In March 1990, Playboy magazine ran a lengthy interview with a 43-year-old Manhattan real estate mogul who was about to open the most expensive casino ever built, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He bragged about his outsized ego as essential to his business success, but it was his statements about foreign affairs that proved truly eye-popping. Instead of rejoicing that communism was coming to an end, he denounced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for infirmity of purpose—“not a firm enough hand.” It was the Chinese dictatorship, by contrast, that captured his admiration. It had shown at Tiananmen Square how a great nation should react when confronted with internal dissent: “They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world.”
This is the credo, or at any rate instinct, that guided Donald Trump during his presidency and continues to animate his rhetoric. Trump admires, even fetishizes, strength. In his eyes, dictatorships are strong, unless their leaders don’t have the guts to utilize their inherent power. Trump also disdains weakness, and to him, democracies are weak, unless their leaders grab extra-democratic powers. Weaker still are alliances of democracies, in which smaller nations inevitably bilk and constrain the larger. Weakest of all are impoverished (see “shithole”) countries and the stateless (refugees, Palestinians). His idea of smart foreign policy is for the United States to build better relationships based on mutual interests with strong (dictatorial) countries and impose its will on weak ones—or ignore them altogether.
In his presidency, Joe Biden has been guided by an entirely different set of principles: the liberal realism of Harry Truman’s administration, which sought to create a preponderance of power for America after World War II. This tradition presumes that democracies have inherent strengths over dictatorships, that alliances with other democracies are force multipliers, and that wise statecraft involves making not only cold-blooded decisions to protect U.S. interests but also generous ones that alleviate the plight of the weak, lest their problems become ours.
Trump’s pro-authoritarian views are linked to an old strain of U.S. conservative thinking, as I explain in my new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Influential figures in this tradition, from H. L. Mencken to Charles Lindbergh to Patrick J. Buchanan, were drawn to what they saw as the strength of foreign autocrats (Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin) as a model of how to fight against the supposed flabbiness and decadence of liberal democracy.
But the national security and foreign policy advisers Trump brought into his administration did not generally share, nor even fully grasp, his pro-authoritarian views, being more Reaganite in their orientation. Trump was therefore constantly doing battle with those around him when trying to advance his agenda. This led to herky-jerky decision-making—made worse by Trump’s natural impetuosity and ignorance. Few presidents have had as many critical books written about them by people who served in their administration as Trump, and a disproportionate number of those were penned by key members of his foreign policy team.
This pattern expressed itself most fully in the administration’s relations with Russia. As has been well documented, Putin’s regime went to great lengths to help Trump get elected, and Trump returned the favor repeatedly while in office. On May 10, 2017, a day after firing FBI Director James Comey for investigating what Trump termed “this Russia thing,” he invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to the Oval Office, where he divulged classified information to them about the Islamic State. A little over a year later, at a summit meeting in Helsinki, Trump publicly sided with Putin over his own FBI about accusations that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump declared. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Even as Trump was cozying up to Putin, his administration was inflicting numerous sanctions on Russia. But many of those sanctions were forced on Trump by U.S. law, and the president consistently bridled at imposing them. In April 2018, after the Kremlin deployed the lethal Novichok nerve agent in Great Britain against the former Russian military intelligence officer and double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Russian officials. In August 2018, after Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, the U.S. imposed a second round of sanctions. “State announced the sanctions, since no new decision was required. Trump, upon hearing the news, wanted to rescind them,” wrote former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton in his memoirs, The Room Where It Happened. Trump was enraged when the State and Treasury Departments determined in November 2018 that Russia remained in violation of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act. A fresh round of sanctions was announced that included the termination of loans to Russia other than for purchasing agricultural products. Trump balked at implementing them. Only in August 2019 did he yield to congressional pressure and slap the sanctions on Moscow.
Even on the rare occasions when Trump willingly challenged Russia, such as his sanctioning of Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, he had other motives. The sanctions infuriated German Chancellor Angela Merkel, his biggest rival among the Western powers, and pleased then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire Trump ally whose country has an existing gas pipeline with which Nord Stream 2 would have competed.
