Thomas Wright’s short, effective new book diagnoses how Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s foreign policies signal a transformed world order, albeit in different ways. Wright, who served on Biden’s National Security Council from 2022 to 2025, combines a scholar’s insight and a practitioner’s experience to shed light on a changing world. However, the book is limited by a lack of meaningful discussion about both Israel-Palestine, and the future of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy.
Wright focuses on a few major themes, the most important of which is the idea that the post-Cold War world is over. Barack Obama, he argues, was the last true “restorationist” president who tried to preserve a grand strategy based on alliances, free trade, and military supremacy. Obama was also the last president to try to integrate Russia and China into a cooperative, liberal international order—and this effort failed. Now the United States faces two major revisionist autocratic rivals that seek to weaken its global influence and assert control over their zones of the world.
Thomas Wright’s short, effective new book diagnoses how Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s foreign policies signal a transformed world order, albeit in different ways. Wright, who served on Biden’s National Security Council from 2022 to 2025, combines a scholar’s insight and a practitioner’s experience to shed light on a changing world. However, the book is limited by a lack of meaningful discussion about both Israel-Palestine, and the future of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy.
