Strategy, grand or otherwise, is about choice. It is about setting priorities. President Biden has a golden opportunity to transform, not restore: to replace the blustering incompetence of the Trump years with a humbler, saner American foreign policy, one that rejects the hubris that helped put Trump in the White House. Defending Forward does promise a restoration of sorts: a restoration of the worst foreign policy ideas since the end of the Cold War. The president would do well to reject it—and its votaries.

Gil Barndollar is a senior research fellow at the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship.

Justin Logan (@justintlogan) is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.