President Joe Biden sought to restore the United States' postwar liberal order in his first two years as president. Biden advocated democratic partnerships, ended the war in Afghanistan, actively supported Ukraine against Russian invasion, pushed techno-nationalist policies, rearranged the Indo-Pacific alliance network, and ratcheted up "great power competition" toward China.
Despite this ambition, Biden's presidency is framed by two separate Trump administrations and is often read as a failed interval in the Trump era. Given this, could contemporaries faithfully evaluate Biden's condensed grand strategy? Can future observers do the same?
A Liberal World Restored?: Grand Strategy Analysis and the Biden Administration presents an innovative approach to identify and assess grand strategy over short time spans by distilling major grand strategy concepts into five ideal types. Despite failures, Joe Biden oversaw a grand strategy that often aligned with expectations set by these criteria. Such results are nuanced. Biden followed grand strategy ideal types related particularly to US power and standing, but his performance on criteria like process and content was mixed.