President Biden used the closing of the NATO summit to issue a blistering attack on Donald J. Trump’s rejection of the value of alliances, and he declared for the first time that he had developed a strategy to interrupt the growing military and technological relationship between Russia and China.
In a wide-ranging news conference being watched to see how he handled himself amid questions about his age and acuity, Mr. Biden mixed defiance of his critics with several flubs.
But the session also served as a platform for him to show a command of foreign policy, including describing in detail the decisions he has made over three and a half years that have been punctuated by wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
He took credit for warning the Europeans of an impending invasion of Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2022, and for preparing NATO to provide arms and intelligence as soon as war broke out. And he used the moment to remind American voters that Mr. Trump’s first reaction to the invasion was to praise President Vladimir V. Putin.
“Here’s what he said,” Mr. Biden added, his voice dripping with sarcasm: “‘It was genius. It was wonderful.’”
The biting comparison, with its suggestion that Mr. Trump admires only brute force and is in Mr. Putin’s pocket, was the kind of attack on his opponent that Mr. Biden’s supporters were hoping for in the debate between the two men two weeks ago but never heard.
Pressed about whether he believed he would be able, in a second term, as he approached his mid-80s, to handle a one-on-one negotiation with Mr. Putin or President Xi Jinping of China, Mr. Biden shot back, “I’m ready to deal with them now and three years from now.”
He said he remained in “direct contact” with Mr. Xi, whom he last saw in person in California, at a summit last November, leading to a brief warming of relations. But he made clear that he was refusing to talk to Mr. Putin.
“I have no good reason to talk to Putin right now,” he said. “There’s not much that he is prepared to do in terms of accommodating any change in his behavior.”
And he expressed regret that he could not persuade Israeli leaders to listen to him when he warned them, soon after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, that they should not overreact.
“I said, don’t make the same mistake we did,” Mr. Biden said, referring to the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He added that he had offered to help Israel “find the bad guys, Sinwar and company,’’ a reference to the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, who planned the attack.
“So there’s a lot of things that, in retrospect, I wish I had been able to convince Israelis to do, but the bottom line is we have a chance now,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s time to end this war. It doesn’t mean walk away from going after Sinwar and Hamas.”
He said that “there was no reason to occupy anywhere,’’ drawing a comparison — somewhat elliptically — between how Israel seeks to oversee Gaza after the war to the failed American effort in Afghanistan.
His answer about Israel was revealing of his political strategy as well. If Mr. Biden remains in the race, as he vowed to on Thursday night, he knows he will continue to be squeezed between the progressive wing of his own party, many of whose members believe he has abetted Israel’s killing of innocent Palestinians, and pro-Israel Democrats who are demanding that he remain resolute in support of the Israeli government by providing whatever weapons it needs to eradicate Hamas.
He placed himself somewhere in the middle, arguing that he withheld from Israel only 2,000-pound bombs that would have killed even more civilians if the Israelis dropped them on heavily populated territory.
Mr. Biden’s news conference came at the end of a two-and-a-half-day summit of the 32 leaders of NATO. The leaders ranged from those who are on the frontline of the effort to push Mr. Putin’s forces out of the roughly 20 percent of the country they now occupy, to some, like President Viktor Orban of Hungary, who just saw Mr. Putin and appears to be pushing for a settlement that would reward the Russian leader with much of the territory he has already seized.
Mr. Orban, whom Mr. Trump has repeatedly praised for his iron rule over Hungary, was reportedly leaving the summit for another visit to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida home.
But it was on the question of Russia’s rapidly expanding relationship with China — and its alignment with North Korea and Iran, two other arms suppliers to Russia — that Mr. Biden broke the most new ground.
Until the news conference, he had never conceded that the United States was seeking to disrupt the relationship between the two countries, just as President Richard M. Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, did a half-century ago, by surprising the world with a diplomatic opening to Beijing.
He declined to discuss details of the strategy in public, but went on to say that “you’ll see that some of our European friends are going to be curtailing their investment in Russia — I mean, excuse me, in China, as long as China continues to have this indirect help to Russia.”
That was a significant reversal. Two years ago, Mr. Biden expressed doubts that the two countries, with their centuries of enmity and border disputes, could ever get along.
By the time the NATO leaders gathered this week for the 75th anniversary of the alliance, however, they were denouncing China as “a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine” and hinting that European nations might restrict their economic interchanges with Beijing.
China “cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation,” the summit’s declaration says, wording that was pressed by Mr. Biden’s aides.
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