Then there was Trump’s handling of relations with NATO and the European Union. Trump consistently demanded that NATO members increase their defense contributions, earning praise from NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. Even as its members upped their military spending, though, Trump also threatened to exit the organization. At a summit meeting in Brussels in July 2018, for example, Trump flirted with leaving NATO, prompting Bolton to recall that “it was frightening because we didn’t know what he was going to do until the last minute.” Since then, Trump has stated that Russia could do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that he deems are spending too little for their own defense.
During Trump’s first year in office, North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb and launched an intercontinental missile capable of reaching the continental United States. Trump responded with ad-libbed bravado that stunned his subordinates: More such threats, he said, “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” But after that ill-advised warning produced no change in North Korean behavior, Trump pivoted 180 degrees and tried to befriend North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. He accepted an invitation from Kim to meet in person, despite the regime’s refusal to offer concessions in advance (the reason no previous president has thought it wise to meet with a North Korean leader). After that high-pomp-and-circumstance summit, and another, Trump met with Kim again in 2019, this time in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, becoming the first U.S. president to step foot in North Korea.
As if fawning personal visits weren’t enough, Trump also ordered the cessation of U.S. military exercises with South Korea, a staunch but vulnerable ally. All Kim offered in return was the same vague language his country had proposed for years, calling for denuclearizing the Korean peninsula—shorthand for a demand that the United States remove its missiles—and, in 2020, the Hermit Kingdom unveiled a new, larger ICBM capable of carrying multiple warheads and hitting much of the United States mainland. Trump’s diplomacy succeeded only in elevating Kim’s international stature and strengthening North Korea’s diplomatic relationships with China and Russia. But Trump remained so enamored of the young dictator that he showed off to guests a series of letters between the two men as though they were signed Derek Jeter baseball cards. He even took what he called the “love letters” with him to Mar-a-Largo, part of the hundreds of purloined government documents he is facing trial for hiding in a bathroom, among other places.
Trump has made it plain that he wants to create a kind of illiberal international. Biden has made clear that his paramount aim is to preserve and strengthen the existing liberal international order.
Trump takes great pride that under his command the U.S. military and U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria defeated the brutal ISIS insurgency and killed its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Yet seven months after driving ISIS out of the last bit of territory it held, Trump committed one of the greatest acts of double-cross in U.S. history. After an angry phone call from Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who considers the Kurdish fighters anti-Turkish terrorists, Trump agreed to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria. That left Erdoğan’s military and Turkish-backed militias free to strafe and bomb America’s onetime Kurdish allies with impunity.
Trump’s proclivity for catering to the powerful and selling out the weak also showed itself in his dealings with Israel. Previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, had held off formally recognizing Jerusalem as that nation’s capital and moving the American embassy there as an inducement to Israel to negotiate peace with the Palestinians. Trump granted these two long-standing Israeli requests with no strings attached. Similarly, his administration negotiated the Abraham Accords, which raised by four the number of Arab nations that formally recognized Israel but bypassed the Palestinians in the process. This emboldened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex more territory in the West Bank and left Hamas, Netanyahu’s frenemy, even more isolated. The terrorist group’s brutal October 7 attack represented in part an attempt to break that isolation and disrupt the growing partnership between Israel and the Arab world.
A similar dynamic guided Trump policy toward Afghanistan. His administration brokered a peace deal with the Taliban without including the weak but democratically elected Afghan government in the talks. Trump’s negotiators were hoping that this would pressure the Afghan government to share power with the Taliban. Instead, the agreement signaled to the Afghan military that it was on its own and that surrendering to the Taliban was safer than continuing to fight. Trump amplified that message when, soon after losing the 2020 presidential election, he ordered a precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan—an order Pentagon officials, knowing it would lead to chaos, refused to carry out on the grounds that it had not gone through proper legal channels. (The collapse of the Afghan military a year later when Biden pulled troops out, in keeping with the Trump deal, came as a shock, but, in retrospect, shouldn’t have.)
