Gods of the Moment, Choosing Who Lives or Dies

Evan Hill reviews Alexander Ward’s “The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump.”

By Evan HillNovember 2, 2024

• Politics

AFTER RUSSIA INVADED Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian flags appeared everywhere, fluttering from car windows, snapping from flagpoles, winking from suit lapels. The president of the National Flag Company told The New York Times that he’d never seen such demand for another country’s flag, and that the only time he’d done as much business was after September 11, 2001. The invasion, and Ukraine’s stunningly successful resistance, seemed to touch a nerve, activating the enduring American belief that we defend freedom and fight just wars against aggressors. Poll after poll showed that Americans cared about the conflict and overwhelmingly supported Ukraine. The Biden administration agreed, and the aid flowed. The glove of foreign policy slipped comfortably over the hand of public opinion. A year after the invasion, President Joe Biden secretly traveled to Kyiv, where he proclaimed that the capital “stands strong, it stands proud, and it stands free.”

That line proved irresistible to Alexander Ward, a national security reporter (formerly for Politico, currently for The Wall Street Journal) and the author of The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump (2024), who made it the concluding sentence of his new book, which aims to be “the first definitive, unvarnished account of the Biden Doctrine.”

Unfortunately for both president and author, history marched on.

On July 21, facing a likely irreversible decline in his polling and popularity, Biden dropped out of the race for reelection, becoming the first president to do so in 56 years. And for the past year, world attention has been fixed not on Ukraine but on Gaza, where a war waged by Israel in retaliation for the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack—which killed around 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals—has in turn killed, as of mid-October, at least 42,065 Palestinians and destroyed the territory’s life-sustaining infrastructure. Of the 34,344 dead who have been identified, over half have been women, children, or the elderly.

The sudden foreshortening of Biden’s presidency, the devastation of Gaza, and the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon are, as I write, penning the unexpected final chapters of Biden’s legacy, yet none of this historic ferment appears in The Internationalists, an effort to make the case for a Biden Doctrine that perplexingly, and inexplicably, concludes just two years into Biden’s term. Ward’s decision to close the book in February 2023, halfway into Biden’s presidency, renders it something like a movie missing its final reel, and its triumphal concluding note in Kyiv rings discordantly in the fall of 2024. Concluding before the Gaza war in particular—and the domestic opposition it continues to inspire against Biden’s administration—means Ward never has to reckon with a conflict that has put a key American ally at odds with much of world opinion and international jurisprudence and which daily threatens to escalate into full-fledged regional war—a bloody challenge to a “Biden Doctrine” that must have seemed secured in the wake of Ukraine’s defense, as The Internationalists went to print. The book instead becomes, almost by accident, a story not about the Biden Doctrine but about the effort by the Democratic foreign policy elite to make it seem like such a thing ever existed.

Unlike other famous entries in its genre, The Internationalists forgoes deep character study or documentary research for the beat-by-beat style of coverage that Politico helped make dominant in American political media, moving briskly from speech to press briefing, concerned less with strategy and statecraft than with communications and public relations. It grants anonymity to scores of government sources, not to discuss state secrets so much as to describe meetings as “extremely serious, professional, and mission focused.” It is a book that, almost as much as its characters, feels shaped by the forces of Washington, DC, a place where faraway death and destruction are measured less by the scale of human suffering than by how much they enhance or reduce the scale of political ambition.

If the book can be said to have a protagonist, it is National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the Minnesota-raised debate tournament champion, quiz-bowl star, and general wunderkind who completed both his undergraduate and law degrees at Yale, with a stop for a Rhodes Scholarship and a master’s degree from Oxford in between. Since joining Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 2008 on the good word of his former boss Senator Amy Klobuchar, Sullivan has stood a quiet but constant watch in the top echelons of Democratic foreign and national security policy, serving as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff in the State Department before being named the youngest-ever director of policy planning. He then worked as Vice President Biden’s national security adviser and later as a senior adviser to Clinton’s second presidential campaign before finally joining President Biden as national security adviser once again, a role he continues to hold. Clinton even officiated his marriage to Margaret Goodlander, a former deputy assistant attorney general and senior adviser to senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, at a ceremony attended by Bill Clinton, future secretary of state Anthony Blinken, and then–Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, for whom both Sullivan and Goodlander had clerked.

