In a Gallup poll released this September, voters in the United States revealed they trust Republicans as the “party better able to keep America safe from international threats” by a margin of 54 percent to 40 percent. In today’s hard-fought U.S. political system, a fourteen-point edge for one party over the other is something close to a landslide. Yet, most academics believe that the superiority of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy approach is self-evident.

So, who’s right—the voters or the academics? Let’s consider the evidence of the last eight years.

The Trump Record

In January 2017, when the Trump administration began, it inherited a broken U.S. deterrence posture. Its predecessor, under Barack Obama, pursued a foreign policy based on gossamer assumptions of international accommodation, polite retreat, the need to prioritize “transformational” left-wing domestic reforms, and the superior morality of American liberals. Obamanauts placed tremendous faith in their man, but his ethical scoldings failed to impress anti-Western forces overseas. By the last year of Obama’s presidency, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and ISIS were all on the march, ramping up their aggressions, including copycat terrorist attacks inside the United States.

The Trump administration then proceeded to introduce more hard-line U.S. policies in every major region overseas.

In Europe, the administration pushed for increased allied burden-sharing, bolstered America’s troop presence along NATO’s eastern frontier, withdrew from unfavorable arms control treaties such as INF, killed Russian mercenaries in Syria, and provided lethal aid to Ukraine. Of course, if you were watching CNN at the time, you would never have known any of this.

In the Middle East, Trump and his advisers pursued policies that were clearly superior to those of Barack Obama. Based on the novel idea of supporting your country’s friends and opposing its enemies, they ramped up a pressure campaign against the mullahs of Iran and withdrew from Obama’s ill-advised nuclear arms control agreement.

Trump was the first twenty-first-century U.S. president to recognize that liberal democracy was not about to sweep through the Greater Middle East. He succeeded in rolling back ISIS. He supported Arab allies in the region straightforwardly without trying to micromanage their internal affairs. And he was, without any doubt, a very good friend to Israel. With this new approach, his administration succeeded in doing what Obama never could—bringing numerous Arab governments together with Israel under the Abraham Accords. The key lay in recognizing that worthwhile peace agreements would come once the Arabs recognized Israel’s right to exist, not the other way around.

In East Asia, the Trump administration initiated the most welcome overhaul of basic assumptions since the end of the Cold War. Reversing decades of ill-founded optimism that Beijing would converge on a democratic market-oriented model, the Trump administration openly announced that China was a full-spectrum U.S. adversary and that a new era of great power competition had arrived. Trump himself stressed that China’s predations extended inside the United States, hollowing out American manufacturing and justifying an energetic response. Based on the prior statements of presidential candidates from both parties, it seems unlikely that any other chief executive would have undertaken such a sweeping economic pressure campaign against Beijing. The impact of this shift is best appreciated by noting that even Trump’s Democratic opponents no longer disagree with his policy shift on China. Instead, they are eager to copy it if they can.

In Latin America, the Trump administration ended Obama’s appeasement of Communist Cuba while correctly instituting a pressure campaign against Venezuela’s socialist dictatorship. Again, the shift was clearly preferable to what came before. As for Mexico and Central America, Trump put unprecedented emphasis on halting the flow of illegal migration into the United States from across its southern border. This was in keeping with his argument that U.S. national security should logically begin with the security of the nation’s own borders.

The Biden Record

Now compare this record to Biden’s. 

Joe Biden began his tenure as president by waiving sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, allowing Germany to access Russian gas. Hoping to “park” Russia geopolitically while tending to other matters, he failed to deter Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Once that war began, Biden couldn’t decide exactly how much support he wanted to give Ukraine. So, he nudged it forward in baby steps over a period of almost three years. He has announced no clear strategy to end the war successfully. And despite early promises by European leaders—notably German Chancellor Olaf Scholz—of a historic turning point in their nations’ defense capabilities, the truth is that for numerous European governments, including Scholz’s own, there has been no such epochal shift.

