Encased in Amber
Biden’s wars and the unmaking of liberal foreign policy.
Joe Biden at a cabinet meeting in 2021.
(Demetrius Freeman / Getty images)In her 1996 essay “political pornography,” Joan Didion performed a vivisection of journalist Bob Woodward’s reportorial method—one that hinged, she contended, on his willingness to serve as a conduit for his sources’ agendas. To illustrate her point, Didion considered Woodward’s answer to the question of why he hadn’t written about the Whitewater scandal, which was then slowly engulfing the Clinton administration. “I do not know about Whitewater and what it means,” Woodward said on Larry King Live. “I am waiting—if I can say this—for the call from somebody on the inside saying ‘I want to talk.’”
“Here is where we reach the single unique element in the method, and also the problem,” Didion wrote. “As any prosecutor and surely Mr. Woodward knows, the person on the inside who calls and says ‘I want to talk’ is an informant, or snitch, and is generally looking to bargain a deal, to improve his or her own situation, to place the blame on someone else in return for being allowed to plead down or out certain charges,” and therefore “knows that his or her testimony will be unrespected, even reviled, subjected to rigorous examination and often rejection.” In the case of a Woodward informant, however, he or she “knows that his or her testimony will be not only respected but burnished into the inside story, which is why so many people on the inside, notably those who consider themselves the professionals or managers of the process…do want to talk to him.”
Woodward’s latest book, simply called War, is, as its title suggests, an account of the Biden administration’s handling of the two major conflicts that erupted during Joe Biden’s years as president—specifically the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But it is also a book that relies, often credulously, on insider testimony. As with Whitewater, Woodward really doesn’t seem to know much about these wars or what they mean—even if, in this case, there were plenty of people willing to talk to him. As Didion noted back in 1996, Woodward consistently fails to interrogate any of what he is told, choosing instead to simply record and relay it and allow his readers to assemble the picture as they wish, as if the real journalistic feat was just getting the decision-makers and insiders to talk to him in the first place. After all, what is one to make of a book that, after detailing the way that Biden and his team helped perpetrate an era-defining catastrophe in Gaza, proceeds to describe that same team as “an example of steady and purposeful leadership”? Indeed, the fact that Woodward feels the need to make this claim despite what he has shown us in the previous pages reads like an accidental confession of the inadequacy of his own method. As Chico Marx said in Duck Soup: “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
And yet even if War is not (as its many back-cover blurbs claim) a vivid first draft of history and an objective view into the rooms where it is made, the book does offer us insight into how the Democratic Party’s elites wish for Biden to be remembered. As one of the first volleys in an intra-Washington battle over how the Biden administration and, more specifically, its foreign policy decisions will be interpreted, War reflects how the Democratic Party establishment desperately wants to see itself: as ultimately responsible and competent, whatever your own eyes may tell you. You realize that, for Woodward, as for those centrists who still want to steer the party away from the left, Joe Biden was the adult in the room, the steady hand on the tiller, even in the midst of two horrifying and increasingly destructive wars. More than any other recent president, Biden embodied the foreign policy establishment, and that establishment cannot admit failure.
The first half of War focuses on the earlier of the two major conflicts that the Biden administration faced: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Woodward details, a few weeks after the disastrously mishandled withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan (to which the book devotes only one short chapter), the administration received the first intelligence warnings of an impending Russian attack. We see a foreign policy team determined not to get caught flat-footed again—and, to their credit, they try to do everything they can to avoid that. We see them working through their own incredulity that Russian President Vladimir Putin could launch such a seemingly irrational invasion, despite the intelligence showing that he was clearly preparing for one. Even when the war initially broke out, the Biden administration handled the unfolding crisis, at least in my view, about as well as possible: putting a hard ceiling on the kind of support the United States would be willing to provide in order to avoid being drawn fully into a war with Russia, while steadily increasing the quality and quantity of that support as the Ukrainians proved capable of integrating new systems into their defense. From the focused prewar diplomacy with Putin by the United States and allies like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, to the strategic use of declassified intelligence to deny Putin control of the information space, to the intensive management of the alliance once the Russians launched their “special military operation” in late February 2022, Biden and his team showed an adeptness that by itself would have gone some way in justifying Woodward’s encomia.
