‘Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which a democracy possesses,’ Alexis De Tocqueville, the French philosopher, observed in Democracy in America, ‘and they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those faculties in which it is deficient.’
Yet what happens when a country that has made the expansion of democracy the central principle of its foreign policy for generations itself experiences a profound crisis in its own democracy?
That is one of the issues that President Joseph Biden faces as he tries to clean up the messes left by his chaotic predecessor and pursue his own agenda.
