Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

I am joined today by Richard Beck. He is a senior writer for N-plus-1 magazine. He's also the author of the fourth coming book, Homeland, The War on Terror in American Life, which is coming in September.

But he's here today because he recently wrote an article in the new Left Review called Bidenism

abroad. And I think this article is such a must read for everyone who wants to understand the Biden administration's foreign policy that I just had to talk to, Richard, about this article.

So Richard Beck, thank you for joining us on current affairs today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, one of the reasons I like what you did with this article is because it's a really nice kind of one-stop shop for understanding the recent history of

American foreign policy, for contextualizing what people might see in the news, for understanding

the worldview of those in the Biden administration, what they think that they are doing, and then, you know,

what they are actually doing. But your book is, as I understand it, it is sort of a book review.

So you are talking about a particular book by a political reporter. You're sort of, you're building

all of this analysis around discussion of

this book, The Internationalist, the fight to restore American foreign policy after Trump, which I take

it you think is a very interesting document for trying to understand the mind administration's policies.

Let's start with that. Let's start with what is it that you think makes this book

such an interesting document for understanding? Well, the piece wasn't designed at the outset

to be a review of this book. I read the internationalists in the course of, you know, doing research

for the article, which was just commissioned and, you know, intended to be kind of a synthesis

of Biden's foreign policy as a whole.

But of the various books and articles that I read getting ready to put a draft together,

the internationalists seemed more than any of the others to really give you a sense of how

people inside the Biden administration saw their own

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