Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently wrote a long piece for “Foreign Affairs” arguing that the Biden administration has put the U.S. back on the map as the guardian of the rules-based international order. This is a theme President Joe Biden has run with since his first month in office, when he gave a speech extolling the U.S. as the “indispensable nation” and promising stronger American leadership abroad.
Yet for all the talk about reasserting its leadership in the world, the U.S. is often remarkably hesitant to exhibit those leadership qualities when dealing with friendly states. In what is one of the most blatant paradoxes in international relations today, the strongest country in the world frequently finds itself being led by smaller powers whose interests and agendas contrast with its own.
The U.S. is a superpower seemingly stripped of agency, and American policy on Israel and Ukraine demonstrates this well.
Author
More on Middle East
Events on Israel
