Updated at 10:15 a.m. ET

President Biden on Friday is set to give his first speech since taking office that is aimed at an international audience.

He will make his case for his plans to turn the page on former President Donald Trump’s “America First” ethos — and try to convince traditional allies that the United States is ready to work with them on issues ranging from arms control, COVID-19, cyberhacking and climate change.

“We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future direction of our world. Between those who argue that … autocracy is the best way forward, and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting those challenges,” Biden is set to say, according to an excerpt released by the White House.

“Historians will examine and write about this moment. It’s an inflection point. And I believe with every ounce of my being that democracy must prevail,” he will say.

Biden is set to address the Munich Security Conference at 11:15 a.m. ET, a who’s who of global national security officials.

Watch his remarks live here.

Earlier, he met with G7 leaders about COVID-19. Both engagements are virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It comes a day after his State Department said the United States would be willing to attend a meeting with European partners and Iran to “discuss a diplomatic way forward on Iran’s nuclear program” — the first signs of movement toward talks about rejoining the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump had quit. It was not immediately clear whether Iran would agree to meet.

In his speech, Biden “will not get into specifics about timetables” for Iran talks but will say “we look forward to engaging in diplomacy,” a senior administration official told reporters ahead of the speech. “We are keen to sit down and hear what the Iranians have to say. We want to come up with a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear program, and let’s get to work. And with the EU invitation from today, I think we have a path forward to return to nuclear diplomacy in a way that could ultimately put us on a positive path,” the official said.

Biden will cast the past four years as an anomaly, and say that he is laying the groundwork for investments at home and around the world that will outlast his time as president. “Let me make clear that the focus of his speech tomorrow is not Donald Trump or what happened over the last four years,” the official said.

He plans to call out Russia and ask allies to work together to counter its efforts to undermine democracies, the official said. “He will specifically talk to what he believes is a concerted effort by the Kremlin to carry out a strategy to discredit, undermine and destabilize democracies,” the official said.

At the G7, he will announce the United States will chip in $4 billion to COVAX, a fund run by Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, and the World Health Organization, which aims to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to 92 low- and middle-income countries.

Reprising 2009 remarks

For Biden, the Munich Security Conference is a bit of a homecoming. The annual gathering normally sees the world’s top national security and military leaders listen to speeches, hold side meetings, and float new ideas for agreements in the nooks and crannies of a plush German hotel.

Biden spent plenty of time over the decades on stage and talking to old friends in hallways when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As vice president, he led three U.S. delegations to the conference, making a pilgrimage there for the Obama administration’s first foreign trip in 2009.

That year, he sought to soothe relations strained by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I come to Europe on behalf of a new administration, and an administration that’s determined to set a new tone not only in Washington, but in America’s relations around the world,” Biden said.

On Friday’s Biden’s main job will be to convince traditional allies in Europe that the United States is a team player after four years of Trump. Charles Kupchan, a former Obama official who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Biden faces a dramatically different environment as weary allies continue to grapple with the political changes in the United States as well as their own countries.

“What is new here is that Americans and Europeans are still in shock about the illiberalism and the populism and the nativism that have infected political life on both sides of the Atlantic,” said Kupchan, author of Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World.

Despite that uncertainty, Biden is expected to touch on familiar themes. In 2009, he called on leaders to work with the United States on global challenges such as arms control, Afghanistan and climate change.

Heather Conley, who was a senior official for European issues in the Bush State Department, sees uncanny similarities between the priorities of 2009 and 2021.

“To know that we’re going back to those same themes over and over again, it has that feeling, that — particularly during the pandemic of Groundhog Day, the movie — we’re waking up and we’re repeating those same sentences, those same challenges,” she said.

In 2019, Biden returned to Munich as a private citizen when the rift between the United States and traditional allies was on full display. A Munich Security Conference report that year found that the Trump administration displayed an “irritating enthusiasm for strongmen across the globe” and “disdain for international institutions and agreements.”

Biden again sought to sooth allies. He urged them to wait Trump out.

“And I promise you, I promise you, as my mother would say, this, too, shall pass. We will be back. We will be back. Don`t have any doubt about that,” he said, to applause.

The rift within the Republican Party spilled out into full view this week.

After voting to acquit Donald Trump on an impeachment charge of incitement of insurrection following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said unequivocally that the former president is to blame.

“There is no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” said McConnell, who noted he didn’t vote to convict because he believes a former official can’t be tried for impeachment.

Trump responded, as he likes to say, 10 times harder. In a statement Tuesday, he called McConnell “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” and added, “[I]f Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again.”

McConnell worked with Trump over his four years in the White House. The Senate leader shepherded Trump’s tax cuts through Congress and got a record number of judges confirmed to the federal bench.

But it was perhaps predictable that it would end this way. There was only so long that the Kentucky Republican — and the establishment wing of the party he represents — could try to ride the tiger that is Trump.

