If the Left’s expectations were low for Joe Biden on the domestic sphere, they were somewhere around floor level when it came to foreign policy. Biden didn’t promise much, and what he did promise didn’t seem to point to anything particularly ambitious.

But have conditions nonetheless forced a subtle shift in US foreign policy? And what does the future hold, as Biden takes the reins of empire at a perilous time of global crisis and declining US supremacy?

Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic spoke to Jason Brownlee, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, about Biden’s foreign policy so far, the state of American empire, and whether the United States is really headed toward a “New Cold War” with China.