Sullivan’s personality emerges in beige quotes gleaned from his friendly interviews with Minnesota publications or the kind of anodyne professional anecdotes you might hear at an office retirement party (he has, it’s said, “a strong work ethic and an uncanny ability to quote Billy Joel lyrics and Saved by the Bell lines”). It’s unclear whether he spoke to Ward for the book, or if his words are among those of its anonymous sources, but as a protagonist he seems a cipher, with no apparent motivation as strong as his desire to serve well. Sullivan’s core principles, Ward informs us, are those of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, “nearly indistinguishable” from Clinton’s. In distilled form, they are the familiar mantra that the United States should “promote and defend the liberal international order” and the “rules and norms that govern global economics and politics” in pursuit of “a more globalized and interconnected world” that will “lift all nations” into greater prosperity and democracy. If there exists a central experience in Sullivan’s life that shaped this worldview or led him to these principles, something that animates his view of the world, we are not told. Belief in the liberal international order is made to feel more like a vow one might take upon joining a private club than a deeply felt conviction.

For the Sullivans of the American elite, Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and the simultaneous left-wing insurgency led by Senator Bernie Sanders were shocking threats to the way they thought the world should and did work. American foreign policy, in their view, had with surprising speed become unmoored from the great American middle, the imagined farmers and coal miners who no longer understood why NATO mattered or what benefits they received from “extending the nuclear umbrella to South Korea.” Trump and Sanders had revealed cracks in the bipartisan Washington consensus that had held sway since the end of the Cold War, and the Democratic establishment in exile needed to figure out a way to repair them, swaying these voters back by reappropriating and rebranding the more agreeable planks of their right- and left-wing challengers. They called their answer a “foreign policy for the middle class,” a doctrine that would in theory subject each plank of a new Democratic administration’s foreign policy to the “litmus test” of how it affected Americans’ economic well-being, and whether it made “life better, easier, safer for families across this country.”

Over 47 years in politics, Biden, the victorious incoming president, had evolved into a standard-bearer of that bipartisan consensus. His worldview put America first, mostly eschewed the human rights agenda, and favored interventionism before coming to shun war-making after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan turned into unpopular quagmires. Biden, Ward writes, believed that American power should underwrite the liberal international order. It was the United States’ great fortune that the boundaries of that order happened to always trace almost precisely the outline of the United States’ own interests. If upholding the international order happened to occasionally spawn mayhem in less consequential countries, that was the cost of the greater goal of international peace and prosperity, and probably not something the American middle class would know or vote about. “Foreign policy for the middle class” was just another way of asking what benefited the US the most. For Biden, this new branding could in fact be an easy “first-page rewrite” of the philosophy he had held his whole career, as Ward revealingly puts it, not the kind of fundamental revision of the United States’ role in the world that the Sanders wing of the party wanted.

In the limited ambit of The Internationalists, three international crises put this rebranded foreign policy to the test: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the 2021 Israeli bombing of Gaza.

The first provides a narrative tailor-made to serve as proof of the book’s thesis: a land war in Europe pitting a smaller democracy against overpowering revanchist authoritarianism, embodied in the United States’ old foe, Russia. Biden’s national security officials, having learned from the failure to strenuously oppose Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, acted forcefully. They cleverly shared accurate intelligence about Russia’s intentions in order to rally NATO to Ukraine’s defense and supplied Ukraine with the money and weapons necessary to defend itself while avoiding the risk of American casualties. Biden, personally invested, felt the need to stand up to Russia “in his bones,” a White House staffer told Ward. The US strategy to support Ukraine proved to be crucial, popular, and successful. The Biden Doctrine seemed to work.

The same couldn’t be said for the exit from Afghanistan, a crisis that also reveals the limits of the book’s reporting.

The withdrawal had been all but etched in stone by Biden’s personal commitment to ending the war, as well as a deal the Trump administration had struck with the Taliban to leave by May 1, 2021, as long as the Taliban halted their attacks on US forces. By the time Biden took office, the Taliban were on the cusp of victory. “If you go a day beyond May 1, all bets are off,” they told US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. Yet by the end of March, with just a month to go before the deadline, Biden still hadn’t given the order to withdraw. The government hesitated to mobilize the vast machinery that would need to surge into motion to evacuate American troops, diplomats, aid workers, civilians, and the families of tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked for the US over two decades, many of whom had applied for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) but were being kept in never-ending limbo.

