As President Biden greeted the leaders of his 31 allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization a week ago, he described in vivid terms how he thought history would treat his first term in office.
He was the American president who had restored and then expanded NATO, the world’s biggest military alliance, saving it from his predecessor’s threats to withdraw from it. He organized the West to push back against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and in so doing deterred Moscow from direct attacks on European nations beyond Ukraine’s borders. And he became the architect of a new American plan to contain China, though he never calls it that: cutting off sophisticated technology to Beijing while pouring billions of federal dollars into producing advanced chips at home.
But Mr. Biden’s defense of his record came too late, after the shocking debate performance that led to his withdrawal from the race on Sunday. And now it will fall to a different nominee — likely but not certainly Vice President Kamala Harris — to defend that record from a radically different interpretation of the past four years promoted by former President Donald J. Trump.
In his acceptance speech in Milwaukee on Thursday night, Mr. Trump insisted he had turned over to Mr. Biden a world at peace in January 2021, and that today “our planet is teetering on the edge of World War III.” It was a disingenuous argument at best. There was a low-level war bubbling in Ukraine throughout Mr. Trump’s term; he simply chose to pay little attention.
Elections are rarely fought on foreign policy records, except when the nation is at war. And while Mr. Biden’s recounting of events hews far closer to the historical record than Mr. Trump’s does, the Democratic nominee will have to explain how she or he will manage a world that is clearly far more dangerous today than four years ago.
Whoever is elected in November will inherit confrontations with America’s nuclear rivals China and Russia, cold wars that are one mistake away from turning hot.
More than any election in decades, this one will be marked by starkly different approaches to an era of simultaneous confrontations: the re-emerging arms race with Beijing and Moscow; deterring attacks on Taiwan and the eastern edge of the Atlantic alliance; Israel’s war against Hamas, which still threatens to set the Middle East aflame. Any one of those could easily explode on the watch of the next president.
