The first is the Obama baseline—the worldview articulated by the Obama administration in its final years. It involves a balanced approach to China and a determination not to have US foreign policy defined by geopolitical competition, combining a desire to avoid interventions in the Middle East with a determination to fulfill America’s traditional role in the region, support for globalization and integration, and a confidence that the long arc of history favors democracy if Americans can invest in their national power and strength, and a wariness of foreign policy activism without clear strategic objectives. One group of centrists continues to broadly hold this worldview, albeit with updates for the events of the past four years—for instance, they are more focused on Russian interference and human rights abuses inside China. I have been calling this group the restorationists.
The second group—whom I have called the 2021 Democrats—see Trump as an existential threat to American democracy and the international order. But they also believe that the world has changed in fundamental ways in the past eight years since President Xi Jinping came to power in China, Vladimir Putin returned as Russia’s president, and Obama was reelected. Nationalist populists have gained power in several countries leading to a weakening of democratic institutions and an existential crisis for centrists. Authoritarianism has used new technologies to modernize its tactics and tools of repression and control. Autocratic leaders have become more assertive and aggressive internationally as the domestic and international constraints fell away. Shared problems, such as climate change and pandemics, have worsened, but international cooperation has become harder to achieve and to explain to domestic audiences. The conviction that the world has fundamentally changed has led the 2021 Democrats to revisit the core tenets and assumptions of Democratic foreign policy in at least four areas: China, cooperation among democracies, foreign economic policy, and the Middle East.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/10/01/between-restoration-and-change/
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