The key reason for this fatally relaxed pace, it would emerge, was the critically mistaken intelligence community assessment that Afghan forces could stave off the Taliban long enough to give the Potemkin government in Kabul 18 to 24 months of life, allowing the United States time to conduct a withdrawal and ramp up the SIV program at its convenience. That prognosis was at odds with the view of General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told Biden’s cabinet that if US troops withdrew by May 1, the government would fall not in two years but between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In the end, even that prediction proved too optimistic, and Kabul fell on August 15. Biden had promised that there would be “no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” alluding to the ignominious end of the Vietnam War. Instead, the defining images of the end of the United States’ 20-year adventure in Afghanistan were worse: desperate Afghans mobbing the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport and falling hundreds of feet to their death from the wheel wells of an evacuating C-17 transport aircraft.

The Internationalists is at its strongest in passages following Samuel Aronson, a relatively new State Department foreign service officer, on the ground at the now US-controlled airport in Kabul. Aronson, thrown into the thick of history, accompanied the Marine Corps guards in becoming “gods of the moment, choosing who lived or died.” The lucky Afghans who had received SIVs brought their extended families to gates choked with dust and humanity. Aronson and the marines told them they had five seconds to choose which relatives would leave with them. Here Ward shows how policies set by calculating bureaucrats 7,000 miles away manifest insanely on the scorching tarmac, and he allows a narrative involving the human costs of American empire to play out through the eyes of a character whose thoughts and motivations we are made to understand on a personal level. But the book quickly returns to Washington, where the real stakes are the reputations of Biden’s foreign policy advisers.

“We didn’t say this explicitly at the time, but later it became clear we were all thinking we needed a comeback,” a senior official told Ward months after the Afghanistan evacuation. “I knew I wanted redemption, but what could be big enough to earn it after all that?”

The book’s reliance on anonymous sources becomes a serious problem in its Afghanistan chapters, during which it keeps itself at a frustrating remove from controversial decisions and shrinks away from identifying who bears responsibility. Anonymity leaves the reader unable to assess the thoughts of unnamed authorities or to assign blame. Often even the anonymous quotes resemble the pablum a spokesman might deliver from the podium—“I felt all along that the president faced a difficult decision, each fraught with a lot of problems” is a typical example. But occasionally, the reader’s attention perks up at the sight of an insider account that threatens to crack open the door on critical mistakes, such as when a senior official tells Ward that the administration hadn’t foreseen the Taliban’s swift victory because, for unexplained reasons, they “were under the impression that the Taliban […] may be at a stopping point” and ready to negotiate. “Obviously that proved not to be the case,” the official adds.

“Did we completely, as a government, miss how strong the Taliban was? Why did no one question the assumption that a takeover would take a long time?” someone else asks during a conversation between General Kenneth McKenzie, the former head of Central Command, and his subordinates. “Yeah […] we fucked that up,” says one senior military official.

But who fucked up, and why? Is Sullivan’s anonymous voice here somewhere? What explains one of the biggest US intelligence failures since Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction? The Internationalists, like the Biden administration itself, doesn’t seem interested in answers.

Despite calls for Sullivan, Blinken, or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to lose their jobs, “there wasn’t even a real possibility of a shakeup,” a White House official revealed to Ward. Yet the consequences for Afghans were enormous. In addition to the scores of reprisal killings the Taliban has committed against those who served in the Afghan security forces or who worked for the United States and stayed behind, there were, as of late 2023, an estimated 130,000 Afghans whose applications for SIVs had still not been processed. Many of them, even if their applications are eventually approved, will still never be resettled, given the lack of interest in Congress in raising the current cap on such visas.

Ward chronicles often contentious calls between progressive groups and longtime Biden foreign policy speechwriter Carlyn Reichel, who had been assigned to manage and coordinate useful messaging with the groups as it became apparent that the administration’s effort to speed up the evacuation of SIV holders remained hopelessly behind. But The Internationalists is concerned more with these messaging calls than with the behind-the-scenes decisions that led to them. Surprisingly, it ignores entirely the story of the CIA-trained Afghan commandos known as Zero Units, which have been accused of executing and forcibly disappearing civilians and whose members helped guard the Kabul airport and performed secret exfiltrations during the crisis and received preferential evacuations.

As for the other SIV applicants, “multiple current and former Biden administration officials admitted that there just wasn’t any political will to expedite improvements for the SIV process before the Taliban made its bid for power,” Ward writes. He then seems to mix his own voice with that of his subjects: “Biden had other priorities to get through Congress, like COVID relief and the Build Back Better bill. Fighting with a fifty-fifty Senate over an immigration issue—‘about bringing brown Muslims to America,’ as one person put it to me—would jeopardize that agenda.” This was “Bidenism in action,” Ward continues approvingly: “Better to cut losses and run rather than continue sinking time and energy into a fight that would lead to only more bloodshed and body bags.” The lack of critical distance between Ward and his subjects makes it hard to tell whether this is Ward’s view or that of the administration officials he interviewed. If the latter, it would seem like a reporter’s job to say who was making these decisions and who argued for leaving thousands of Afghans behind because they didn’t want to spend valuable political capital on a fight over “brown Muslims.”

