Around 3 a.m. on Nov. 15, hours before the start of President Biden’s final day at a summit in Bali, Indonesia, an aide nudged him awake to deal with a potentially explosive crisis: A Russian-made missile had landed in Poland and killed two farmers.

It was not yet clear where the missile had come from. But Biden and his aides knew they would face immediate questions about whether Russia had intentionally launched a missile into a NATO country — an act of war that would trigger Article 5 of the alliance’s charter, drawing the United States and more than two dozen other countries into direct conflict with Russia.

With the sun not yet up, Biden huddled with his two top foreign policy officials, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. The three sat on the couches in Biden’s lavish hotel room at the Grand Hyatt Bali and dialed into a briefing with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who told them the Pentagon had strong indications the missile was from Ukraine, not Russia, and had gone tragically off course.

Biden’s first move was to call Polish President Andrzej Duda. “You and I together need to set the tone for our response,” Biden said, according to Sullivan, who was present. “We need to indicate to the world that as we do this, we’re not going to let events spin out of control.”

Biden then invited a cluster of foreign leaders — including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Rishi Sunak — to his hotel room to personally workshop a joint statement aimed at calming the situation. When Biden later went out to speak to reporters, he veered from his prepared remarks to make clear the explosions probably were not from a Russian projectile.

The moment reflected key elements of Biden’s approach to foreign policy, as he heads into a stretch of his presidency likely to be far more dominated by global affairs: He reacted instinctively, relied heavily on relationships with other world leaders and showed few qualms about departing from a carefully scripted statement.

Biden has articulated a foreign policy doctrine as explicitly as any president in recent years, saying the United States will side with democracies in their global battle with autocracies. But ultimately, allies say, Biden is guided by instinct and experience — not sweeping theories or cut-and-dried principles.

“He has very strong instincts,” Blinken, who has worked with Biden for more than 20 years, said in an interview. “But they are deeply informed by experience, deeply informed by constant conversations, engagements, discussions and debates with his senior team and with others.”

Biden took office after more than 30 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and eight more spearheading diplomatic assignments for President Barack Obama. That seasoning has led to a willingness to overrule military commanders, diplomatic experts and others, a habit that has produced notable successes and occasional missteps.

“He’s got fluency on foreign policy that gives him confidence — he knows he can win the argument,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), adding, “It allows him to act with boldness and confidence, even when a decision he’s making may be ripe for political criticism.”

This article is based on interviews with nearly two dozen White House aides, administration officials, former Biden staffers, members of Congress and experts, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly or discuss private meetings.

Much of Biden’s third year in office will probably focus on foreign policy as House Republicans, now in control of the chamber, do all they can to block his domestic agenda. Biden has lined up a busy schedule of foreign travel for 2023, including trips to Japan, Australia, Europe, India and Africa. In a few weeks, he will visit his ancestral homeland of Ireland.

The two biggest foreign policy flash points of Biden’s presidency — Ukraine and Afghanistan — highlight the advantages and liabilities of his approach, especially his certainty that he knows the right course regardless of what others may think.

By the time Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine a year ago, Biden had years of experience with the Russian leader, including a close-up view of his annexation of Crimea while Biden was vice president. Biden’s success in holding together an international coalition to back Ukraine is likely to be a defining part of his legacy.

Yet his equally long history of grappling with Afghanistan led to one of his most controversial decisions: pulling the last U.S. troops out of that country in the summer of 2021, a chaotic and deadly withdrawal that allowed the Taliban to retake power.

Biden aides and allies say it was the right decision and that, after 20 years of war, the pullout was never going to be smooth. But the abrupt move, which included the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, angered some of the United States’ closest allies and has spurred investigations by congressional Republicans.

GOP leaders say Biden’s foreign policy preconceptions have weakened the country in the global arena. They point to the Afghanistan pullout, Biden’s desire to maintain communication with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal as policies that have emboldened U.S. rivals.

“President Biden has been wasting U.S. taxpayer resources chasing fruitless engagement with the Chinese Communist Party. It is clear that Xi is not interested in genuine cooperation,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an interview. “Our deterrence against Iran is broken and must be restored, or we will face devastating consequences. Unfortunately, Biden is not doing what is best for Americans on the world stage.”

Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Biden’s experience has enabled him to take such actions with an “easy confidence” even when he faces political blowback.

“To me, the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is the primary example of Joe Biden’s foreign policy style. He was absolutely confident it was the right decision,” Murphy said. “The two previous presidents had known in their gut leaving Afghanistan was the right thing to do, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it.”

Murphy added: “I think he knew it was going to be subject to a lot of criticism and a lot of political hand-wringing, and he made the decision to do it because he came into office with a real confidence about his take on the world.”

At the heart of Biden’s foreign policy is the singular importance he places on his rapport with foreign leaders. “He frequently says all foreign policy is personal, that personal relationships with leaders really matter,” Sullivan said.

