A facile way to frame the future of American foreign policy is to set up two scenarios as a binary choice. If Donald Trump returns to the White House, the United States becomes isolationist. If Joe Biden wins re-election, the U.S. remains broadly internationalist.
That framing neglects a change that may be less obvious but more consequential for other countries, a shift that will keep playing out no matter who wins in November: For the first time in its two-and-a-half centuries, the U.S. will stop looking at the world through the lens of its own exceptionalism and behave as just another great power using its awe-inspiring might to serve a narrow self-interest.
The old notion that America is exceptional was there from the start. It inspired John Winthrop, as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, to speak of a "city on a hill” and former President Ronald Reagan in 1980 to turn the same phrase into a "shining city upon a hill.”