The issues the Biden team chooses to avoid are as revealing as the ones they prioritize. In an inadvertently prescient chapter about the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza in May 2021, the penultimate episode of violence before the cataclysm of October 7, Ward writes that the Biden administration was “asleep at the switch” when it came to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, according to “someone in close contact with senior U.S. figures.” The administration’s priorities at the time were both “not to make the Middle East an issue” and not to “embarrass Israel in public” by issuing condemnations. These impulses, which failed in the end to stop Israel from bombing, were “‘coming from the top,’ someone familiar with the administration’s thinking” informed Ward. Biden was a self-described Zionist who traced his emotional connection with Israel to childhood lessons from his father. He had been a pro-Israel hawk for four decades, outdoing even the Israelis themselves. Ward recounts how, after a June 1982 appearance by Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during which Biden “delivered a very impassioned speech” in support of Israel’s controversial invasion of Lebanon, Begin had been forced to “disassociate” himself from Biden’s remarks that he would kill women and children to repel an invasion of his own country.

Though Biden was on record that a two-state solution was “the only answer” to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, his administration put in “not a fucking second of effort” to make it happen, another anonymous administration official told Ward. Yet by fall 2023, Sullivan apparently felt confident enough in the administration’s work—its “comeback” from Afghanistan—to pen a 7,000-word foreign policy manifesto for Foreign Affairs that contained a long section on the Middle East in which he wrote that the administration’s “disciplined” approach had “de-escalated crises in Gaza” and the region. “Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” he wrote in the now infamous passage. Five days after the issue went to print, Hamas launched its attack, triggering an Israeli response that has become the worst calamity for Palestinians since 1948. For the online version of the article, now embarrassingly overtaken by the region’s biggest crisis in a decade, Foreign Affairs allowed Sullivan to scrub the offending section.

Biden’s team had marketed the president’s strategy as a new foreign policy for the middle class, but the term “middle class” disappears from The Internationalists after its second chapter, only reappearing near the epilogue, as if the book has belatedly remembered its thesis. He makes the case that the defense of Ukraine had protected the American middle class, since a successful Russian invasion and occupation would have meant rising energy and food prices and the need for the United States to increase military and economic support for allies in Europe. But many of those consequences came to pass anyway as part of Ukraine’s successful defense. And when it comes to a policy with perhaps the clearest impacts on the middle class, Trump’s tariffs on China, Ward writes in a brief aside that Biden’s team decided to keep and enlarge the tariffs for political reasons, to match Trump’s toughness on China and to ensure that China hawks among the Senate Republicans wouldn’t block their nominees, not because they were thinking of working Americans.

What, then, was a foreign policy for the middle class? The defense of Ukraine had been popular and successful, and there was a good case to be made that it had upheld international laws and norms regarding illegal invasions and the crime of interstate aggression. The withdrawal from Afghanistan had ended an extravagantly expensive and unpopular war, but it had also consigned many Afghan allies to an indefinite and dangerous life under the Taliban, even though 56 percent of Americans said they favored admitting thousands of Afghan refugees to the United States. The war in Gaza has led the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to seek arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of Israel for allegedly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the International Court of Justice ruled in January that it was plausible that the rights of Palestinians to be protected from genocide were at risk of irreparable harm, and that Israel must take steps to prevent this from occurring. In March, 55 percent of Americans said they disapproved of Israeli military actions in Gaza, and in June, 61 percent said that the United States should not send weapons or supplies to Israel. In mid-August, the Biden administration approved a new $20 billion weapons package. It recently stated its “limited” support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.

There are events and forces in the world, such as climate change, that materially affect every American. And then there are those things that may materially affect only a few but touch on the conscience of many. The bombing of a faraway village using US weapons may change nothing, materially, in the lives of millions of Americans, but it may affront their sense of justice or their beliefs about the United States’ proper role in the world. These aren’t questions of addition or subtraction and can’t be measured on a ledger. They are not about putting a dollar in someone’s pocket. It seems unlikely that an American who supported the defense of Ukraine or the withdrawal from Afghanistan, or who now opposes the wars in Gaza or Lebanon, did so while thinking first of their paycheck or mortgage. Nor has the Biden administration argued that the Gaza war benefits the middle class.

