PRESIDENT JOE Biden aspires to be a twenty-first-century Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). Comparisons between the two presidents, once ubiquitous but now sparser, began months before the election when biographers of the thirty-second president heralded Biden as FDR’s heir. Pundits, professors, and presidential advisors swiftly endorsed the analogy. The administration’s failure to usher in sweeping changes, largely owing to Democrats’ razor-thin congressional majority, has dampened the comparison, if not Biden’s own transformational ambitions.

That the parallel was hackneyed and premature did not make it uninformative, though. Spectators confidently compared the two presidents because the moment of Biden’s accession did resemble the moment in which Roosevelt promised to conquer fear with action, want with provision, and political paralysis with functioning democracy.

Each president defeated the incumbent, entering office amid a crisis that so imperiled American lives and confidence that it “put into question the purpose” of America itself, as political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau wrote of the Great Depression’s impact. Accordingly, like FDR set out to get “our own national house in order,” Biden vowed to “build back better.” Like FDR, “healer-in-chief” Biden assumed office hoping to unify a deeply polarized country.

Even Biden’s mission to “prove democracy works” sounded only slightly less daunting than FDR’s self-prescribed mandate to “make democracy work” (and then “prove” it, as FDR was fond of saying). Each wasted little time delivering “action, and action now.”

The similarity of greatest consequence, however, was not that of the presidents’ domestic situations. It was that both witnessed the reemergence of authoritarian competitors abroad. Neither president could ignore that, just as faith in American institutions plunged to new lows, authoritarians abroad boasted governing models that appeared more cohesive, less cumbersome, and often brutally competent.

What observers and the Biden administration have largely forgotten, however, is that Roosevelt did not prove democracy works by providing relief, welfare, and protectionism. Those measures earned FDR favor among beneficiaries, as the political scientists Matthew Baum and Samuel Kernell have shown, but did little to close the class divide. Only once the mid-century war eclipsed the Great Depression as the dominant domestic crisis did the class-based polarization gap narrow.

And yet it would be wrong to attribute this depolarization to a rally around the flag effect. The unity achieved in December 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, for instance, owes more to Roosevelt co-opting Republicans during the 1940 presidential campaign than to any international impetus. Roosevelt worked assiduously to set the stage upon which the attack would galvanize the nation. 

What proved democracy still worked, cohered Americans, and unleashed the nation’s industrial capacity was totalitarianism: FDR staring it down and preparing America to confront it. Biden has an analogous authoritarian challenge today in the form of China, suggesting he should turn from Dr. New Deal to Dr. Win-the-War for insights. More precisely, Biden should consider how Roosevelt led a weary people to become what we now call the greatest generation.

Though Biden concedes he may be “no FDR,” he recognizes China is “a key test by which historians will judge his presidency” and just how Rooseveltian it was. The good news is, to pass this test, Biden need not be FDR, the charismatic orator and great reformer. He need only be FDR, the negotiator and competitor. Presidential power, as Richard Neustadt observed, is as much about personal influence—Biden’s forte—as it is about public prestige.

ROOSEVELT POSSESSED both power sources in abundance. However, there was a brief period, between 1937–1940, when his popular appeal waned. In this time, the “transformational” Roosevelt played transactional politics to secure policies that did considerably more to unify Americans and contest totalitarianism than his oratory and entitlement programs could.

In 1936, FDR warned of “elements that lead to the tragedy of general war,” elements he would later claim made World War II “unmistakably foreseeable since 1936.” A year later, even the usually prescient Winston Churchill reiterated in his essay “Hitler—Monster or Hero?” that “both possibilities are open at the present moment.” Indeed, Roosevelt stood “almost alone” in recognizing what “Hitler’s coming to power meant,” as one study put it.

Even so, Roosevelt knew his foreign policy remained subject to the vicissitudes of public opinion. He faced his own version of the decades-long, bipartisan agreement to “engage but hedge” revisionist authoritarians, a policy that enabled China’s rise in our time. “Governments, such as ours, cannot swing so far or so quickly,” FDR wrote a friend in fall 1941. Democratic government “can only keep in moving with the thought and will of the great majority of our people.” And the great majority were not yet resigned to war, or Roosevelt’s leadership, in the late 1930s.

