Beware entanglements? ‘Realists’ fret over Biden foreign policy.

When President-elect Joe Biden named Antony Blinken, his longtime foreign-policy aide and a former Obama deputy national security adviser, as his choice to become the next secretary of state, foreign-policy realists shuddered.

Here we go again, they said, with a foreign policy run by idealists and based on American global leadership and promoting democracy and human rights – a recipe, in their view, for a return to the disastrous interventions of the past two decades.

“I wish he’d go with his Joe Biden self who was skeptical of the Afghanistan surge in the Obama administration,” says Michael Desch, professor of international relations and director of Notre Dame International Security Center in Indiana. “But unfortunately, most of the signals are sort of back to the future with a return to the good old days of liberal intervention and American leadership.”

“Evolution” in Biden’s thinking“Idealists” leading the teamCall for “new thinking”