Inflection Point: Biden, Trump, and the Future World Order

From a Biden administration insider, an account of how global crises were managed and a warning of what is to come.

The old international order is over, and a competition is underway to determine what comes next. Inflection Point is an insider account of how the Biden administration handled global crises and what is to come under Trump and beyond. Written by a senior member of President Biden’s National Security Council, this book argues there are now two Americas – one internationalist and the other America First – that will compete with each other to shape the world.

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Introduction

‘I’ve said many times before: we’re at an inflection point. The post-Cold war period is over. A new era has begun.’

President Joseph R. Biden, foreign policy remarks, State Department, 13 January 2025

The United States’ 2022 National Security Strategy declared that ‘the post-Cold War era is definitively over and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next’. In America, this sentiment is widely shared among Democrats and Republicans. But there is intense ideological competition in the United States to determine the type of order America should now try to create. This competition started after the Obama administration, which was the last restorationist US government that sought to preserve the post-Cold War order largely as it was and without major changes to US strategy.

Donald Trump’s first presidential term (2017-2021) seemed to be something of an aberration. He was a nationalist and a protectionist, but he was hemmed in by his cabinet officials, who tended to be more traditional conservative internationalists committed to alliances and a relatively open global economy. Trump took the United States in a very different direction. But by the end of his term, much of it seemed reversible and there was every possibility that the Republican standard-bearer in 2024 would be a conservative internationalist.

In office, Joe Biden spoke like a restorationist (‘America is back’) but did not govern as one. He broke with President Obama and Clinton in significant wats – on the Washington consensus for international economics, and on China and Russia. One can find in his administration a distinctive worldview for an era defined simultaneously by strategic competition with revisionist autocracies like Russia and China, and by interdependence.

When Trump came back, he changed course – embracing tariffs and economic warfare, sidelining great power competition. And flirting with territorial expansion. A new generation of America Firsters led by Vie President JD Vance began to lay out a worldview that is likely to endure in the Republican Party after Trump departs as president. This worldview does not always align with what Trump says and does.

This Paper seeks to discern those two worldviews – the emerging Democratic and America First perspectives – and their implications for world order, drawing on foreign policy in the Biden administration, in which I served as senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council, and the first 12 months of the second Trump administration. Each administration acted decisively in very distinct ways.

During the Cold War , the United States pursued strategies of containment. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis has shown, there was some variance between these strategies from president to president and from party to party. But what the strategies had in common – support from alliance, hostility to the Soviet Union, opposition to protectionism – was more important and significant. This is no longer the case. There is a vast difference between the emerging Democratic and America First worldviews.

The focus of this Paper is on what we have learned from the implementation of these two worldviews and what it reveals about how Democrats and Republicans are likely to see the world in years to come.

Chapter 1 looks at what we learned about world order and Democratic foreign policy from the Russia-Ukraine war, while Chapter 2 asks the same questions for China strategy. Chapter 3 looks at trump’s trade and China’s policies, and Chapter 4 focusses on how Trump is handling alliances and partnerships. Finally, Chapter 5 considers the impact of these two worldviews upon global order and how other countries are likely to react. The Trump chapters address events up until mid-February 2026, including the dramatic Delta Force raid to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the trans-Atlantic standoff over Greenland.

In many ways, Trump’s return to the presidency confirmed the end not just of the post-Cold War order but of the order that was built and sustained by the United States after the Second World War based around alliances, economic integration, and strategic restraint. While remnants and champions of that order still exist, it has been shattered by the collapse of the American consensus and the rise of revisionist autocracies. We are now in a new world with two different Americas.Neither is likely to vanquish the other politically to chart a consistent course for decades. Instead, the country is likely to move back and forth between them.

If one looks back at American political history since 1944, Democrats have held the presidency for 40 years and Republicans are in their forty-second year. Essentially, the two parties have split the White House 50:50. There is no reason to expect that to change. But now, the geopolitical fluctuation that will occur when power changes hands is likely to be seismic.

The mere probability that such change will occur each time the presidency moves from one party to the other will itself have an impact on world politics. Can allies trust extended nuclear deterrence (America’s promise to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, to defend an ally) if it is only likely to be provided half the time? How will countries structure their economies if 20 per cent tariffs are imposed and taken off every four to eight years? The ideological contest inside America, and the world’s adjustment to it, will shape the international order for some time to come.