After winning reelection in 1936, Roosevelt’s approval rating plunged to 48 percent by 1939 (eight points below Biden’s standing prior to the Afghan withdrawal and still a point below Biden’s term average as of the time of writing). To explain the loss of public confidence in FDR, many point to the Roosevelt recession or the president’s failed attempts to pack the Supreme Court, shove a government-reorganizing “dictator bill” through Congress, and purge his own party of New Deal skeptics. Above all, however, Roosevelt’s standing fell because he set out to awake a nation “pretending that this war is none of our business” to authoritarian competitors who begged to differ. 

Still, some contend Roosevelt followed public opinion, earning him a reputation as a trimmer. But FDR’s closest advisors reveal that the first president with access to passable polling statistics consulted them not for policy prescriptions, but to tailor his appeals.

Whether he capitulated to, gingerly nudged, or expertly steered public opinion throughout his career, during the period examined herein, Roosevelt tended to “push opinion forward oratorically, allow its avant-garde to surge past him, follow cautiously in practice, and keep repeating the process,” as Conrad Black put it. Britain’s King George VI put it succinctly, when, shortly before America declared war, he commended FDR for the “way you have led public opinion by allowing it to get ahead of you.”

For the inventor of the “personal presidency,” allowing public opinion to get ahead was not Roosevelt’s instinct. FDR preferred to “refine and enlarge public views” with his rhetoric, even once announcing that (pace the cynical predictions of Madison in Federalist 10) “the day of enlightened administration has come” to superintend competing interests. His decision during this period to lead largely from beneath the bully pulpit bequeathed to him by Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt was a response to his diminished popularity following an October 1937 speech.

AGAINST THE backdrop of European rearmament and Japan’s invasion of China, Roosevelt chose Chicago, the heart of isolationism, to propose a “quarantine” of aggressor nations as an alternative to Congress’s neutrality policy. FDR’s speech was “hailed as war mongering … search[ing] ‘under the bed’ for dangers of war which did not exist,” he later recalled. FDR would not overtly try to overturn isolationist sentiment for another eighteen months. “It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and to find no one there,” he confided to an advisor.

Many felt betrayed by the president, who a year before declared “I hate war.” As unemployment again approached 20 percent, most thought the country should build back better at home before turning outward. America could dodge Europe’s next bloodbath by minding its own, western-hemispheric business and best buttress democracy worldwide by modeling its peaceful benefits at home. Others worried Roosevelt’s international outlook would only benefit the war-profiteers he earlier reproached, at the expense of a proto-foreign policy for the middle class. Still others considered the speech a deliberate diversion. Rounding out the isolationist majority were fascist and communist agitators who urged mimicking the dictators.

So wary were Americans of foreign entanglements that Congress considered the Ludlow Amendment, a proposal that would require a public referendum to declare war, during Neutrality Act deliberations each year from 1935 to 1940. Following a Japanese attack on an American gunboat two months after FDR’s quarantine speech, 75 percent of Americans supported the amendment. For fear of losing more public support, Roosevelt refrained from publicly condemning it. Instead, he tipped the close 1938 vote on the amendment by sending a note to House Democrats.

Though the warmaking power was safe from plebiscite, Americans registered their opposition to belligerence in polls. Two months after the Munich Agreement, 95 percent of Americans opposed war. This opposition hardly relented over the next two years. As the German blitzkrieg raced across Europe, non-intervention sentiment intensified.

AS THE precariousness of Europe’s democracies became clearer to Roosevelt, so too did the obstacles posed by Congress’s neutrality laws, which proscribed transfers of U.S. materiel to belligerents. Though he stated the “wholly excellent” embargo provisions should be “clearly and unequivocally enforced” when signing them into law in 1935, he harbored reservations even then.

FDR remained nonetheless hopeful that by “next January, I can get” a law granting “authority to the President.” Instead, Congress reinstated the embargo three years straight. Already accused of provoking hysteria, Roosevelt needed to nudge opinion carefully. If any segment of the public supported repealing the embargo, it was less “to help France and Britain” than to “improve business in this country,” a poll at the time found.