The Biden administration tried to resuscitate Barack Obama’s failed approach centering on a nuclear arms control agreement with Iran. Predictably, it failed again. The Iranians took the economic sanctions relief offered by Biden, pocketed it, and used it to fund terrorist proxy attacks on Israel. Yet, over the past year, Biden has nudged away from any straightforward defense of the Jewish state toward a false equivalence between Israel and its terrorist enemies. Biden also managed to alienate the Saudis from the very beginning of his administration. Altogether, the Middle East is considerably more unstable than it was four years ago.

Biden revived Obama’s affection for the diplomatic accommodation of left-wing dictatorships. But the focus of these delusions is now Venezuela instead of Cuba. The Bolivarian Republic led by Nicolas Maduro has played Biden like a fiddle, squeezing out economic benefits and holding phony elections while cracking down on democratic opposition. Meanwhile, Biden willfully allowed America’s porous border with Mexico to turn into the utter disaster that it is today. Election-season promises of pragmatism on this issue from the current administration are too little and too late.

U.S. policy toward East Asia, to be fair, is among the least bad aspects of Biden’s foreign policy. No doubt this has something to do with the tacit admission among Democrats that Trump got something right here. Still, President Biden’s policy in the region is badly under-resourced in terms of available military strength. The president has made no serious effort to boost U.S. defense spending above the rate of inflation. At the same time, his administration continues to invest false hope in broader cooperation with Beijing on hobbyhorse issues such as climate change. The possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan looms large in the next four years. That prospect has not been reduced under President Biden. On the contrary, it has only increased. Meanwhile, the United States remains dangerously dependent on China economically and technologically—dependencies that Biden has not adequately addressed. For America to continue to finance its leading peer competitor is a kind of madness.

The defining failure of the Biden team, however, was the president’s decision to withdraw completely from Afghanistan without serious preparation for the consequences. That set the tone for everything else. It sent the message to allies and enemies alike that the United States was weak and unreliable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, like Iran’s many aggressions, followed naturally as a result.

The Liberal Bubble

Evidently, when comparing the two parties on national security, the voters see something that academics do not. The connecting theme in all the Biden administration’s foreign policy failures seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding as to how international politics really works. It’s as if a number of students used to getting “A” grades from their professors are now in charge of protecting U.S. national security, and they don’t understand why they’re not being similarly rewarded by their foreign counterparts. 

In your typical college course these days, promoting a rules-based liberal world order is the correct answer to any international question, however complex. Key members of Team Biden believe this to be true, however flexible they may be in their day-to-day tactics. It’s part of the air they breathe inside the Democratic Party’s ideological bubble. And if statements of concern, verbal chastisements, and public lectures on liberal norms and institutions were the true test of an administration’s success, then surely Biden-Harris would be among the all-time great national security teams.

In practice, however, foreign governments are not terribly impressed by this moralistic aspect of American diplomacy. They can see that Biden isn’t usually willing to back it up with concrete measures that are either sufficiently painful or sufficiently rewarding to make it effective. America’s enemies aren’t afraid of ethical scolding from Democrats, and U.S. allies don’t view it as especially helpful. The whole thing is overly self-referential. It impresses American liberals, along with a few like-minded folks in Western European capitals, and that’s about it. In fact, even in Western Europe, allied governments privately worry whether they can count on Biden in a pinch. Certainly, in Afghanistan, the answer was “no.”

Still, the liberal bubble must advance because to admit its errors and delusions would require taking a very hard look in the mirror. Those of us who work on U.S. college campuses understand that no practical failing, however severe, can be allowed to disrupt the self-regard of progressives. Trump’s first-term foreign policy may have worked in practice, but did it work in theory? That’s the question liberal academics want answered. American voters, thank God, tend to be more pragmatic. So, on this question, as on so many others, I’ll take the wisdom of the public over academic liberal dogma any day of the week.