Can Foreign Policy Win Elections?

My review of a new book in the Washington Post

In today’s Washington Post (gift link), I review Alex Ward’s The Internationalists. Ward presents an insider account of the first years of the Biden administration’s foreign policy, including the first of their entanglements with Israel/Hamas, the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and the consequences of the withdrawal, and trying to deter and then defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I came away mostly more sympathetic to the Biden team’s travails, although I’ll have more to say about that later. The greatest irony to me was that the book is framed around an attempt to craft a Democratic foreign policy to win back voters Trump courted in 2016—broadly, an anti-internationalist, anti-free trade group—but that attempt has, broadly, not met with much success. Instead of playing small ball, it might be time to reframe the message for turnout and activation:

Ironically, Ward’s portrait of the disjuncture between the administration’s ambitions and its challenges suggests that the Biden team needs to campaign this year on a bolder vision than it did in 2020. Policies seemingly remote from middle-class interests, such as promoting the defense of democracies, resonate with the administration’s supporters and independents. Depicting the White House’s foreign policy record as part of a struggle for a new deal for the world might help frame its failures and successes — and even its compromises — as part of the story of redemption that the administration desperately wants to tell.

Read the whole thing!