The last couple of times former U.S. President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden faced each other on the debate stage during a presidential race four years ago, foreign policy didn’t receive much airtime. But in their first showdown of this year’s campaign on Thursday night—with a backdrop of two major wars in which Washington has a crucial stake, as well as escalating great-power competition with China—it was harder to skirt around. 

As Jeremi Suri of the University of Texas at Austin wrote in a piece for Foreign Policy ahead of the debate, Trump and Biden are further apart on their approach to Washington’s international relations than most presidential candidates in recent history have been, with Biden seeking to restore America’s global standing and relationship with traditional allies while Trump espouses a far more isolationist doctrine. 

The debate was still dominated by domestic issues such as the economy—including inflation and the high cost of child care—and the opioid crisis, but Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, and immigration did receive significant attention. Strikingly, the candidates were not asked about China, though they brought it up themselves briefly when discussing the U.S. economy and the impact of the heavy tariffs that Trump put on many Chinese imports and which Biden has largely kept in place.

Here’s what the two candidates said onstage Thursday night on the major foreign-policy issues facing Washington right now:

Russia and the war in Ukraine

Biden and Trump clashed fiercely over the U.S. position on the Russia-Ukraine war, the scope of U.S. aid to Kyiv, and Washington’s contributions to NATO. 

Under the Biden administration, the United States has been a staunch backer of Ukraine’s war effort, supplying Kyiv with some $175 billion in military aid since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of the country in 2022. Biden defended that position while framing the United States as a global unifier in rallying international support for Kyiv during the war. “I’ve got 50 other nations around the world to support Ukraine, including Japan and South Korea,” he said. 

Trump baselessly suggested that Biden had “encouraged Russia” to invade and sought to portray the invasion as a result of the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in May 2021. “[Biden] was so bad with Afghanistan, it was such a horrible embarrassment,” Trump said. “If we had a real president, a president that was respected by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, he would have never invaded Ukraine,” he added.

If elected to a second term, Trump vowed to “settle” the war between Russia and Ukraine before his inauguration—with no explanation of how that might be done. He also railed against NATO, building on his earlier threats that Russia should do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that fail to hit their defense spending targets. “We’re paying everybody’s bills,” he said. 

Trump declared that the Biden administration’s stance would push the United States into another war. “He will drive us into World War III, and we’re closer to World War III than anyone can imagine, and he’s going to drive us there,” he said. 

Biden pushed back against that sentiment. “You want World War III? Let [Trump] win and let him tell Putin to do whatever the hell he wants to NATO,” he said. 

Israel and the war in Gaza

Both candidates, as expected, issued full-throated endorsements of Israel—though to different degrees and in different ways. 

Biden said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had endorsed his plan to resolve the conflict between Israel and Hamas, and he headed off Netanyahu’s accusation that Washington hadn’t supported Israel enough by reiterating that the only weapons Biden denied Israel were 2,000-pound bombs, which “don’t work very well in populated areas” and “kill a lot of people.” 

“The only one who wants the war to continue is Hamas,” he said, adding that the militant group has been “greatly weakened” and “should be eliminated”—with a caveat that Israel has to be “careful in populated areas.”

Trump poured water on both those notions, saying: “Actually, Israel is the one who wants to keep going” and adding that “we should let them go and let them finish the job.” He also had a pointed and characteristically hyperbolic accusation of Biden’s allegedly muted support for Israel: “He’s become like a Palestinian.” 

Echoing his previous claim that Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine had Trump been in the White House, he asserted that Hamas wouldn’t have attacked Israel if Trump had been president at the time. 

Asked by moderator Dana Bash whether he would support the establishment of a Palestinian state, Trump deflected, only saying he would “have to see” before quickly pivoting back to barbs about Biden’s engagement with NATO. 

America’s global image

Both candidates slammed each other for a perceived diminishment of America’s standing in the world.

Trump repeatedly hit Biden on the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, referring to it as “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country” and at one point calling it the “Afghanistan horror show.”

“What happened to the United States’ reputation under this man’s leadership is horrible,” Trump said. 

Biden accused Trump of wanting to pull out of NATO and argued that Trump’s previous support and praise for far-right demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, and even Adolf Hitler were what diminished America’s global reputation. “This guy has no sense of American democracy,” Biden said. 

Biden later slammed Trump’s doomsaying about America’s global image: “The idea that somehow we are a failing country, I’ve never heard a president talk like this before. We are the envy of the world.”

China 

Possibly the biggest surprise of the debate was the relative lack of discussion of the United States’ biggest global rival. The moderators mainly focused their foreign-policy questions on the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the U.S. relationship with Europe and NATO. 

One reason may be that on China policy, Trump and Biden are probably closer together than on any other foreign-policy issue. Biden has continued and in some cases even dialed up the hawkishness on China that began under Trump, keeping in place many of the tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese imports and ratcheting up restrictions on semiconductors and electric vehicles in particular. Both candidates did bring up China themselves on a few occasions, however. “Under this guy, we have the largest deficit with China,” Trump said of Biden in response to an unrelated question about the opioid crisis. “He gets paid by China, he’s a Manchurian candidate. He gets money from China,” Trump added, falsely. Trump also pointed out that Biden had not removed Trump’s tariffs on China because they’re bringing in “too much money.” 

“You have not made any progress on China,” Biden hit back, citing his own achievement of bringing the United States’ bilateral trade deficit with China to its lowest level since 2010. 

Immigration 

Some of the most inflammatory rhetoric of the debate came when Trump and Biden sparred over U.S. immigration policy. Trump’s presidency was marked by hard-line, and controversial, immigration policies—some of which are still in place today under the Biden administration. 

Right out of the gate, Trump lobbed attacks at Biden’s policies, accusing Biden of failing to stem an influx of migrants at the U.S. southern border and painting a dystopian—and largely false—picture of undocumented immigrants turning the country into a “rat’s nest” of crime. The United States is “literally an uncivilized country now” and “people are coming in and they’re killing our citizens.” (Studies show that immigrants are, in fact, less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens.)

“I’d love to ask him why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails, and mental institutions, to come into our country and destroy our country,” Trump said. 

Biden fired back by attacking Trump’s immigration legacy, which included “separating babies from their mothers [and] putting them in cages” under the former leader’s family separation policy. Under that policy, the Trump administration separated some 2,600 children from their parents. The Biden administration has also “worked very hard to get a bipartisan agreement” on immigration, he added. 

“What I’ve done, since I’ve changed the law … I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40 percent fewer people coming across the border illegally,” Biden said. “That’s better than when he left office.”