When Joe Biden became president, he brought with him not only a more traditional foreign policy vision but also a far deeper knowledge of the mechanics of Washington’s foreign policy and military apparatus. Though not a prisoner of this so-called “blob”—as his bold decision to leave Afghanistan despite an outcry from the elite media and the State and Defense Departments indicates—neither has he been at constant war with it as was Trump. Rather, Biden has managed the national security bureaucracies with a deft touch in the face of challenges much more dire than those that occurred on Trump’s watch.
Exhibit A is Ukraine. In late 2021, the Biden administration started publicly releasing U.S. intelligence findings that the Russian military was on the verge of a massive invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin denied it, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders didn’t believe it. But the prediction turned out to be accurate, and it bought Biden extra credibility as he rallied the American public and the world community to Ukraine’s defense. Since Putin invaded on February 24, 2022, the United States and 46 other countries have poured $243 billion in weapons and other aid into Ukraine. With that international support, the doughty Ukrainians have transformed what most experts thought would be a quick Russian victory into a bloody two-year stalemate in which Russia has lost nearly 90 percent of the active-duty troops and two-thirds of the tanks it had prior to the war. And while Putin had hoped to fracture NATO, Biden has leveraged the Russian invasion to revive the alliance and expand its membership by including Sweden and Finland. NATO has never been stronger or more effective.
Biden has been similarly skillful in his dealings with China. Trump combined lavish praise of Chinese President Xi Jinping with tariffs on Chinese imports that wound up increasing America’s overall trade deficit. Biden, who has known Xi for more than a decade, has been more effective, at least so far, in checking China’s economic and military threats. He has restricted the sale of advanced microchips to China, which have critical military uses; begun finding other sources of key materials, like rare earth metals, that China controls; banned goods made by Uyghur slave labor; and created or strengthened defense partnerships with Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea. At the same time, he has convinced China to curb the export of chemicals used to make the dangerous opioid fentanyl, to refrain from resupplying Russia with weapons, and to join the U.S. in tackling climate change by ramping up renewable energy sources.
As with Russia and China, Biden has managed the chaotic Middle East adroitly, though at significant cost to himself politically. His early embrace of and steady supply of weaponry to Israel after the October 7 Hamas massacre, plus his carefully calibrated U.S. military actions—such as a precision missile strike that killed an Iraqi militant commander responsible for the deaths of three U.S. soldiers, rather than direct engagement with Iran, as U.S. hawks have demanded—have so far achieved the administration’s main objective, which is keeping the Gaza catastrophe from morphing into a regional war. As it stands, he is toughening his stance toward Netanyahu over prolonging and escalating the war. Whether he can alleviate the ongoing human devastation in Gaza and turn the calamity into a diplomatic process that leads to a two-state solution—his larger goal—is an open question.
Any hope for that, of course, will require that he win reelection, and the contrast between Biden and Trump could hardly be starker. Trump has made it plain that he wants to create a kind of illiberal international. He would likely eviscerate NATO by declaring Article V, which commits its members to a common defense, null and void. He continues to praise Putin as a great leader and the Russian military as “a war machine.” He met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago in March and praised him as “the boss.” As Biden imposed new sanctions on Russia after the murder of Alexei Navalny, Trump likened himself to Navalny. Were Trump to abandon Ukraine and encourage Putin to reestablish dominance over eastern Europe, it would be the end of the Western alliance. At the same time, Trump might well jettison the alliances America enjoys with Japan and South Korea, while imposing tariffs in excess of 60 percent on Chinese goods. The result would be turbulence, if not chaos, abroad.
By contrast, Biden has made clear, in his rhetoric and actions, that his paramount aim is to preserve and strengthen the existing liberal international order. In standing for democracy and cooperation with allies, Biden is adhering to the traditions of every previous administration since World War II, Trump’s notwithstanding. These traditions have formed the basis of American prosperity and liberty. Abandoning them would not be a strategic and moral mistake. It would be a calamity.