That includes sensitivity to those leaders’ domestic political challenges. When Macron visited Washington late last year, he blasted one of Biden’s most cherished initiatives, the Inflation Reduction Act, for boosting U.S. industries at the expense of European companies.

Biden’s team briefed him on Macron’s remarks before he was to appear with the French leader at a news conference. As the aides read Macron’s comments to Biden, the president smirked, indicating he already knew about them, according to a senior White House official familiar with the meeting.

“I know exactly why Emmanuel said that,” Biden told his aides, suggesting he understood that Macron had to slam Biden’s initiative to appease the French electorate.

In September, after hosting a summit for leaders of Pacific island nations, Biden spontaneously invited the group — many of whom were seeing the White House for the first time — into the Oval Office, where he showed them the photographs on his desk and explained the significance of every painting on the wall, according to a senior State Department official who attended the event.

Still, this personal cast to foreign policy has not always worked out well. Biden initially was openly contemptuous of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for his history of human rights abuses, especially the intelligence community’s finding that he had personally ordered the killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Biden’s aides persuaded him that Saudi Arabia was too important a country to snub, however, so he ultimately did meet with the crown prince, resulting in an awkward fist bump that provided endless fodder for his critics. Months later, Saudi Arabia publicly embarrassed Biden with a cut in oil production shortly before the midterm elections.

Biden’s aides estimate that in 2022, he met with about 80 percent of the world’s leaders in person, a figure that includes one-on-one meetings and international summits. But his sometimes-undiplomatic style with his counterparts goes back decades.

In 2004, President George W. Bush struck a deal with Moammar Gaddafi in which the Libyan ruler would renounce nuclear weapons in exchange for diplomatic relations with the United States. Bush asked Biden, then the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to travel to Libya to show the deal had bipartisan support.

Biden and his aides arrived in Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte only to be kept waiting for hours. “I’m a very busy man,” Gaddafi said when he finally arrived.

Biden stood up. “That’s okay,” he replied. “I can leave.” Gaddafi, taken by surprise, urged Biden to stay, and the two men proceeded with a meeting that ended up lasting about three hours, according to an official who was present.

When he was vice president, an aide recalled, a Latin American leader demanded to know why American aid was going to the country’s nonprofits and businesses instead of to its government. “Because you’re corrupt!” Biden shot back.

As president, Biden also sometimes takes his own advisers by surprise, for example by publicly announcing decisions on matters they thought were still under discussion.

On the question of whether the administration would send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, aides prepared a number of vague statements because no decision had been made. Then, in an interview, Biden said bluntly that Ukraine “doesn’t need F-16s now.”

At a fundraiser in October, Biden declared that Russia’s nuclear threats amounted to the most serious “prospect of Armageddon in 60 years,” an alarming aside that was not part of his prepared remarks. The president received widespread criticism for the comment; a senior White House official said it reflected in part his frustration with experts who dismissed the nuclear danger.

In San Diego last month, Biden got ahead of his staff again by revealing that he planned to speak with Xi in the coming weeks. Aides had been instructed to remain vague on the question to avoid appearing overly eager for a call with the Chinese leader, according to an official who was part of the conversations.

For all his confidence, Biden frequently stress-tests his decisions with a small circle of advisers. While Obama often preferred to pore through briefing memos, Biden peppers aides with questions and arguments, to the extent that they often think he disagrees with their point of view — only to find out later that he agreed all along.

The president also often has a stack of foreign policy books on his desk, underlined and marked with Post-it notes, one aide said, adding that he sometimes sends officials home with a book or asks them to read a specific passage.

Overall, Biden’s instincts can lead to a less obviously consistent approach than that of other leaders. The late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) reliably favored American engagement in world hot spots, for example, while President Donald Trump almost never did. For Biden, in contrast, the Ukraine war called for a deep U.S. involvement — while Afghanistan necessitated a rapid pullout.

As a result, Biden spent hundreds of hours with foreign leaders to encourage their support for Ukraine. He has even been willing to take actions that he and his aides did not initially like, such as signing off on sending powerful M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine in order to get Germany to release its supply of Leopard 2 tanks.

In withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Biden overruled the objections of top Pentagon officials, as well as allies who had committed troops for more than 20 years to support the U.S. effort. As vice president, he was often a lone voice vigorously advocating for the U.S. withdrawal, arguing that staying longer would bring more costs than benefits.

“He’s not shy; he’s comfortable expressing himself and doing so persistently and with vigor. He is a strong advocate for his own positions. You don’t have to guess where he stands on issues,” said Douglas Lute, former U.S. ambassador to NATO under Obama.

“That’s actually very powerful in the decision-making process, because there are others who have the style of holding their cards close to the vest and waiting to see which way an issue breaks and siding with the majority,” Lute said. “He has his own views.”