President Joe Biden has said he wants to use foreign policy to advance the interests of working people, approaching global affairs as an extension of domestic policy. But the administration faces criticism it is attempting to formulate policy to address its top political aim at home: to reach voters in the hotly contested industrial base.

Biden’s idea of a foreign policy for the middle class “takes us back to the Trump campaign in 2016,” said Kiron Skinner, director of policy planning at the State Department during the Trump administration and now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.