There’s No Going Back

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