From Washington to Trump to Biden, new presidents meet unwanted foreign crises
President Biden took office a year ago promising to focus on the domestic crisis of that moment — the COVID-19 pandemic that was killing tens of thousands of Americans each week, confining millions to their homes and hobbling the world's largest economy.
Implicit in that promise was the unavoidable corollary: American involvement in other parts of the world would have to take a back seat to the domestic crisis at hand.
That is, until the reckoning in Afghanistan intruded, and before the Russians massed armored divisions on their border with Ukraine.
Biden now finds himself in the grand tradition of new American presidents who have made much the same promise but struggled to keep it. From George Washington's famous warning against "foreign entanglements" to Donald Trump's mantra of "America First," the pledge to prioritize domestic concerns has been almost as constant as the oath of office itself.
But far more difficult to keep.
Washington himself had no sooner taken that oath than the French Revolution caused convulsions on both sides of the Atlantic. Washington knew how much the French had assisted in his own military success, and also how close his fledgling nation was to renewed war with the British. Yet he held out for neutrality so he could concentrate on defending frontier settlements and federal taxing authority closer to home.
His successor, John Adams, had planned to follow Washington's lead before being derailed by a bit of intrigue known as the XYZ Affair (the letters were code for the names of three French diplomats engaged in a secret correspondence).