Noting “storms from abroad” that challenged “institutions indispensable to Americans” in his 1939 State of the Union, FDR did not mention repeal. Instead, he exposed the embargo’s unintended consequences. When we “deliberately try to legislate neutrality,” he posited, our “laws may operate unevenly and unfairly.” The law may “give aid to an aggressor” and “deny it to the victim.” “The instinct of self-preservation should warn us that we ought not to let that happen anymore,” since Americans could not know when aggressors might turn their sights toward the United States. Pressed days later to elaborate which reforms “short of war” he had in mind, FDR prevaricated, just as he had before when asked to reconcile his proposed quarantine with neutrality policy.

Though he worked vigorously from beneath the bully pulpit to shift opinion, Roosevelt had abstained from public neutrality talk since January when Congress took recess in summer 1939 without amending the embargo provisions. By July, the president’s impatience prompted him to ask his attorney general, “how far do you think I can go in ignoring the existing [neutrality] act—even though I did sign it?!” Having mobilized a nationwide network that loosened resistance to repeal, the president went to the press to exploit Congress’s “bet” that “another international crisis would not erupt.” If one did, Roosevelt told reporters, Congress had “tied my hands,” rendering him powerless “to prevent … war from breaking out.” When, not a month later, Germany’s invasion of Poland seemingly called Congress’s bluff, Roosevelt encouraged public opinion to follow the direction of events. “This nation will remain a neutral nation,” he stated during a fireside chat that made no mention of the embargo, “but I cannot ask that every American citizen remain neutral in thought as well.”

He delayed convening Congress for special session until he gathered enough votes for repeal. FDR forbade a cabinet member from speaking to a Polish club in Chicago for fear of appearing unneutral, and postponed the Canadian governor-general’s visit to Washington, writing, “I am, almost literally, walking on eggs” and “at the moment saying nothing, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”

After aggressive bargaining within Washington and some subtle rhetoric without, Roosevelt signed the Neutrality Act of 1939, replacing the arms embargo with a cash-and-carry provision. The country was gradually substituting neutrality for its emerging role as the “arsenal of democracy.”

ON MAY 15, 1940, five days after assuming the premiership of an embattled Britain, Churchill sent Roosevelt a cable requesting the “loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers” to replenish Britain’s dwindling fleet. In exchange, the United States would gain military basing rights in British possessions. The American public, however, would likely decry the deal. Therefore, FDR repeated the steps that won the cash-and-carry policy: a little rhetoric followed by lots of politicking.

Without mentioning any specific materiel, FDR reaffirmed America's cash-and-carry pledge to “extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation,” for “the future of this nation” was contingent on it. He alerted Republican newspaper editor William Allen White and his network, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, to preempt the protestation of the America First Committee, an 800,000 strong isolationist pressure group. He directed advisors to furnish a legal basis for aiding “the allies,” which appeared in the New York Times in August. 

Roosevelt presented the “destroyers-for-bases” deal as a fait accompli in September 1940 despite fears that it would cost him reelection two months later. However, the deal encountered “virtually no criticism,” he wrote to King George. Indeed, the leap-first strategy met a relatively tame public reaction. Moreover, Congress seemingly endorsed the deal when the Lend-Lease Act passed the following year. The Supreme Court, by its silence, validated the leap.

THOUGH ROOSEVELT still hoped to spare major American bloodshed, he recognized that resupplying fledgling democracies was at best hedging the nation’s bets. As early as 1920, Roosevelt assumed “every sane man knows that in case of another world war America would be drawn in.” Twenty years later, Roosevelt would urge a military draft to prepare for just that inevitability.

“Yet he had not urged it too vocally” his aide recalled. The idea of introducing the nation’s first peacetime draft, breaking with an American tradition averse to standing armies, came to FDR from a Harvard classmate in May 1940. His classmate was reviving the “old Plattsburg crowd,” a university-based military preparedness movement dormant since the Great War. Roosevelt encouraged their advocacy, but warned conscription was ultimately a “political” question contingent upon “what one can get from Congress.”