There’s a tendency of some on both the left and the right to see Ukraine and Gaza as expressions of DC’s warmongering, but this undersells Biden’s relative restraint on Ukraine (for which he’s been bitterly criticized by both Ukrainian and American hawks). Biden clearly did not seek the war in Ukraine or the conflict with Russia. The administration’s original goal was to park the Putin problem out of the way and focus on strategic competition with China. Biden held a summit with Putin in June 2021 for the purpose of bringing some clarity and stability to the relationship. While some continue to claim that US support for Ukraine is simply an example of NATO expansion, Biden himself was reportedly one of those who were resistant to Ukraine’s entry into the alliance.
Yet while we should acknowledge the Biden administration’s generally capable handling of the conflict in Ukraine, we should also note that Washington was quite literally built, brick by brick, to handle confrontation with Russia. The bureaucratic and diplomatic machinery to oppose a Russian war was created long ago, and so it proved to be well equipped to respond (just as, later, the bureaucratic and diplomatic machinery would also prove well equipped to support an Israeli one).
In relating these events and in making the case that the Biden team handled the Ukraine war with skill and prudence, Woodward offers his readers little that is revelatory. Most of what the book tells us about the Biden administration in these weeks and months will likely already be familiar to many readers from magazine articles and newspapers. (Then, as now, key members of Biden’s foreign policy team are experts at getting their preferred perspective out there.)
There are a couple of exceptions, such as Woodward’s revelation of a notable phone conversation between Putin and then–British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in which Johnson tells the Russian leader that Ukraine won’t be joining NATO “any time soon”—diplo-speak for “ever.” Woodward then tells us that after the call, Johnson grew concerned that Putin had put him and NATO into a trap, because although they believe that Putin knows Ukraine will not join NATO, Putin wants them to say this publicly, which would contradict NATO’s open-door policy and make it seem as though the Russians had a say in NATO decisions and a veto over a sovereign country’s membership. According to Woodward, Johnson believed that this “would be a massive concession and an admission of defeat, a surrender to Putin’s pressure and quite wrong.”
This is revealing of just how trapped the United States and its NATO allies were by their commitment to the alleged norms of the post–Cold War world, which will prove to have even more devastating consequences in the second part of the book. But this scene is one of the rare instances in War in which we learn something new, and sadly it isn’t all that consequential, since any close observer of the war already knew that the possibility that Ukraine would join NATO was only one among a broad set of grievances for Putin and doesn’t ultimately explain much.
As for the rest of the book’s sections on Ukraine, almost all of the revelations are inadvertent, the product of policymakers providing comments or internal monologues on actions that have been reported elsewhere—but who, in attempting to put the best spin on these policies, end up producing an MRI scan of the national security elite. Indeed, several passages from the Ukraine part of War betray such a complete lack of self-awareness that they would be great setups for jokes that pay off later in the book, if the author had any sense of irony.
To take just one instance: In a telling scene, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines informs the president that Putin “is lying to people on a very consistent basis,” which “is hard for Western leaders to absorb.” This is a questionable claim to begin with, but especially when we consider how often Biden and his top officials would go on to lie about Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war, repeatedly promising to uphold humanitarian legal standards without following through—in other words, disregarding US laws that condition military aid based on how that aid is used. Along with the effort to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline, these deceptions will only further corrode the administration’s legacy as more information comes out about what the president and his team knew and when they knew it.
Another revealing moment occurs when Pentagon official Colin Kahl tells Woodward that Putin “dreams of reconstituting a Russian empire and there is no Russian empire that doesn’t include Ukraine…. It’s always weird to read things like that as an American,” Kahl adds, “because our history doesn’t go back very far. So the notion that countries would give a shit about what happened 9,000 years ago or whatever or, you know, 2,000 years ago or 1,000. Americans don’t think like that.”
In reality, lots of Americans do think like that, including Biden, who has repeatedly identified himself as a Zionist, and tens of millions of Christian evangelicals, many of whom support the modern state of Israel for religious reasons. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who knows his American audience, has repeatedly justified his war on Gaza by invoking Amalek, the Jews’ biblical enemy from 3,000 years ago.
