Grave new world

EVEN BEFORE THE PRESIDENT-ELECT finally began getting the daily briefing from U.S. intelligence services on Nov. 30, Joe Biden would start his day at his home outside Wilmington, Del., with a two-page rundown on the world. The document was prepared by his own foreign policy and intelligence experts, who several times a week also provide a focused brief on one area of a globe already familiar to the former Vice President and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But an additional benefit of the sessions, with longtime advisers like incoming National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State–designee Antony Blinken, was that they felt almost … normal.

Which is what much of America and the world is craving. For many worn out by President Donald Trump’s disruptions, Biden’s taking the helm of U.S. foreign policy raises the reassuring prospect that the world might go back to the way it was. Even Republican graybeards who have worked with Biden—and Blinken and Sullivan—quietly say they hope for a return to good order on the foreign front. Among America’s allies overseas, the response to Biden’s election “was the collective breathing of a huge sigh of relief,” says former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. “You could sense the unknotting of shoulders all the way from Seoul to Sydney.” Biden himself sounded a reassuring note when he took the podium in Wilmington on Nov. 24 and declared, “America is back.”

But the truth is harder. Biden and his foreign counterparts know