Opinion: Biden Should Look Abroad for Strategies to Fix the U.S.

The worst thing that President-elect Joe Biden can do right now is to spend any more time with election lawyers. The irritations of President Donald Trump’s unseemly rearguard action are already fading away. The challenge of governing the country will only grow. The ugly truth is that the new president’s inheritance is a much tougher one than most of Biden’s supporters realize — on two counts.

First, as Covid-19 has revealed in painful detail, the U.S. is falling behind much of the world, not just in health care but also in most of the functions of government. Second, little of this falling behind is really Trump’s fault. The disruptive child being dragged out of the White House is more a symptom of what ails the U.S. than a cause. Merely removing him will not solve much.

From this perspective, Biden should do what other great U.S. presidents have done when their country has started to fall behind: Look abroad and copy what works.

For all the talk about American exceptionalism, the best American leaders have never been ashamed of learning from abroad, especially in times of trouble. The founding fathers carefully studied the world’s most successful political systems, particularly those of Britain, France and ancient Rome. James Madison pored over comparative constitutions while at Princeton, while John Adams and Thomas Jefferson drew on their experience as envoys to France.

A century ago, the Progressives stole ideas from Europe: President Woodrow Wilson even began writing a universal history of the state in order to redesign U.S. institutions for a post-laissez-faire age. During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt based Social Security on foreign pension systems and turned to John Maynard Keynes for economic ideas. President Lyndon B. Johnson borrowed the phrase “Great Society” from another British academic, Graham Wallas, while the Ronald Reagan administration borrowed “privatization” from Margaret Thatcher. America’s most influential statesman of the late 20th century, Henry Kissinger, based much of his diplomacy on the European concept of balance of power.

Nowadays, Kissinger still draws on Metternich and Talleyrand when he thinks about the U.S.-China relationship, but in terms of public policy he is a cosmopolitan exception. Washington, sadly, has stopped learning from abroad in terms of ideas and has become the rich world’s most parochial capital city.

The lobbyists and lawyers who infest the town are preoccupied with exploiting their knowledge of the intricacies of the U.S. system to win advantage for their clients. Of course, a president whose foreign policy was summed up by “America First” has not helped, but Trump’s blinkeredness is hardly unusual. With John McCain gone, can you name a senator who understands what is happening in the rest of the world?

No, neither could we.

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