No US presidential administration’s foreign policy can be truly assessed until it faces something wholly unexpected, an event that forces it into a reactive posture where the promises of the campaign trail no longer apply. Think September 11, which spawned the War on Terror; or the Arab Spring, which led to the US intervention in Libya; or the 2017 Saudi-Qatari diplomatic crisis, which gave us an incoherent and thus quite Trumpian US response. Joe Biden has yet to face a challenge of that type, one hundred days in.

What we can do, however, is begin to assess Biden’s foreign policy against his own standards. In the March/April 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs, the then-candidate penned a lengthy commentary titled “Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump.” The title speaks to Biden’s intent, which is to restore a pre-Trump foreign policy status quo, albeit with some updates to address problems — among them climate change, infectious disease, and the growth of the global far-right — that he argued had grown worse during Trump’s four years in office.

There is plenty of reason to take issue with the fundamental worldview that underpins Biden’s essay. It is rooted in the same basic principles — US global leadership, “American exceptionalism,” massive military spending — that helped create many of the problems Biden says he wants to resolve. But for our purposes, let’s use Biden’s own framework to measure his performance. Even granting this, Biden’s foreign policy has been awful.