It was also a political question about how much FDR was willing to gamble as he campaigned for an unprecedented third term. But with the fall of France came a rise in support for compulsory service: up from 39 percent in December 1939 and 50 percent in June 1940, 63 percent supported a draft once Germany captured Paris. Roosevelt nudged this trend further in an address to Congress. Praising industry’s military production, he added, “a system of selective service” may be needed so that “when this modern materiel becomes available, it will be placed in the hands of troops trained, seasoned, and ready.”

By August, 71 percent of Americans supported “the immediate adoption of compulsory military training.” Perhaps it was this turning tide that convinced FDR’s electoral opponent, Wendell Willkie, to jilt his party’s platform by endorsing conscription. FDR swiftly caught up to opinion by signing the draft into law on September 16, 1940, calling it “America’s answer to Hitlerism.” Not only a tool of deterrence and preparation, Roosevelt celebrated the draft as an instrument that would also intertwine the fates of “Americans from all walks of life.”

CASH-AND-CARRY, destroyers-for-bases, and conscription were but three of several policies Roosevelt stewarded in preparation for war. Each illustrates the persistent process by which Roosevelt moved the needle and reduced polarization prior to that day which would “live in infamy.”

The president was the calmest person in a White House of scrambling officials that day. The attack on Pearl Harbor had vindicated his warnings, justified his preparations, and roused the cohesion the nation would need. His most trying task—preparing America spiritually and industrially to fight a war a majority had opposed—was over. Following the attack, FDR continued to corral support for the war effort, but he also rode a wave of nationalism that assured (most) politics stopped at the water’s edge.

It was not inevitable that an attack, especially one on a far-flung island territory many Americans did not instinctively recognize as U.S. homeland, would unite Americans. If the country had “overnight” become “at long last a united people,” as the journalist Walter Lippmann supposed, that unity owed much to the conditions Roosevelt set for events to do their work.

AN EVENT like Pearl Harbor is unlikely, though not unthinkable, during Biden’s presidency. Since each president “deals with concrete difficulties,” Roosevelt once said at Gettysburg, “[i]t seldom helps to wonder how a statesman of one generation would surmount the crisis of another.” But as FDR proceeded that day to explain how Lincoln had forged a “new unity” years ago, let us consider what Roosevelt’s example can clarify today.

Like FDR, Biden has the opportunity to lead public opinion from behind. Biden’s quiet diplomacy inside the Washington Beltway and beneath the bully pulpit has long been his greatest source of influence. He used precisely this technique to broker the bipartisan infrastructure compromise, over the intransigence of many Republicans and the efforts of progressives in his party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. In fact, it was on the few occasions Biden did discuss the deal outside closed doors that he nearly unraveled it. 

Biden can also lead public opinion on China from behind, and with less resistance than FDR confronted. For all its missteps, the Trump administration did leave in its wake what Senator Dan Sullivan calls a “bipartisan awakening” to the challenge of China. Although recent research doubts this awakening can reduce either Congress’ policy polarization or Americans’ affective polarization, recent trends trump those findings. A bipartisan concern with U.S. technological competitiveness vis-à-vis China is pushing congressmembers across the aisle. Outside Congress, nine in ten Americans view China as a competitor, and a majority want a more assertive policy towards China.

Biden should steer this momentum toward investing in what he calls “a competition to win the twenty-first century.” The competition, he stresses, has many non-security dimensions. Even so, the administration’s early attempts to cloak domestic tax-and-spend bills in the language of strategic competition risked squandering the bipartisan awakening. Roosevelt acknowledged that making “democracy work within our borders” was indeed “a component of national defense.” But he also knew that to simultaneously “pursue two equally important things” like common defense and general welfare was “darned hard.” When pressed to justify spending billions of post-recession dollars on tanks over social welfare, FDR defended the former as the better guarantor of Americans’ security and prosperity. That Biden’s first proposed defense budget could not find the $9 billion the operable National Defense Strategy requires, while the president’s administration proposed $6 trillion for other “once-in-a-generation” investments, suggests we have forgotten how precarious all investments are in an insecure world.

