No longer the world’s most admired democracy, our political system is more often perceived as uniquely dysfunctional, and our leaders as notably dangerous. Since 2016, America’s international reputation has been transformed. That would be a mistake.Īdam Serwer: The crisis of American democracy is not over Some on the Biden team, veterans of the Obama administration, will be tempted to restart relationships and reboot old plans as if nothing has happened. None of the major diplomatic institutions, international or domestic, is the same either.

None of America’s relationships, with either our friends or our enemies, is the same as it was four years ago. Even though members of the Biden team are locked out of the State Department-in a normal transition, the departing administration would be helping set up postelection courtesy calls on secure lines-it was probably nice for them to have ordinary conversations with foreigners again too.Īnd yet there was something misleading about all of these statements and compliments, for after the Trump era, there can be no return to normal. No doubt various world leaders felt relieved to speak once again with a coherent and knowledgeable American leader. troops from South Korea-a move that would have left the country vulnerable to invasion from the North. According to the readout of a call with South Korea’s leader, Moon Jae-in, America’s president-elect “thanked President Moon for his congratulations, expressing his desire to strengthen the alliance as the linchpin of security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region.” This was also pretty boring, unless you remember that Trump publicly mused about withdrawing U.S. Readouts published by Biden’s transition team noted, for example, that “the President-elect underscored that the United States and Australia share both values and history”-boilerplate cliché, unless you remember that President Trump’s first call with the then–Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, ended in a nutty argument about refugees. Had it not been for the intervening four years, the tweeted congratulations would have seemed entirely unremarkable, nothing more than the predictable pleasantries so common to global diplomacy in the era before Donald Trump. A few days later, he spoke with the leaders of Australia, Japan, and South Korea too.

Even Fox News sounded excited by the list of well-wishers, who, the channel noted, included “British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, and Spanish President Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón.” Biden himself made a point, on November 9, of calling the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, and Great Britain to thank them in return. In the hours and days after American news networks declared him the victor on November 7, President-elect Joe Biden received congratulatory tweets and statements from American allies around the world.

The world after trump