When Secretary of State Antony Blinken strapped on a guitar and took the stage at a Kyiv rock club last week to sing Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” he didn’t amuse many of the Biden administration’s critics, who questioned whether the jam session was in good taste at a time when children are starving in Gaza and when Russian forces are making rapid gains in eastern Ukraine, partly due to the long delay in delivering US weapons to the front.

But the song’s eponymous chorus (Blinken skipped the far more caustic verses, which make it clear that Young was being ironic) is a good representation of how the Biden administration would like its foreign policy to be viewed, particularly when it comes to support for Ukraine. As Blinken told the crowd, Ukraine’s forces “are fighting not just for a free Ukraine but for the free world — and the free world is with you too.”

Almost from the beginning, President Joe Biden has defined his administration as locked in a struggle to push back against the global erosion of democracy and “win the 21st century” against authoritarian powers like China and Russia. He has often described this struggle as guiding not just America’s foreign policy but its domestic priorities, saying America must prove that democracy “still works” to deliver economic growth and prosperity. This type of rhetoric only intensified after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Biden has framed as a test of the democratic world’s resolve.

The democracy versus autocracy framing drew a stark contrast with Donald Trump, who as president took a........

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