The Biden doctrine, if only…

The five pillars of a new US foreign policy strategy look great on paper but seem impossible in practice.

Three decades after the United States emerged from the Cold War as the undisputed world superpower, the Biden administration is inheriting an overstretched, overstrained and overburdened country, thanks in no small part to the grandiose and reckless neoliberal and neoconservative policies of its predecessors. The Bush Sr administration presided over unprecedented geopolitical expansion following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, spearheading the enlargement of NATO and launching the First Gulf War that paved the way for permanent US military presence in the Greater Middle East. This was followed by the Clinton administration’s doctrine “from containment to enlargement” that pursued a neoliberal foreign policy aimed at “expanding markets and democracies” in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.