In foreign policy, the best modern presidents have been Republicans — present company excluded
The real test is dealing with Russia and China.
By Stephen Kinzer – Boston Globe - May 16, 2026
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
Tension among the world’s great powers is escalating. Presidents of the United States are partly to blame. Through combinations of ignorance and arrogance, they have led us toward confrontations with China and Russia that wiser leaders might have avoided.
We once had those wiser leaders. Three modern presidents, all Republicans, deftly managed relations with China and Russia.
Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush envisioned a world of shared security and prosperity rather than eternal great-power conflict. If American presidents are ranked according to their success in dealing with Russia and China, these three are at the top.
Part of their success can be attributed to their creative and farsighted secretaries of state. Henry Kissinger reveled in his ignorance of Africa and Latin America: “I am not interested in, nor do I know anything about, the southern portion of the world from the Pyrenees on down.” Yet he and Nixon were intently focused on reducing Cold War tensions among great powers. Together they designed America’s paradigm-shattering “opening to China.” That conceptual breakthrough opened a new historical era. If later presidents had followed the Nixon-Kissinger policy, the United States and China might today be respectful partners rather than adversaries.
Reagan chose the thoughtful and pragmatic George Shultz as his secretary of state and sought to build on Nixon’s approach. The two of them pursued a combination of carrots and sticks to advance a policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Reagan even harbored the radical dream of “a world without nukes.” During his 1986 summit with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, he suggested that both countries dismantle their nuclear weapons within 10 years. That idea failed, partly because it horrified both men’s military advisers. It did, however, lead to the 1987 treaty under which both countries agreed to dismantle their intermediate-range ballistic missiles. That eliminated an entire category of nuclear weapons.
Subsequent presidents have moved in the opposite direction, building new generations of nuclear weapons that push other nuclear-armed states to do the same. In 2019, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the missile treaty, propelling the world closer to the nuclear conflict that Reagan sought to avoid.
James Baker was arguably the most capable secretary of state in modern history. He and his boss, George H.W. Bush, masterfully handled the shocks that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. During a series of meetings in 1989 and 1990, they assured Gorbachev that if he withdrew Red Army troops from Eastern European countries, the United States would not bring any of those countries into the NATO military alliance. Bush even traveled to Kyiv to warn Ukrainians against provoking Russia or descending into “suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred.” Anti-Russia militants in Washington howled in protest, but Bush insisted that Ukraine should make compromises with Russia. Decades before war broke out, Bush evidently saw the danger of rising Russia-Ukraine tensions.
Among those who applauded Bush’s approach was the long-retired Nixon, who visited Kyiv in 1994. Afterward he sent a private letter to the new American president, Bill Clinton, that reflected his geopolitical prescience. “The situation in Ukraine is highly explosive,” Nixon wrote. “If it is allowed to get out of control, it will make Bosnia look like a PTA garden party.”
Clinton ignored that warning. Rather than embrace Bush’s vision of a “balance of interests” with Russia, he began pushing NATO eastward, toward Russia’s borders. His secretary of defense, William Perry, warned him that this would provoke Russia, but as Perry wrote later, “The response I got was really, ‘Who cares what they think? They’re a third-rate power.’ And of course that point of view got across to the Russians as well. That was when we started sliding down that path.”
Combative secretaries of state helped guide Clinton and his successors into escalating conflicts with Russia and China. Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, Mike Pompeo, Antony Blinken, and Marco Rubio proved to be shallow and conventional thinkers compared with the geopolitical chess masters Kissinger, Shultz, and Baker. They and their bosses — Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump — have helped to usher the United States, Russia, and China toward ever more frightening confrontation.
All three presidents who did good jobs managing relations with Russia and China had decidedly mixed overall records. Nixon resigned in disgrace, Reagan took a wrecking ball to social programs, and Bush nearly doubled the budget deficit over the course of a single term.
All three also intervened violently in smaller countries. Nixon promoted the coup that deposed an elected leader in Chile and endorsed brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Pakistan and Indonesia. Reagan fomented civil war in Nicaragua, embraced repressive regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, and sent American troops to invade Grenada. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama and launched what turned out to be a disastrous mission in Somalia. Those are stains on their foreign policy records. They do not, however, separate those three presidents from others. Every president since Eisenhower has ordered violent interventions in poor countries.
Few who lived through the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr. presidencies would have imagined that all three would one day look like foreign policy visionaries compared with their successors. If subsequent presidents had followed their example, the world might be a safer and more peaceful place today.