Opinion | ‘Trump Is at His Absolute Worst in a Crisis’: Three Columnists Imagine the World Ahead

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists David French, Lydia Polgreen and Bret Stephens about the biggest risks and challenges facing America in the world today and the leadership of President Biden and President-elect Donald Trump.

Patrick Healy: President Biden is about to hand back national security and foreign policy to Donald Trump, and the president-elect is already musing about taking Greenland and the Panama Canal by military force. Trump has big notions about America’s place in the world, and that’s where I want to start.

We started the new year with the truck attack in New Orleans by an Army veteran who had an ISIS flag. You have hostages and fighting still in Gaza, and a new Ukrainian offensive in Kursk. The Biden team portrays the world as safer than when the president took office, while Trump sees a world in chaos and is promising order and peace while making a lot of threats to other countries. Let’s start with a base-line question: Do you think America is stronger and more secure in the world today than it was four years ago?

Bret Stephens: The fault doesn’t lie with the Biden administration alone, but it’s hard to argue that President Biden leaves office with the world safer than he found it.

Iran, China, Russia and North Korea now form a new axis of repression and cooperate in ways that were hard to imagine a few years ago. NATO has a couple of new members and is spending a bit more on defense, but the war in Ukraine is not going well, in part because of the administration’s reluctance to supply it with the arms it needed when it needed them. China’s threatening behavior toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea has gone from bad to worse. And Islamist terrorism may be resurgent. The one bright spot is the weakening of Iran and its proxies in the last few months, but that was brought about not by the administration but by Israel’s military successes — achieved often in the face of Biden’s opposition.

Lydia Polgreen: One thing that strikes me about the Biden administration and this era in the world is the element of surprise and seeming unpreparedness. There was the Afghanistan withdrawal, which really weakened Biden. But I also think of the comment by the national security adviser Jake Sullivan about the “quieter” Middle East just a week before Oct. 7, and then the total failure of the administration to influence Benjamin Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war in Gaza. And now we have the seeming surprise at the stunningly rapid fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Perhaps the best way to achieve strength and security is to anticipate, influence and shape global events in the interests of the United States. And on that score I think we have had a pretty lousy four years.