When it comes to Gaza, we find an administration trying to fit the president’s square-peg view of Israel, Palestine, and the region into the round hole of reality. Anyone who has heard Biden speak on the conflict has likely heard him tell of his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1973, shortly after he was elected to the Senate. His own staffers joke about how often he brings the meeting up, and for good reason: Biden’s understanding of the region seems trapped in that moment, like one of Jurassic Park’s mosquitoes encased in amber, a remnant of an earlier era.
As Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, related in a memoir, Biden had a saying about the Palestinians: “Never crucify yourself on a small cross”—meaning that the Palestinians weren’t worth the trouble. The first two years of Biden’s presidency reflected this view, as his administration paid scant attention to the Palestinians and refused to reverse the provocative moves made by Donald Trump during his first term, such as closing the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington, DC, moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (which every previous administration had viewed as an issue for final-status talks), and officially recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights. Instead, Biden and his team focused on an illusory—and ultimately elusive—normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would have further sidelined the Palestinians.
Restoring the Palestinians to the regional agenda was reportedly one of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s goals in launching the October 7 attacks, and Woodward narrates these events and the war that quickly followed, tracing the ways that the Biden administration ended up facilitating what many now call a genocide. And yet in Woodward’s description of these events, and in those of the policymakers he interviews, one finds little horror or even circumspection. In Woodward’s faithful mirroring of his sources’ accounts, there is not much curiosity about the historical background of the conflicts in the region. For example, he reports that the Israelis “did not have enough of their forces close to the border when the invasion began,” but he doesn’t tell us why: Those forces had been redeployed to the West Bank to protect the rampaging settlers there in their ongoing efforts to harass and attack Palestinians and drive them off their land.
Leaving out this context is of a piece with Woodward’s treatment of the October 7 Hamas attack, as if it disrupted an extended period of calm (which it didn’t, at least not for the Palestinians). One of the few references we get to the oppressive status quo that existed before October 7 is a mention that “because of a 16-year blockade by Israel, 95 percent of Palestinians living in Gaza already did not have access to clean water and 80 percent relied on humanitarian aid for food.” As for the rest of Israel’s actions before 2023 and the US role in them, we hear very little. Commenting on Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, Woodward writes that it “creat[ed] a firestorm in the press, but no Third Intifada in Israel.” It does not appear to have occurred to him that the move was yet more kindling for a firestorm whose start was merely delayed until the fall of 2023.
Yet while Woodward shows little interest even in the recent developments in the Middle East that preceded his narrative, he does provide his readers with ample contemporaneous warnings of the disaster to come. The book’s discussion of Gaza includes multiple instances of the Biden administration’s exasperation with Netanyahu and his government—for example, national security adviser Jake Sullivan calling bullshit on the promise by Ron Dermer, the Israeli minister of strategic affairs, that any operation in Gaza would last only three weeks. Biden himself wrongly concluded that his administration’s regular leaks to this effect constituted a form of pressure on Netanyahu, when in fact they only emboldened him by showing again and again that the US president was afraid of imposing any real costs and so had to turn to the press in an attempt to get Israel to change course. Biden and his team’s refusal to do anything else—repeatedly giving Netanyahu political cover as Netanyahu repeatedly conned them—fatally undermines Woodward’s claims as to their competence.
Meanwhile, Palestinians barely register in the book as individuals at all. War’s cover, in fact, telegraphs this glaring blind spot. Arrayed beneath the title are the photos of six leaders: Biden, Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. There is no Palestinian leader on the cover, just as there is no Palestinian voice in the book itself. Palestinians exist only to be killed—facelessly, anonymously, and in large numbers. They exist entirely to be acted on, given agency only when it’s time to blame them for their own deaths. Which is to say that the book’s view is perfectly emblematic of the DC foreign policy discussion.
