Democracy, Populism, & Domestic Politics, United States Biden wants America to trust the process again

February 11, 2021
By Alex Ward | Vox

Perry World House Director of Communications and Research John Gans is quoted in this article from Vox on President Biden's approach to foreign policy.

President Joe Biden has spent his first weeks in office repudiating much of his predecessor’s foreign policy. But it’s not just the decisions he’s made that separate him from Donald Trump — it’s how he’s made them...

“He is demonstrating, with every review and meeting, that America is back on foreign policy and that there’s somebody on watch, making decisions, thinking things through, and behaving responsibly,” said John Gans, author of White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War. “That’s a big change from the last four years.”...

The NSC, the White House directorate charged with coordinating foreign policy across the government, was created in 1947. Its founding was partly in response to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personalist handling of World War II.

“He kind of ran foreign policy by the seat of his pants,” said Gans. FDR led America’s wars in two theaters while keeping his own vice president, advisers, and US allies in the dark as to his plans. 

Read more in Vox >>