The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has just wrapped up a week-long swing through Europe, while basking in the afterglow of not representing Donald Trump. Along the way Blinken has delivered encouraging, albeit boilerplate, rhetoric: hearty appreciation for the US’s strong ties with Europe, a case for the importance of international cooperation and the Biden team’s latest riff on the responsibilities of the world’s democracies “to deliver” – not just for their citizens, but for the global population. The US has no better friend and partner than (he inserted the name of the country he was visiting) in pursuing this challenge of our time. Blinken’s rhetoric rarely deviates from the standard diplomatic playbook, but his language about China is revealing about the possible direction of nascent US foreign policy. With Europe, Blinken was knocking on an open door. In sharp contrast to the disdain the continent had for his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, who regularly boasted about a speech he gave in Brussels trashing the UN, EU and other multinational institutions, Blinken was hailed as a rock star – starting in Germany where the foreign minister, Heiko Maas, gushed that his country was “very happy that the United States is now back on our side again”. Diplomacy with the US back in a leadership role, he said, over drinks with Blinken in a Berlin beer garden, was not only more productive, but “more fun, too”. In France, where Blinken lived as a young boy, he was greeted by the foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, as “Dear Tony”. These are early days and every incoming administration needs time to review the policies of its predecessors. This is particularly true when it comes to foreign policy – and even more so in the case of the Biden team, which has to unravel a web of policies that in many ways disrupted decades of US global leadership in four short years. The first months of the Biden presidency were spent prioritising the pandemic response and shoring up the US economy. In foreign policy terms, it was framed as a “foreign policy for the middle class”. As the argument goes, a strong US at home can better engage the world by countering global challenges and pursuing policies that promote American values – good global governance, human rights and cooperation on issues such as global health and the climate crisis will benefit Americans. Biden has defined strategic competition with China as the organising principle of US foreign policy during his presidency. In order to enlist US allies, which his national security team believes are America’s key advantage, the administration has framed the competition as a struggle between democracies and autocracies – specifically the Chinese, and, to a lesser extent, Russian, variety. In the presence of allies whose support is needed by the US, Blinken’s rhetoric towards China has not been adversarial. For example, he shied away from calling Beijing an “enemy”, unlike Trump, who harped on China’s negatives. Instead, Blinken sought to accentuate the US’s positives – particularly the allure of its values, which the Biden team considers one of its most potent weapons. Ideas such as the US-led “Build Back Better World”, described as “an affirmative initiative” to meet the infrastructure needs of low- and middle-income countries and compete with China’s predatory belt and road initiative, are meant to offer attractive alternatives to Beijing and show the power of like-minded democratic societies to not just “deliver”, but collectively seize opportunities in a way where the sum is greater than any of its parts. It was a far less antagonistic tone than Blinken took earlier this year in Anchorage, Alaska, when he and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, met Chinese officials. Instead of traditional conciliatory remarks to open the annual strategic and economic dialogue, Blinken said that he and Sullivan would discuss “our deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber-attacks on the United States, and economic coercion toward our allies”, actions that “threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability”. Furious, the top Chinese diplomat, Yang Jiechi, discarded his prepared remarks to deliver a blistering response about the lack of confidence in American democracy and its own human-rights imperfections. In perhaps the one time since taking office, Blinken deviated from his script, and the secretary of state ended the public session with a challenge to the Chinese, telling them, that “it’s never a good bet to bet against America”. The episode was a reflection of how acrimonious the US-China relationship had become and raised global concerns about witnessing the dawn of a new cold war. Since then the US rhetoric has been less fiery, but just as clear on the competitive lens through which Washington sees Beijing. Strategic competition is a coherent framing of the challenge posed by China, but risks what some foreign policy experts like to call “positioning without taking a position”. Brian Katulis, author of the Liberal Patriot newsletter, argues that a key challenge of Biden’s foreign policy team is defining the US’s “strategic narrative” – what it wants to get done and why it matters. Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama, was criticised for articulating what the US was going to do to address particular national security issues, but fell short on the “why”. Obama and his team, Katulis argues, left many in the US and around the world wondering, “What’s the big idea?” The Biden administration has started to make the case for the “why”, but has yet to explain the “what”. For all of their rhetorical flourishes about US values and the need to forge a “united front” of global democracies against Chinese domination, Biden and Blinken still must define coherent policies on how they are going to do that and, more broadly, what the US’s role in the world is going to be. They must also explain how they plan to balance democracy promotion with working cooperatively with more authoritarian-leaning countries such as China on pressing global security issues such as the climate emergency and the pandemic. Blinken’s lofty rhetoric also glosses over how the ongoing crisis inside American democracy affects US standing and its ability to promote democracy abroad. While relieved the US is once again taking a leadership role on the world stage, countries across the globe are understandably wondering whether the US can credibly lead a crusade against the same types of populist, authoritarian and illiberal behaviour it is fighting at home. The US is clearly back at the table but Europe’s strategic patience is not infinite. Biden and Blinken will soon be expected to flesh out more concrete policy proposals for the encouraging vision they are laying out. Elise Labott is a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine and an adjunct professor at American University’s School of International Service