“America is back.” So President-elect Biden declared after announcing his cabinet nominations last week, and after the Trump presidency many around the world will at least be relieved that normality has returned. But global joy might be short-lived, because with the new White House appointments, there is no longer any mistaking what we are in for these next four years. Joe Biden is a restorationist, evidently intent on giving America and the rest of the world as faithful a copy of the Obama administration as he can conjure. It might be truer to say that American exceptionalism is back.
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.”
We Americans love these multisyllabic words. And we love making them mean other than what one finds in our Merriam–Webster dictionary.
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