Back to the future

NOT SINCE George H. W. Bush in 1989 has America inaugurated a president so well-known in world affairs as Joe Biden. A former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then vice-president for eight years, he has had a role in, or a say on, most foreign policy since the cold war. His chosen foreign-policy team, dominated by other veterans of Barack Obama’s administration such as John Kerry and Tony Blinken—a former secretary of state and a prospective one who has briefed Mr Biden for decades—is almost as well-known. Yet for all these familiar elements Mr Biden’s foreign policy is cloaked in uncertainty.