty-sixth president insists on pretending our forty-fourth had it all right.

Diversity is de rigueur as Biden shapes his administration. He promises “the most diverse cabinet in history,” and his nominees so far are indeed dense with women and people of colour, just as former Obama Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played the diversity card during her 2016 campaign, naming women, black people, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and others to high office.

But now as then, it is diversity of identity that is supposed to count, not diversity of thought, of which one finds none among Biden’s newly-named people. This is a sales job, just as Barack Obama was a salesman — window dressing for an un-pretty foreign policy regime.

And there shall be no diversity among nations, either, as Joe Biden fashions his post-Trump idea of America’s proper place in the world. On this side of the pond, there are headlines about Team Biden’s abiding intention to use foreign policy to reconnect with the global community. “Biden Picks Team Set on Fortifying World Alliances,” The New York Times announced atop page one last week while Democracy Now!, a Democratic Party-aligned radio programme, puts it this way: “Biden’s National Security Appointments Focus on Multilateralism, International Cooperation.”

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We Americans love these multisyllabic words. And we love making them mean other than what one finds in our Merriam–Webster dictionary.

The lately prevailing theme — multipolarity, alliances, partnerships, shared responsibilities — is also to be traced back to the earliest days of the Obama administration. The most important of Biden’s newly-announced cabinet and advisory appointments — respectively Antony Blinken to State, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser — sound it routinely: We cannot solve the world’s problems alone, they say with solemn conviction.

It is an excellent thought, as it was first time round. But we had better look carefully at who these people are — both Obama administration holdovers — and listen carefully to what they say. The alliances-and-partnerships bit did not turn out well when Obama tried it, and there is nothing to suggest that, four years on, it will work this time round.

The first thing to note about the administration Biden is introducing to the world is never mentioned in the American press, and certainly not among the foreign policy cliques. Biden’s people are to a man and woman American exceptionalists — true believers in the country’s providentially-conferred destiny to light humanity’s way. There is nothing new or remarkable in this: our chosen-people consciousness goes back to Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” sermon, delivered before the celebrated Puritan set out from Southampton for these parts in 1630.

But as long as this credenda goes unquestioned, nobody is going to change the direction of American foreign policy in a way that responds imaginatively to the realities of the 21^st century. Chief among these is parity among nations, notably those of the West and non–West.

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To put this question in a useful context, one of Donald Trump’s supposed original sins, committed during his presidential campaign in 2016, was his full-frontal disavowal of our exceptionalist ideology. “I don’t like the term, I’ll be honest with you,” he told a Texas audience. “I don’t think it’s a very nice term: ‘We’re exceptional, you’re not.’” Three years later, when the fight to defeat Trump’s re-election bid was fully joined, the man now named Biden’s national security adviser published a spirited argument “for rescuing the idea of American exceptionalism” in The Atlantic. Jake Sullivan’s was “a case for a new American exceptionalism… as the basis for American leadership in the twenty-first century”.

All that flows from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the national security apparatus over the next four years will reflect this belief. But how does one reconcile all the talk of partnerships and common cause with “global leadership,” another of the Biden people’s running themes? When the next president declares that “America is back,” you have to read into the statement to grasp the true meaning: “It’s a team that reflects the fact that America is back. Ready to lead the world, not retreat from it. Once again, sit at the head of the table.”

America has long required enemies to maintain its spot at the “head of the table”, the Cold War being the case nearest to hand. So far as one can make out, China and Russia, America’s twin Beelzebubs, are to serve as the Biden administration’s primary organising principles. To be noted in this connection: Strategic rivalries with the Chinese and Russians were the primary topic at a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last before Blinken replaces him.

Blinken and Sullivan are now preparing to enlist the Europeans, India and numerous East Asian nations as the U.S. conjures a new and dangerous Cold War with China. This is, of course, a straight-out continuation of the ultra-hawkish Pompeo’s cause. But Pompeo hasn’t got very far and neither will Team Biden. None of the Asians, not even the ever-loyal Japanese and certainly not congenitally non-aligned India, wants anything to do with an animated anti–Chinese coalition. Even Taiwan does not want confrontation; it wants protection. None of these countries desire to turn the region into another decades-long flashpoint.

It is now confirmed that Biden will extend the new START accord with Russia, due to expire early next year. This is wise, and one hopes Biden will go further on nuclear-arms reductions. But to the president-elect’s people this is an arms-control question, not a matter of U.S–Russian relations. These will not improve because Biden’s national security team are packed with Russophobes (including Joe himself). Antony Blinken, whose father was a noted advocate of détente, is vigorously of the view that ties with Russia can be repaired only if Moscow accepts unequal relations in which Washington sets the terms. Bill Clinton tried the same thing to no avail. Ditto Barack Obama.

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Will the Europeans re-enlist in this front in the new Cold War? One seriously doubts it. If Trump’s four years made anything clear in trans–Atlantic relations, it is that the continent no longer wishes to be force-marched into another of Washington’s anti–Russian crusades. Emmanuel Macron has been consistently outspoken on this point over the past couple of years. It is true the French president nurses a de Gaulle complex, but he is simply more forthright than others in expressing what is on a lot of European minds.

It was commonly assumed until last week that, along with the Paris climate pact and the WHO, Biden would also bring America back into the many-sided accord governing Iran’s nuclear programs. The assassination last Friday of Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh complicates things, but it was highly questionable whether Biden and Blinken would have made the move even if Iran’s top nuclear researcher hadn’t been murdered (almost certainly by Mossad). Biden, like almost all other American pols, is simply too close to Israel, which has made its objections to the nuclear agreement abundantly, belligerently clear.

So we’ve now got Sullivan saying “yes, we’ll get back in with other signatories — providing Tehran meets ‘these follow-on agreements’” — which are understood to be an awful lot like Pompeo’s preconditions, please note. This is an intended-to-fail position — and an easy way out for Biden. Net outcome: hostile stalemate in the Persian Gulf, continuing alienation from the European signatories to the accord, more trans–Atlantic drift.

If only America’s leaders understood that, with the emergence of new powers such as China and India and a new generation of post–Cold War leaders in Europe, ours is an age that requires us to accept — no, embrace — a diversity of perspectives. But our policy cliques, lost in nostalgia, travelling on presumption, and with no decisions to make for the past 75 years, simply cannot read the hands on the clock.

Biden’s “global leadership” will be the same as all previous versions — a polite term for American hegemony. Sullivan, Blinken and Biden’s other national security nominees may put themselves forward as vigorous proponents of partnerships, but look closely: they expect America’s allies to fall in line behind America’s we-know-best dictates. Apostles of exceptionalism can think no other way.