These are two very different men, but the infighting represents something far broader than just the two of them. It is emblematic of the splintering between rank-and-file Republicans and has roots much further back than Trump’s political rise.

Still Trump’s party

Make no mistake: The GOP of 2021 is very much Trump’s party.

His approval ratings among Republicans continue to tower over others in the party, and two-thirds of Republicans say they still want him to lead the GOP.

Trump also controls much of the conservative political apparatus in the country, with the Republican National Committee firmly within his grip.

That means state party officials are fully in his camp, something that has been made perfectly clear since Trump’s impeachment. County and state parties in a number of states have moved to censure Republicans who voted to impeach or convict the former president.

But something else is happening within the party at both ends of the spectrum.

In higher-than-normal numbers, tens of thousands of formerly registered Republicans across the country have dropped the party label since Jan. 6. And some — a clear minority of anti-Trump Republicans — are even contemplating forming a third party.

“I’ve had a number of political people reach out — leaders and grassroots people reaching out,” said Evan McMullin, a former policy director for the House Republican Conference who ran for president in 2016 as an independent. He cohosted a call of more than 120 disaffected Republicans interested in the third-party idea earlier this month. “They’ve had enough and are ready to move on, ready for change.”

McMullin said they are mostly “former Trump supporters, who appreciated the policies and the judges, but the insurrection was too much and believe it’s time for the Republican Party to move on.”

Largely because of Republicans, record numbers of Americans are now calling themselves independents and saying a third party is needed.

In September, just 40% of Republicans said they thought a third party was necessary. That has now jumped to 63%, according to Gallup.

But this increase is mostly because of Trump supporters, not people who are anti-Trump, said Jeff Jones, a senior editor at Gallup.

“It’s more of a pro-Trump group that would want to break away from the GOP,” Jones said, adding of the GOP infighting, “There is frustration with both [sides] with each other. … I think the civil war going on in the Republican Party is pushing them up to these higher levels” of independents and those in favor of a third party.

Not a new divide

The divide between Trump and McConnell is not all that surprising, except for how public it has become.

McConnell is a careful and canny political insider whose lack of dynamism is balanced out by his tactical abilities. He cares first and foremost about putting up candidates who, in his view, can win.

Trumpism, he believes, won’t lead to a majority everywhere. After all, during his presidency, Trump alienated college-educated and suburban voters, and the party lost not just the White House, but control of both chambers of Congress too.

Trump, on the other hand, may be undisciplined and divisive, but his outsize personality and bombastic political incorrectness have delivered him the heart of his party and brought new voters into the fold. He believes candidates who position themselves as uncompromisingly in his controversial mold are the only way forward for the party.

This divide, however, is not new. The Republican Party — the party of Lincoln, as Republicans like to say — used to be one dominated by the wealthy and the educated.

The party was not dominant in the South, as it is today. In fact, it had a strong foothold in the Northeast. It was Democrats who had long dominated in the South — “Dixie-crats,” they were sometimes called.

But that all started to change in the 1960s with the election of Democrat John F. Kennedy, a liberal northeasterner; the civil rights movement; and Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of it.

Jim Crow-era laws were dismantled, and Black Americans were given more rights and freedoms, particularly when it came to integration and voting.

Some in the GOP believed the way to a majority was through a “Southern Strategy.” It used appeals to fear and white racial grievances, which began a long arc of an American political crackup centering around race and culture.

It arguably laid the foundation for the Tea Party movement, which happened to spring up during the tenure of the first Black president, Barack Obama. That led to the formation of the Freedom Caucus, the block of hardline House Republicans who led to the ouster of John Boehner as speaker and culminated with Trump’s election.

In recent years, whites without college degrees have gravitated toward the Republican Party, while voters with degrees — both whites and demographically growing nonwhites in the suburbs — have moved to Democrats.

So, this is a very different Republican Party than it was decades ago. Gone are the concerns of free trade and a hawkish national security with a strong American global footprint. In is a type of right-wing populism with voters animated by cultural issues like immigration, abortion and religious freedom — things the base perceives as necessary to defend to maintain a way of life that liberal popular culture threatens.

Mixed in with this nativism, many in the GOP base now believe misinformation and have declining trust in expertise and institutions.

Trump critic McMullin sees continuity in the former president’s rise.

“My view of Trump and Trumpism is it was a logical next step on a destructive trajectory that was already present in the GOP before Trump came along,” he said.

Trump’s grip on the Republican Party raises questions about the direction of the future of the GOP in a volatile and unpredictable period in American politics, with sky-high polarization and personal distrust.

But even McMullin is clear-eyed about whether, or when, the party will dump Trump. It may take years, if ever, for the Trump fever to break, he said.

“If the party continues to run on Trumpism in 2022 and again suffers defeats, then I think we’d see another portion of Republicans desire a different direction, and, at that point, have an even more robust debate within the party,” McMullin said. “And that may not be enough to change the direction of the party.

“It may take another cycle or two to change.”