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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.

Inflection Point: Biden, Trump, and the Future World Order, Thomas Wright, Penguin, 176 pp., April 2026

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.

These changes, Wright argues, were well under way in Trump’s first term, if not earlier, but Trump exacerbated them with an incoherent hybrid strategy. He blasted his predecessors for overextending U.S. power and letting allies free-ride, but under the influence of his more conventional Republican policy advisors, he did not radically revise the global U.S. role.

Senior White House policy advisor Stephen Miller, left, and chief strategist Steve Bannon, center, sit with other members of the Trump administration at a news conference at the White House in Washington on Feb. 13, 2017.Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In this light, Biden’s presidency and Trump’s return to office constitute definitive inflection points from the........

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