May 7 2025 - 3:00pm
Joe Biden’s re-emergence on the political stage, after a long silence, came with a warning and an implicit reminder of how much has changed even in the few months since he left office. In an interview with the BBC published today, the former president defended his decision to remain in the 2024 race and condemned Donald Trump’s approach to ending the Ukraine war as “modern-day appeasement”.
Biden chose the BBC and VE Day — a commemoration more resonant in Europe than in the United States — as the setting for his return. For him, the legacy of the Second World War is not just history but a lodestar: the war against totalitarianism, the necessity of American engagement, the birth of an international order in which the US bore extraordinary burdens to guarantee freedom abroad and stability at home. That commitment defined his presidency — and, in many ways, his political identity since entering the Senate in 1973. “My father’s and mother’s generation knew what was at stake,” he told the BBC. “They knew that democracy was literally hanging in the balance.”
This vision stands in contrast to Trump’s. At the heart of Trump’s worldview is a certain revisionism: that the order constructed in 1945 did not serve American interests. According to this logic, the alliances and obligations which followed — from NATO to Bretton Woods — amounted to a con, in which America sacrificed its industries, overvalued its currency, and underwrote the security of freeloading allies. Trump’s foreign policy is a repudiation of the moral and strategic assumptions that guided American power for generations. Clearly, the consensus has fractured and the paradigm has shifted.
Trump says the quiet part out loud. Post-1945 supremacy came at a cost, and it wasn’t worth paying. For Biden, those sacrifices were not only necessary but noble. “Imagine there being no NATO,” he told the BBC’s Nick Robinson. “Do you think Putin would have stopped at Ukraine?” The irony is plain: the United States has become the revisionist power in the very order it built. For decades, the threat was assumed to come from Moscow, Beijing or jihadist terror. In the end, it came from within — from the exhaustion of a public no longer persuaded that sacrifice abroad yielded security at home. The genie is out of the bottle. Who among the next generation of Democratic leaders is willing to say that Americans must bear the economic cost for the defense of distant capitals?
Democrats are studiously avoiding the question. Electoral imperatives steer them towards economic concerns — inflation, trade instability, the fallout from Trump’s tariffs. It is easier to condemn the apparent absurdities, such as proposals to annex Canada or buy Greenland, than to confront the deeper erosion of American global leadership. The prospective contenders for 2028 are not foreign policy thinkers. They are governors such as Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer, whose appeal rests on domestic competence, or progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who frame the political battle in terms of oligarchy and inequality. None are steeped in the logic of liberal internationalism. None appear especially eager to defend it.
Biden makes his argument because he believes it and because he has lived it. The 82-year-old former president’s remarks are a condemnation of Trump rooted in nostalgia for a time when American power was a responsibility rather than a burden. “We’re not the essential nation,” he told the BBC, “but we’re the only nation in the position […] to bring people together — to lead the world.” Biden’s words were those of the last postwar liberal internationalist, spoken on the anniversary of a victory fewer and fewer Americans now commemorate, as new doctrines of US power rise from the ashes of the old.
Angus Reilly is Assistant Editor at Engelsberg Ideas. He is writing a book about Henry Kissinger in the Second World War and a biography of David Owen.
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