The end of open door globalism: how Biden and the democratic foreign policy elite consolidated trump’s remaking of American grand strategy

A new research article in the journal Cambridge Review of International Affairs argues that Joe Biden’s foreign policy represented less a restoration of pre-Donald Trump liberal internationalism than a consolidation of Trump’s break with “Open Door Globalism”. While Biden rhetorically rejected “America First”, his administration preserved and expanded economic nationalism and strategic competition with China.

Using a critical political economy framework, three scholars from Vrij Universiteit Amsterdam explain this continuity through the interaction of structural change and elite adaptation. The 2008 financial crisis, the contradictions of neoliberal globalisation and China’s rise reshaped both US domestic politics and foreign-policy thinking, making a return to post-Cold War globalism politically and strategically unviable.

The authors contend that Biden broadened Trump’s trade war into a wider techno-industrial strategy centred on export controls, industrial policy and supply-chain “de-risking”. Unlike Trump, however, Biden coupled economic nationalism with renewed alliance management, especially through NATO and Indo-Pacific partnerships, framing global politics as a contest between democracies and autocracies.

They also analyse the composition of Biden’s foreign-policy elite. Although many officials emerged from Obama-era networks and establishment think tanks, they had comparatively weak ties to transnational capital and Wall Street. This, the article argues, created intellectual and political space for a “post-neoliberal” foreign policy that retained US global leadership ambitions while abandoning key assumptions of neoliberal globalisation.

The article concludes that Trump was not an anomaly but a turning point. Biden altered the style and discourse of US foreign policy, yet largely accepted the structural logic underlying Trump’s nationalist reorientation.