The 2022 Reckoning

This is the last Morning Jolt of 2021. I’ll see you January 3. Let’s close out the year by looking at what 2021 brought us and what 2022 is likely to bring. I think the one word that will most succinctly summarize 2022 is “reckoning.”

I can’t predict specifically what’s going to happen in 2022. But I think I can predict the general theme of the coming year: a reckoning, in the sense of a settling of accounts.

Up until the Trump era, America’s role in the world was shaped by a somewhat bipartisan consensus, sometimes snidely referred to as the foreign-policy “blob.” If you look at the worldview of the Davos conference, the United Nations, the World Bank, and most of the employees of the State Department, you see this worldview at work: Diplomacy solves problems. We offer tsk-tsk statements about human rights. Engagement with other countries always pays off in the end.

The Trump presidency offered a brief interruption of that consensus but without much of a coherent alternative. The Trump administration was allegedly a bunch of unilateralist cowboys who put America first, and who didn’t care about world opinion . . . but also pushed through the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic breakthrough that even staunch Trump critics recognize as a significant accomplishment. Trump pledged to end “endless wars” but didn’t hesitate to launch military strikes, slay Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, and so on. He played footsie with foreign dictators with little to show for it, was brusque and difficult with allies, and when the coronavirus pandemic broke out, Trump demonstrated no ability to unite the world, either against the virus or against China.

Joe Biden was very proud of himself for instantly restoring America’s role in the world upon taking office, strutting around and declaring “America is back!” But what Biden meant was that the U.S. would start attending international summits and signing relatively meaningless joint statements again. Biden allegedly wants to pivot to Asia but has a bad habit of backing down to Beijing when things get tough. (This is the kind of White House that throws a “Democracy Summit” but doesn’t want to display Taiwan as an independent country, lest that anger Xi Jinping.) Biden talks tougher about Russia, and intermittently really tries to galvanize alliances against Vladimir Putin, but even here, the Biden administration is sending signals that it’s looking for a chance to make a deal and reward Russian aggression.