Opinion: What Biden and Trump have in common might surprise you

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room,” also on Appleand Spotify. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinionon CNN.

You might think President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are worlds apart on most international issues. But look a little closer, and you will see that the two candidates actually share some surprising commonalities on foreign policy, trade and even immigration.

While you are unlikely to hear much about those commonalities during Thursday’s presidential debate on CNN — it is, after all, a debate — it’s worth bearing these in mind when Biden and Trump take the stage for what could be one of the most consequential debates of any presidential campaign in recent memory.

Voters should also consider issues like temperament, consistency and predictability when comparing the two candidates as the future commander in chief. After all, both American allies and rivals want a certain amount of predictability when dealing with the world’s leading superpower.

American allies want and deserve to be treated with respect, not contempt. An excellent example of this is the effort to get all the members of NATO to spend 2% of their GDP on their own defense by the end of this year.

This was a policy goal agreed to during the Obama administration when Biden was vice president, but you wouldn’t know that from how, when he was in office, President Trump constantly publicly berated NATO members to spend more on their defense and claimed