After last year’s NATO summit, Joe Biden talked to reporters about the war in Ukraine, U.S. military assistance to the government in Kyiv, the invitations to Sweden and Finland to join NATO, and the global economy.
The message that the U.S. president emphasized, on all of these issues, was that “America is back.” After the isolationist rhetoric of the Trump years, the United States was once again participating in multilateral initiatives and shouldering its share of alliance burdens. It was the defining message of his presidency from day one.
But the first question Biden fielded at the press conference was not about foreign policy at all. It was about the Supreme Court, which had recently overturned constitutional protections for abortion, and the perception both domestically and internationally that the United States was not back, but backwards.
Biden’s answer was telling. He insisted that America was indeed moving forward. “America is better positioned to lead the world than we ever have been,” he said. “We have the strongest economy in the world. Our inflation rates are lower than other nations in the world.”
But then the U.S. president pivoted: “The one thing that has been destabilizing is the outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court …read more
Source:: Institute for Policy Studies