The Biden administration’s idea of evaluating foreign policy according to how much it improves the material American way of life might seem like an impossible task, not to say a dangerous one. Measuring foreign policy instead by its popularity presents other risks. The Biden administration hadn’t done either, exactly, and in salient cases it hewed to causes both unpopular and costly. Its rationales, per Ward, involved classical politics, a drive to sustain and improve its popularity, and a desire to uphold its view of the liberal international order, with a heavy dose of Biden’s personal passions. It had all been, to put it succinctly, rather familiar.

In the book’s epilogue, Ward follows Sullivan into the Brookings Institution in April 2023, at a time when the administration was confident, “buoyed” by their success in Ukraine. The stakes of the speech are made to seem enormous. Sullivan, Ward writes, was “about to challenge long-held beliefs and lay out a road map for the nation’s ideological future” in a “legendary” venue that would now “serve as the birthplace of a quiet revolution.” He and his colleagues had spent weeks on the address, Ward writes. A little more than two years earlier, they had told themselves that their job was to “save the world from Trump” and “save America from the forces he had unleashed.” Now, Sullivan would offer a “different vision” for US foreign policy, “the grandest example of the significant rethink that occurred in the Biden administration’s first half of the first term.”

At the podium, Sullivan spoke mostly of reenergizing the American economy, primarily by turning the “Rust Belt into a Cobalt Corridor” and implementing Biden’s new industrial policy. He expressed hawkishness on China, arguing that its economic rise had not come with fairness for the American worker or more world democracy. The administration, he said, was on the path to “restoring the middle class, to producing a just and effective clean-energy transition, to securing critical supply chains, and, through all of this, to repairing faith in democracy itself.”

Ward’s glowing review can almost be mistaken for the speech itself:

It was Bidenism, fully embraced by the president, but a brainchild of the national security adviser who, due to his young age, could serve as an ideological leader within the Democratic Party for decades to come. […]

America was ready for renewal. The world was there to remake. There were at least two more years to get it done.

We now know what those two years entailed: a generation-defining calamity in the Middle East, and the end of Biden’s political life. The supposed centerpiece of the administration’s Middle East efforts, the Saudi–Israeli normalization deal, meant in part to salvage something from a year of bloodshed, also seems dead. The grand rethink of foreign policy was hard to spot. The administration had, it would argue, returned the American ship of state to its previous course, restoring the predictability of old behaviors and alliances and ending a failed nation-building effort. But, for those people in the world who found themselves outside the boundaries of the liberal international order that Sullivan and his colleagues swore to uphold, or deemed not crucial enough to its functioning, that ship of state could be a menace they hoped never to see on the horizon.

And it was being steered by the same people who had done so for nearly two decades, a Democratic elect whom critics such as Alex Thurston, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Public and International Affairs, have described as “the keepers of order within American foreign policy, the crew that cleans up Republican foreign policy disasters […] reliable defenders of an American imperial order.” Subject to what Thurston calls the “homogenizing effects” of a pipeline that typically leads through Ivy League universities, political campaigns, and Senate or State Department posts—and the small world of consultancies and think-tank fellowships that serve as nesting grounds when out of power—this foreign policy elite rarely critiques itself. Far from the portrayal put forward in The Internationalists, they are, Thurston argues, marked by “ideological vagueness, a belief in American greatness, and a preference for the status quo.”

This foreign policy legacy may now pass on to Vice President Kamala Harris, whose views have not been shaped, like Biden’s, by decades in the mucky trenches of Washington’s consensus-making. On perhaps the most divisive foreign policy issue of the day, the war in Gaza, many progressives and leftists who opposed Biden’s policies now read the augurs daily for signs of whether Harris will change course, looking for any indication that she is more attuned to Palestinian suffering. Since the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris has done little to inspire their hope, reiterating Biden’s stances along with her commitment to defend Israel, and, with few exceptions, dismissing the idea of withholding weapons to exercise leverage. Those positions, especially unpopular among many angry Arab and Muslim constituencies (including in Michigan, a crucial swing state), may help determine the election. It is possible that she will lose to Donald Trump. Should she win, Harris will elevate a new circle of foreign policy advisers, and unforeseen crises surely lurk. Whoever decides to write the first history of her foreign policy should at the very least wait until her term is over to do so.