from 2000 to 2010-a period during which NAFTA was already in place, and China joined the World Trade Organization-were due to automation by American companies, not trade. His team echoes the Trump administration’s mistaken assertions that manufacturing jobs fled the United States for cheaper manufacturing abroad, cratering the economy for the American middle class. Presumably because of domestic opposition, the Biden administration has yet to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership-which, as a presidential candidate, Biden vowed to renegotiate. (Never mind that the trilateral United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement was the only trade deal that Trump closed.) To the extent that the Trump administration supported trade negotiations at all, American officials claimed that bilateral arrangements allowed the U.S. That was one of Trump’s arguments for pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade bloc negotiated by the Obama administration and 11 other nations to facilitate trade, set business standards, and counter Chinese influence in the world’s most economically dynamic region. The Trump administration claimed that multilateral trade deals allowed weaker states to gang up on and punish the United States. And both fail to recognize that, by establishing security and expanding the rule of law in ways that enable commerce to create jobs and reduce prices for all Americans, traditional postwar foreign policy was already making an enormous contribution to the middle class. economy, both are fundamentally mercantilist in their intention to promote more exports and discourage more imports, and both hide behind what they perceive to be an isolationist public attitude rather than shape public understanding.

This rhetoric is less strident than Trump’s “America First” approach, but how is it actually different? Both are based on a faulty industrial-age understanding of the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s mea culpa earlier this year for his own previous support of open trade described the Biden administration’s approach in these terms: “We will fight for every American job and for the rights, protections, and interests of all American workers … Our trade policies will need to answer very clearly how they will grow the American middle class, create new and better jobs, and benefit all Americans, not only those for whom the economy is already working.” Supporters defend this approach as a reorientation away from a post–World War II foreign policy that, in their view, privileged the rich by pushing trade agreements that allowed competition from imports and enforcing a multinational order that allowed global business to flourish at workers’ expense.

The goal of what the Biden administration calls “ foreign policy for the middle class” is to promote the interests of America’s middle-class and working people. Despite presenting his agenda as the antithesis of Donald Trump’s, President Joe Biden, like his predecessor, is managing global affairs as an extension of domestic politics and economic policy.

America first