Like the Soviet Union in its final days, the United States has become a gerontocracy. Joe Biden shuffled out of the White House at age 82. Donald Trump turns 80 in June, no doubt to be marked with great pomp and circumstance. He will be 82 when he is scheduled to leave office. Ronald Reagan was 75 and failing when Iran-Contra broke in 1986, apparently in the early stages of dementia.
All presidents, young and old, make foreign policy mistakes. But older ones not only often lose a step or more in their analytic faculties, but also often make decisions based upon political worldviews that were formed decades before, and then try to apply these fixed ideas to a very different world. Social science research suggests that political worldviews are formed relatively early in life, with ages 14 to 24 being the critical years.
By the time leaders reach middle age, the impact of events on the worldviews of leaders is relatively small. Presidents governing in their late seventies or early eighties, even those who (unlike Trump) had been attentive to and immersed in the political currents of their formative years, are making decisions that are likely to have been irrelevant to what has been required for decades.
Joe Biden assumed his Senate seat when he turned 30 in 1973. He was 65 and had spent 36 years in the Senate when he became Barack Obama’s vice-president, and 77 when he became president. To be sure, his views evolved over the years on a number of important domestic issues, including notably on abortion rights and mass incarceration.
But on foreign policy, he remained essentially who he was when he came to Washington during the Nixon Administration. His political psyche was formed by the Cold War. His focus was on Europe and the Nato alliance. His views on the Middle East were formed by long-term support of the progressive Zionist project, which reflected a post-Holocaust consensus in the United States as well as political pragmatism. His touchstones were the six-day and the Yom Kippur wars. His peers were Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. He was in the Senate during the Opec oil boycott of 1973-74, which radically destabilised the US economy. He was focused on energy and knew that relations with Saudi Arabia and other oil producers were an unhappy necessity. So too was a peace process, but the Palestinian history of terrorism and intransigence made the Palestinians suspect as partners.
For good and for ill, Biden’s foreign policy reflected his formative years. He instinctively (and correctly) supported Ukraine when it was invaded by Putin’s Russia. For Biden, his points of reference were Soviet aggression in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. A land invasion in Europe was the essence of what Nato was designed to prevent. He provided massive support to Ukraine consistent with the fundamental principles of the post-war consensus and his concerns about escalating to nuclear exchange.
His anti-China stance, continuing many of the policies of the first Trump administration, was formed not only by historic hostility toward communism in China, but also by the political and economic damage inflicted on the United States by Chinese cheating on trade following its accession to the World Trade Organisation. Biden knew that tariffs across the board would harm affordability in the US, but could argue that targeted trade sanctions on China would be economically and geopolitically advantageous. Biden wanted out of Afghanistan because he knew enough history to know it was the graveyard of empires; it had cost the Soviets dearly and he was a dissenter during Obama’s administration on the policy that Afghanistan was a “good war”, not a stupid one. His precipitous exit reflected that view, but his haste led to loss of life and political damage.
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Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s geopolitical moves were largely informed by their respective formative years (AFP/Getty)
Where Biden’s fixed worldview hit the rocks both politically and geo-strategically was in the Middle East. Like Obama, he was frustrated with Netanyahu, but he was confident that he could manage the post-October 7 conflict by giving essentially unconditional public support to Netanyahu and Israel and then using that support to quietly convince Netanyahu to limit the devastation of Gaza and the massive killing of civilians.
After all, surely Netanyahu would come around quietly to the policy agenda of Israel’s primary benefactor. This was a startling misjudgment informed by the nostalgia of earlier years. Netanyahu was no Rabin; he was not even Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Shamir. He was a shrewd student and player in American politics. His fragile hard-right coalition and personal legal jeopardy limited his willingness to compromise in any event. The thousands of civilian lives lost may not have been avoidable given Netanyahu’s intransigence, but Biden did not try to use American power to avoid it and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, paid a political price.
Trump is only slightly younger than Biden. His views were also formed in the 1960s and 1970s, but he seemingly took away different lessons. His worldview appears effectively ahistorical, mercantile, xenophobic and paranoid. He is convinced that America (with which he identifies his own interests) is getting screwed. America needs to win; therefore, other countries need to lose; there are only zero-sum games in the world.
We need big American cars and cheap oil and coal, just like in the good old days. So, we need tariffs – an ideal fix of his for decades – and we need to grab resources so that we can restore an American manufacturing base, never mind that manufactured goods can no longer be produced at costs that Americans are willing to pay. We need to take the oil, even though the US is a net oil exporter, and the cost of Venezuelan oil extraction outstrips any conceivable economic benefit. Cheap oil powered American prosperity and drove the building of highways, office towers, hotels and casinos. We need to keep the foreigners out because they take American jobs, never mind that immigrants have driven prosperity at the top and have taken essential jobs at the bottom that Americans can’t or won’t do.
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Trump’s relationship with Russia’s leader indicates a certain admiration (AFP/Getty)
In Trump’s world, land is real and hard; soft power, not so much. So, he does not just want influence in Greenland or access to its minerals; he wants Greenland. We need 3 per cent mortgages for homebuyers, so we need to coerce the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to a point where rampant inflation and economic dislocation are inevitable.
It seems Trump is indifferent to the post-war consensus; Nato is full of cheaters and elites, and it costs too much. He likes dictators as long as they are “our dictators”, who flatter him and make him rich. He will always prefer Putin to Gorbachev; Orban in Hungary to Macron in France; Bukele in El Salvador to Machado in Venezuela (who is quite conservative but actually supports elections). Yes, it helps to flatter Trump, but at the end of the day, Trump has a keen sense of with whom he can consistently do business.
Of course, no president at any age can or does govern alone. There have always been ambitious young people offering advice and implementing policy. The National Security Council grew from around 40 at the end of the George HW Bush Administration to around 400 during parts of the Obama Administration and now sits at around 150, although Trump has his secretary of state serving simultaneously as national security adviser for the first time since Henry Kissinger.
The reality, however, is that Biden was far more likely to take advice even if he could be stubborn on core issues. Trump, during his first administration, also had strong, experienced advisers around him who were able to prevent him from implementing some of his worst ideas.
In the second administration, Trump has some capable and experienced advisers, but also a grab-bag of TV hosts, yes-men and fanatics. To be sure, he also has politicians with some gravitas and common sense, but who are savvy enough to know that if they question their leader, they will not be long in their jobs. Marco Rubio must certainly know that while Greenland may have some strategic and resource importance, it is beyond deranged to consider invading it and destroying Nato. Yet he duly joins the sycophantic JD Vance to journey to Nuuk to try to buy or coerce another 2.16 million square kilometres for the United States.
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Trump has had his share of questions on his health, repeatedly appearing to fall asleep in cabinet meetings (Getty)
Ultimately, it was Biden’s age and his apparent physical and mental decline that cost him the chance to run for a second term. Trump appears more robust but has also had to deal with repeated questions about his health – from mysterious bruises on his hand to his admission that he takes higher than recommended doses of aspirin, his dislike of exercise, and his questionable diet.
The Biden foreign policy was by no means perfect, but it mainly reflected a durable and stable consensus that he had advocated for half a century and a willingness to listen to advisers who had some expertise that he did not.
Trump came to office with few fixed ideas other than a Fortress America, a military that was there to grab things, a hostility for alliances and international organisations, and an affinity for strong men. As he approaches his 80th birthday in June (with more than two and a half years left in his term), it is frighteningly likely that few of these ideas will be re-examined – and there is no one with the courage to impose any fresh thinking on the Great Leader.