Though Sino-American competition will be full spectrum, military power will underpin each lever of U.S. national power needed to compete along each segment of that spectrum. Absent a credible threat of military force, diplomacy, agreements, and sanctions become impotent to compel our adversaries. U.S. leverage over the Taliban, for instance, departed on the last outbound aircraft carrying American combat troops. If the Chinese Communist Party assesses that America is unable or unwilling to defend its interests with military force, we should similarly expect little from other tools of national power.

The test may come sooner than later, too. Top military brass warn that Chinese preparedness for an assault on Taiwan could require the United States to deter (and maybe fight) with the military it has today, not the one it wants tomorrow. Therefore, future budgets cannot mortgage today’s military readiness for tomorrow’s procurement. A cross-strait contingency would also compel the United States to clarify its longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity,” a position with which FDR was well-acquainted, owing to congressional, legal, and public constraints on his foreign policy. Among the Americans who did take seriously the Axis threat in the 1930s, they argued U.S. rearmament should fortify their country alone, keeping would-be intruders at bay. Instead, Roosevelt sent abroad the first outputs of America’s revamped war machine. Keeping the Soviet Union and Britain in the fight was not only pivotal to defeating the Axis, but more self-interestedly, would reduce American costs over the war’s course. Roosevelt recognized the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them well before Churchill uttered the words.

The embargo repeal, destroyer deal, and Lend-Lease—all “methods short of war”—were America’s forward defenses, trading American treasure for European blood. As FDR extended to the Allies the “arsenal of democracy” before Pearl Harbor, so too might America “serve as armorer rather than guarantor” of vulnerable democracies today.

BIDEN’S “AMERICA is Back” tour through Europe in June launched his campaign to rally those allies again. Leveraging the political acumen forged over decades, the president gave a little—submitting America as the “arsenal of vaccines”—and gained a lot of acquiescence from the G7, NATO, and the European Union to name-and-shame Chinese transgressions. In a nod to their respective heroes, Biden and British prime minister Boris Johnson also updated Roosevelt and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter.

The communiqués, for now, are just statements. But rhetoric is where democratic policy begins. Before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt recalled, he deployed his oratorical skill in order to “constantly…keep before the people of the United States the ever-growing [Nazi] menace.” The current menace—atrocities in Xinjiang, suppression in Hong Kong, peril in Taiwan, and coercion elsewhere—should be kept before the people, too.

Exploiting such events, however, will prove more difficult for Biden than it was for Roosevelt. Not only was Roosevelt “perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war,” as he once confessed, but he was easily able to do so to help enter the war, too. These “good cause” lies, as Senator William Fulbright once referred to them, included a grossly distorted telling of a clash between a U.S. destroyer accompanying British aircraft and a German U-boat, fully a week after the incident. Today, the president’s response to (eerily) similar events—such as Russian warships firing at a British destroyer accompanied by U.S. aircraft in June 2021—must contend with commercial satellite imagery, open-source analysis, and the adversary’s propaganda, all disseminated in near real-time through social media. FDR enjoyed a sharp information asymmetry that is flattening today, as Biden discovered when trying to recast the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan as a logistical triumph.

The true power of Rosevelt’s storytelling rested less on his description of events, however, than on his speculation about what they portended. His four defense-oriented fireside chats predating Pearl Harbor were replete with eschatological imaginings read from the “Nazi book of world conquest.” Described ad nauseum as “intimate” chats, they were actually among the president's most vitriolic public remarks. Roosevelt was playing an old game, of course. Leaders have long exploited what Roman philosophers called “metus hostilis,” or fear of the enemy, to cohere their own ilk. FDR unleashed what the Pragmatists of his own era called the “social possibilities of war” by characterizing the war in Manichean terms that pitted democracy versus dictatorship. “There never was,” declared Roosevelt, “and never can be successful compromise between good and evil.”

In this tradition, Biden has instrumentalized fear over Beijing’s intentions and framed competition with China as a “battle between democracies and autocracies.” The more difficult task, however, may be maintaining that distinction. Building in-group cohesion at the expense of the Chinese “other” risks blurring the lines. The animosity toward Japan that Roosevelt helped engender eventually converted America’s West Coast into what historian Clinton Rossiter called a “naked dictatorship” for 117,116 interned Japanese-Americans.

