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David French, Lydia Polgreen and Bret Stephens

By David FrenchLydia Polgreen and Bret Stephens

Mr. French, Ms. Polgreen and Mr. Stephens are Opinion columnists.

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists David French, Lydia Polgreen and Bret Stephens about the biggest risks and challenges facing America in the world today and the leadership of President Biden and President-elect Donald Trump.

Patrick Healy: President Biden is about to hand back national security and foreign policy to Donald Trump, and the president-elect is already musing about taking Greenland and the Panama Canal by military force. Trump has big notions about America’s place in the world, and that’s where I want to start.

We started the new year with the truck attack in New Orleans by an Army veteran who had an ISIS flag. You have hostages and fighting still in Gaza, and a new Ukrainian offensive in Kursk. The Biden team portrays the world as safer than when the president took office, while Trump sees a world in chaos and is promising order and peace while making a lot of threats to other countries. Let’s start with a base-line question: Do you think America is stronger and more secure in the world today than it was four years ago?

Bret Stephens: The fault doesn’t lie with the Biden administration alone, but it’s hard to argue that President Biden leaves office with the world safer than he found it.

Iran, China, Russia and North Korea now form a new axis of repression and cooperate in ways that were hard to imagine a few years ago. NATO has a couple of new members and is spending a bit more on defense, but the war in Ukraine is not going well, in part because of the administration’s reluctance to supply it with the arms it needed when it needed them. China’s threatening behavior toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea has gone from bad to worse. And Islamist terrorism may be resurgent. The one bright spot is the weakening of Iran and its proxies in the last few months, but that was brought about not by the administration but by Israel’s military successes — achieved often in the face of Biden’s opposition.

Lydia Polgreen: One thing that strikes me about the Biden administration and this era in the world is the element of surprise and seeming unpreparedness. There was the Afghanistan withdrawal, which really weakened Biden. But I also think of the comment by the national security adviser Jake Sullivan about the “quieter” Middle East just a week before Oct. 7, and then the total failure of the administration to influence Benjamin Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war in Gaza. And now we have the seeming surprise at the stunningly rapid fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Perhaps the best way to achieve strength and security is to anticipate, influence and shape global events in the interests of the United States. And on that score I think we have had a pretty lousy four years.

Stephens: Lydia makes an important point about the administration’s repeated unpreparedness, which I wrote about in my latest column — Biden offering assurances that the Taliban wouldn’t quickly overrun Afghanistan, and his 2021 claim that the uptick in migration across the southern border was merely part of a seasonal pattern. These were the sorts of analytical errors that ultimately helped cost him his presidency.

David French: I think two things are true at once — America’s key enemies are weaker than they were four years ago, and the world is more dangerous. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel triggered two wars that have increased instability and geopolitical risks. The war in Ukraine in particular represents a failure of deterrence.

At the same time, neither war has gone the way the aggressors wanted, in part because of the Biden administration’s responses. Russia has taken enormous losses in men and equipment, and its economy is struggling. Yes, Russia is putting Ukraine under significant pressure on the battlefield, but it’s safe to say that Vladimir Putin never expected his invasion to cost this much.

Iran has suffered the most severe defeats. Hezbollah — its most potent proxy army — has been decimated. The Assad regime has collapsed. Hamas is a shell of its former self. And the vaunted Iranian ballistic missile arsenal has proved ineffective (at least so far).

Healy: How do you see Biden in all of this, David?

French: The Biden administration has played a role in all these developments. It deployed considerable military force to blunt two separate Iranian attacks on Israel — a direct military intervention that not only exposed Iranian weaknesses, but also signaled that differences over strategy and tactics were not creating a rift in the alliance.

I have many disagreements with the Biden administration’s approach. He should have provided more weapons to Ukraine, sooner, and with fewer restrictions on their use, for example. But in both Ukraine and the Middle East his approach has been directionally correct. America has stood behind its allies.

Polgreen: Patrick, you mentioned New Orleans, and there has been some concern about the re-emergence of extremist terrorism, especially with the fall of Assad in Syria. But I am also concerned about the Las Vegas truck explosion. One potent source of violence in the United States is actually our own veterans. There was a fascinating A.P. investigation in October about the rising tide of radicalization among veterans. This can certainly be expressed, as it was in New Orleans, by support for foreign terrorist groups.

But much more common is homegrown extremism. Coupled with veterans’ disproportionately high rates of death by suicide, domestic violence and serious mental distress, these events do not make me feel especially great about Pete Hegseth, who has fiercely defended American soldiers accused of horrific war crimes. Veterans who serve our country deserve much better.

French: Hegseth is a culture warrior, and more culture war is the last thing the military needs. You don’t cure a radicalization problem in the military by putting a radical in charge of the Pentagon.

The political conversation about military life is pretty far downstream from actual military life. If you’re walking into the Pentagon thinking the way to improve morale or to increase recruitment is to wage war on “wokeness,” then you’re demonstrating that you don’t quite understand the problem. Service members are straining under the burden of frequent deployments and extremely high-tempo operations.........

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