SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
When Joe Biden took office as president, he acknowledged that many Americans had grown weary of the high costs of global leadership. He promised a new approach to U.S. foreign policy to try to prioritize the needs of working Americans. He called it a foreign policy for the middle class, but he may have been knocked off course by war in Europe. NPR's Franco Ordoñez has this look back.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Good afternoon, everyone. It's an honor to be back at the State Department.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: Just two weeks into office, President Biden delivered his first foreign policy speech. He said the U.S. would be a stronger partner abroad if it first boosted its own domestic economy.
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BIDEN: There's no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy. Every action we take in our conduct abroad, we must take with American working families in mind. Advancing a foreign policy for the middle class demands urgent focus on our domestic economic renewal.
ORDOÑEZ: That last part, a foreign policy for the middle class, was something different. The White House insisted it was not just a slogan but an organizing principle for how they would set priorities. The idea was to put domestic needs first, even when it came to foreign policy. Here's national security adviser Jake Sullivan explaining it back in 2020.
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JACK SULLIVAN: Everything we do in our foreign policy and national security will be measured by a basic metric. Is it going to make life better, safer and easier for working families?
ORDOÑEZ: In part, it was a reaction to the popularity of Trump's America First policies, says Charles Kupchan, who served as a senior adviser on European affairs in the Obama White House.
CHARLES KUPCHAN: Too much world, not enough America. What about us? And I think Biden understood that, and that's one of the reasons he wanted to retrench.
ORDOÑEZ: And so there was a focus on plugging holes in supply chains and strengthening buy-American policies. There was a huge investment in infrastructure. And Kupchan says, even the withdrawal from Afghanistan, while ugly, was intended to lighten the load for Americans. But priorities changed almost overnight for Biden when Russia invaded Ukraine. It took up a lot of bandwidth, limiting opportunities to pursue other things that would help the middle class.
Eric Green, who was Biden's senior director for Russia and Central Asia, said it complicated efforts to work on trade, climate and confronting China.
ERIC GREEN: In general, as is often the case with presidencies, it didn't really turn out the way he would have planned it in that first speech.
ORDOÑEZ: To be clear, Biden made a lot of progress with diplomacy. Biden helped overcome generations of friction to bring Japan and South Korea together at Camp David. He strengthened ties with the U.K., India and Australia to counter China, and he repaired relationships with allies in Europe and NATO, which meant a stronger response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
AMANDA SLOAT: In some ways, he may be the last truly Transatlantic president that we have.
ORDOÑEZ: Amanda Sloat served as senior director for Europe on Biden's National Security Council.
SLOAT: His working experience was very much shaped by the importance of these institutions coming out of the ashes of the Second World War.
ORDOÑEZ: But Biden struggled to explain how the billions spent on Ukraine fit with his goals of a foreign policy for the middle class. And over time, he stopped talking about those goals. Heather Conley worked on European issues in the Bush State Department. She liked Biden's concept, but says it didn't really work out.
HEATHER CONLEY: I don't think it was successful because people really aren't listening to Washington. They're focusing on what's happening in their local community.
ORDOÑEZ: And that, she says, means these conversations about the link between foreign policy and the domestic economy need to be happening more at the local level, instead of Washington.
Franco Ordoñez, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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