ACCORDING to many scholars, a Joe Biden presidency will mean a return to a more traditional United States foreign policy; one whose focus is to champion and defend the liberal world order it had a hand in creating.
Biden himself had confirmed this in a foreign affairs article ("Why America must lead again") earlier this year, in which he wrote about the need for US to reclaim leadership of the free world, to promote democracy, advance human rights and strengthen global rules on trade.
Some commentators have referred to this as a return of American exceptionalism, the belief that US is uniquely and naturally placed to champion those liberal values it claims as inextricably meshed with its DNA.
This belief, according to Joseph S. Nye in his article "American exceptionalism in the age of Trump", has both inspired efforts towards a freer and more peaceful world based on a system of international law and organisations but has also encouraged US to ignore those same laws when it suited it.
Is there room for American exceptionalism today? The world today is a different one. Biden himself has acknowledged this in an interview on NBC's "Nightly News" on Nov 24 last year ("We face a totally different world than we faced in the Obama-Biden administration").
Definitely, it is not the same one as that which emerged after World War 2 or the end of the Cold War. Take for instance the two key aspects of the liberal world order — democracy and free market capitalism.
Democracy is walking with a limp these days. The 2020 Democracy Perception Index (DPI) found that while 78 per cent of the respondents viewed democracy as important to have in their country (a slight decrease from 79 per cent in 2019), 40 per cent of the respondents in democratic countries believed their countries were not democratic.
In fact, 43 per cent of the respondents perceived their governments were solely serving the needs of a small group. More concerning for US is that only 44 per cent felt US' global influence has a positive influence on democracy around the world, compared with 38 per cent who disagreed.
In relation to free market capitalism, public perception is mixed. A Pew Research Centre's 2018 Global Attitudes Survey found that people around the world broadly viewed international trade and economic integration as good for their country.
However, that same survey also found that most advanced economies, including US, were less convinced of the overall benefits of trade compared with the people in emerging markets.
In a 2020 survey on foreign direct investment, it was found that while most viewed it positively, investments that entailed building factories were viewed more beneficial than those that involved buying domestic companies outright.
This clearly will impact trade policies around the world and it is doubtful we shall see a return to the intense trade and investment liberalisation that characterised much of the 1990s.
If we include perceptions on governments performance in managing the Covid-19 pandemic, the challenge for US is even more daunting.
The DPI recorded high rates of satisfaction among respondents in China, Vietnam, Greece, Malaysia and Ireland, which were among those that had at one time or another during the period imposed the strictest measures, according to the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker.
In fact, the DPI found that almost all countries rate China's response as better than US'. The world today is indeed a different one, and US and the values it champions no longer has the legitimacy it did in the early 1990s.
China offers a legitimate alternative. Middle powers can also play an important role if they can come together as they did when they concluded the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.
US needs to understand that it still has an important role to play but neither it nor the values it champions are exceptional. A humbler, more inclusive, foreign policy may be the way to go.
The writer is Deputy Head of Cluster, Cluster of Expertise Development, National Institute of Public Administration