Max’s best-selling biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: His Life and Legend, will be released in paperback on October 20. It was selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2024. It has also made best-of-the-year lists at The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Economist, and Air Mail. You can purchase at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookstore.

How Trump pivoted from China hawk to China dove

The president seems to have discovered the high cost of confronting Beijing.

By MAX BOOT

The Washington Post

September 21, 2026

President Donald Trump’s second term has been notable for some head-spinning changes in U.S. foreign policy. Who could have predicted that Trump would launch a cold war with Canada and a love-in with the Chavista regime in Venezuela?

How far we have come since 2016, when Trump accused China of “raping” the United States, or 2024, when he said, “They are killing us as a country.” He acted on those concerns in April 2025 when he imposed heavy tariffs on China — up to 145 percent. China responded with restrictions on exports of rare-earth minerals that threatened to cripple U.S. manufacturing, and Trump quickly backed down.

Trump ends the Greenland crisis he created. For now.

Trump didn’t get anything justifying the massive strain he put on trans-Atlantic relations.

By MAX BOOT

Substack

September 19, 2026

Donald Trump is a master at creating crises and then resolving them by claiming he won a massive victory when the status quo barely changed.

The template was the crisis over NAFTA, which Trump called the worst trade deal ever signed. So he blew it up and in 2020 renegotiated the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada) Agreement which was pretty much the same thing. He called it “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law. It's the best agreement we've ever made." Crisis resolved. Sort of. (The only complication is that Trump doesn’t abide by deals he signs—he is now violating USMCA as part of his trade vendetta against Canada and Mexico.)

The Greenland crisis follows the same pattern. Trump got into his head that the United States has to “have” Greenland. There was no obvious reason why, beyond the fact that it’s a big hunk of land, and he’s a real estate guy, so he decided to acquire it, after his New York tycoon buddy Ronald Lauder brought it to his attention. He told the New York Times it was “psychologically important” to him to get his hands on it.