Emma Shortis

Having worked for the Democrats in the United States and as chief of staff to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Bruce Wolpe has credentials. Few in Australia are better placed to examine the implications for Australia, and particularly the Labor government, of a possible Trump return in 2024. 

Michael Mandelbaum’s book The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy is intended as another instalment, the author argues (quoting Pieter Geyl), in history’s ‘argument without end’. Historians of US foreign policy have long been engaged in their own particular argument – mostly, a competition over naming rights. In the most prestigious instalments – and Mandelbaum’s contribution is certainly one of those – the argument is not so much over the substance of history, but over its categorisation.

The forty-sixth president of the United States, like most of his predecessors, is an avid student of American history. In August 2022, Joe Biden met for the second time with a group of pre-eminent historians to discuss his presidency and the many threats facing American democracy. A month later, standing in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he told the American people: ‘I know our history.’ Biden has, from the beginning of his campaign for the presidency, characterised his own period of American history as a ‘battle for the soul of the nation’, riffing off historian Jon Meacham’s book The Soul of America: The battle for our better angels (2018).