President Biden promised to reverse 'America First' foreign policy and restore US global leadership, yet his administration largely continued Trump's shift away from the long-standing grand strategy of Open Door Globalism. While partially reembracing diplomacy and alliances, Biden and the Democratic foreign policy elite consolidated the Trumpian shift away from (neo-)liberal expansionism to a strategy of economic nationalism and expansive competition with China. This article explains the striking continuity and limited change in Biden's foreign policy by analysing interaction between the changing global and domestic context and the agency of Biden's foreign policy-making elite. We map the shifting ideas and interests of Biden's top officials who, while part of the pre-Trump foreign policy establishment, were less tied to transnational capital. The deepening contradictions of neoliberal globalisation that enabled Trump's rise, also reshaped the grand strategy of Biden's team, making a full return to Open Door Globalism neither feasible nor desirable.
What impact do signs of change in international politics have on the images and learning of decision-makers? Is there a relational and cumulative dynamic between events, adaptation, learning, and change in foreign policy? Based on this problem, this article analyses Portuguese foreign policy in relation to the Timor-Leste issue at the start of its Europeanisation and identifies the main signs of change that influenced the Timor-Leste issue and the cognitive evolution of Portuguese elites. Through an analysis of ideas, contexts, and discourses, this article compares Portugal and Indonesia's ideas and strategies and demonstrates the dynamics of adaptation to various movements of change and the consequent growing visibility of the Timor-Leste issue. This article argues that this growing importance resulted from the interaction between contextual and agential factors, with an emphasis on the perceptual learning process of the Portuguese elites.
This research explores T & uuml;rkiye's governmental and nongovernmental engagements with ECOSOC. Addressing the notable lack of scholarly attention to T & uuml;rkiye's multi-stakeholder participation in normative governance within the UN, the study contributes to understanding Turkish governmental and civil society engagement in ECOSOC as a global governance forum for norm-making and deliberation on development goals. Employing a grounded research design, the study analyses oral and written statements by the Turkish government and accredited Turkish NGOs in ECOSOC meetings. The findings show that governmental representatives primarily endorse global partnership and development-financing norms while contesting some of their foundational principles under the guise of sovereignty, national ownership, and burden-sharing. Accredited NGOs, by contrast, advance rights-based, gender-just, and participatory interpretations of developmental objectives, particularly gender and youth goals. The intricate dynamics of normative validation and contestation are influenced by T & uuml;rkiye's oscillation between a democracy-promoting model country and a competitive middle power, whose contributions to the implementation of developmental goals have been increasingly shaped by its evolving governance trajectory. Consequently, ECOSOC has functioned both as a platform for the government to assert its normative identity and as a venue for accredited Turkish NGOs to either expand their capacity to influence global norms or directly challenge governmental agendas on the global stage.