Here Biden should heed Roosevelt’s words over his (mis)deeds. Before ordering the internment, FDR chided employers for firing Asian Americans. Imploring Americans to “[r]emember the Nazi technique” that “pits race against race,” he admonished, “[w]e must not let that happen here.” Reports of recent anti-Asian violence—and the bill Biden signed to combat it—reflect the perils of trading in social identity theory, particularly as tribalizing, race-based identity politics are regaining purchase.

THE CONFLATION of Sino-American competition and Sinophobia partly explains why the bipartisan awakening to China’s challenge has not yet resolved disagreements over the appropriate response. While most Americans see China as a competitor, less than half think “limiting China’s power and influence” should be a top priority, according to a recent Pew Research poll. Moreover, this debate over containment (in all but name) splits neatly along partisan lines: only 36 percent of Democrats but 63 percent of Republicans favor it.

China’s centrality to the global economy ensures containment today will not mirror its Cold War predecessor. Still, Biden would be ill-advised to play offense alone in a protracted security competition. The administration has, in fact, already outlined economic containment measures like “friend-shoring” to reduce democracies’ reliance on China. In Brussels, where Roosevelt once pressured the Nine Powers Conference to support his quarantine, U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken likewise proposed barring China from “open and secure [trade] spaces.”

Roosevelt lost his bid for containment by quarantine. If Biden wants better success, he should broaden his foreign-policy coalition, both domestically and abroad, like FDR did following his ill-received quarantine speech.

Even though Roosevelt enjoyed an electoral mandate and comfortable congressional majority, both of which Biden lacks today, none of Roosevelt’s defense initiatives—from the embargo repeal and lend-lease to conscription—were one-party policies. They were not bipartisan because they were popular; a single vote saved the draft in August 1941. They were bipartisan by necessity: the president’s party alone could not supply enough votes. The greatest champions of FDR’s New Deal were also his foreign policy’s staunchest critics. 

Likewise, progressive members of Biden’s party are enthusiastic about his domestic agenda but remain skeptical about great-power competition. Roosevelt solved this numbers problem by stretching his foreign-policy coalition across the aisle. He appointed prominent Republicans to run the war and navy departments and made his 1940 Republican challenger his envoy to Churchill, depriving anti-intervention Republicans of top cover. Biden’s foreign policy coalition requires less opposition party courting since few Republicans oppose balancing against China, but he has the problem of skeptics inside his own party that FDR had.

Framing competition as a human rights imperative may help Biden unite the most partisan. Large majorities of conservative Republicans (77 percent) and liberal Democrats (76 percent), as well as lesser ideologues, want the United States to privilege human rights over trade in its relationship with China.

Critics charge that a values-conscious foreign policy confuses what is a security competition for an ideological one. But Sino-American competition is already fundamentally ideological, a fact recently exhibited by Biden’s summit of democracies and China’s denouncement of it. Both the American and Chinese heads of state conceptualize this great-power competition as a battle between clashing ideologies. If the world’s structure “is what states make of it,” as the political scientist Alexander Wendt famously posited, then it seems competition too is what competitors make of it.

IN 1938, a State Department staffer thought America should travel “along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state.” Fortunately, Roosevelt transcended such national self-loathing then in vogue and proved democracy could work—and fight. Perhaps America’s victory in the war is what changed the mind of a then young George F. Kennan, whom history remembers as the architect of America’s Cold War containment strategy. The strategy worked so well that Americans have taken for granted a world without contest.

As the unipolar moment wanes and democracy retreats from the Eurasian map, we now know that we can no clearer see the end of history today than Kennan could in 1938. This is because history is neither linear nor cyclic. History is a series of contingencies: some novel, others familiar, but none destined. Biden would do well to probe Roosevelt’s example for guidance.

Luke J. Schumacher is a first-year Ph.D. student studying political science at the University of Virginia. A graduate of West Point and Cambridge University, he was previously a U.S. Army intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter at @LukeJSchumacher.

Image: Reuters.