Former and future president Donald Trump haunts War, the looming peril of his restoration overshadowing everything else that occurs. Indeed, short chapters focused on Trump are interspersed throughout the book, sort of like the “Meanwhile, at the Hall of Doom…” scenes from the old Super Friends cartoons, where we would cut away from our heroes to check in on what the bad guys were conniving next. Occasionally, Woodward also interjects an interview with the Trump folks, as if to say, “This is how much worse it could be.” We get the required labeling of Trump’s foreign policy as “isolationist,” a term that functions primarily to signify membership in the Washington foreign-policy cool-kids club, a way of policing the debate and ruling that certain ideas—such as the notion that some things happening in the world might not be America’s business—are out of bounds. As we have seen, the Trump administration is far from isolationist; instead, it is unilateralist, having little time for the multilateralism that past administrations saw as essential for undergirding, and generating international consent for, American power. Trump simply sees that power as self-justifying.
And much of the American public is fine with that, consistently giving Trump higher marks on foreign policy than Biden or Harris during the 2024 presidential race. As in so many other cases, Woodward fails to grapple with this fact—in part because the Democratic Party hasn’t grappled with it either. No matter how inconsistent and corrupt Trump’s foreign policy is, it indisputably speaks—unlike that of the Democrats—to a sizable constituency of voters. For all of the Biden administration’s bromides about the norms and procedures that supposedly make up “the rules-based international order,” and for all its claims to be the adults in the room, it is clear that Biden—and with him the Democratic Party—struggled to find an enduring base of support for his administration’s foreign policy.
So what lessons will the Democrats learn from this? Some see an opportunity to move to Trump’s right on foreign policy, as exhibited by the selection of Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a party establishment favorite, to give the official response to Trump’s March address to Congress. For this faction, the best way to revive the party’s electoral majority is by claiming the Cold War mantle of Ronald Reagan, apparently in the hopes that the curdled militarism that has consistently lost elections in the post–Cold War era will somehow magically start winning them again.
For another faction in the party, it has meant a turn away from foreign policy altogether, focusing instead on areas of domestic policy where the Democrats have always felt more comfortable. But if the Biden administration has shown us anything, it’s that foreign policy is too important to be left to the so-called experts.
There is also a smaller but growing faction that offers a less militaristic vision of foreign policy through a coalition of NGOs working alongside pro-diplomacy champions in Congress. The 2028 presidential primaries will tell us whether these ideas can break through, or whether the party will continue to seek safety with a foreign policy vision based on Cold War nostalgia.
Meanwhile, as the Democrats scramble to agree on a unifying alternative message to compete with MAGA (even as Bernie Sanders hands them one on a platter), Trump and his former junior president Elon Musk have proceeded to tear the wiring out of our country’s foreign aid system. Trump’s foreign policy has zigzagged wildly between pressuring Ukraine and supporting it, between talking to Iran and bombing it. (Biden’s failure to have the United States rejoin the Iran nuclear deal—reneging on one of his 2020 campaign’s most unequivocal commitments—is another thing that Woodward fails to address.)
Yes, “Trump is a vandal,” as Adam Tooze noted in a Financial Times article that examined both the Trump administration’s record thus far and that of the Biden years. “But in tearing down the status quo he does no more than confirm the obvious—that the elite coalition that favoured US global leadership has lost its political grip.” War is an elegy for this elite coalition, far less valuable as a record of what went down than of how the 2024 Washington foreign policy establishment wants to see itself. In its total absence of interest in any real reflection on what the Biden administration could have gotten wrong, the book serves instead as a compelling brief on why Trump was reelected.
Asked by a reporter a few months before the 2024 election whether anyone was “ever held accountable by the president directly for what happened with the withdrawal in Afghanistan,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby replied, “We have all held ourselves accountable.” It was a transparently and hilariously meaningless answer, as well as a perfect demonstration of what “accountability” means in Washington: acknowledging that a bad thing happened while foreclosing any possibility that those responsible would face consequences. Because, after all, they followed a process.
What about the need to take responsibility for the outcomes at the end of that process? Woodward wants us to believe that, despite the evidence of our lying eyes, the Biden administration’s commitment to process was enough. But Trump’s reelection represents a refutation of that dodge. He is the consequence that the elites running the Democratic Party are now forced to confront—along with the rest of us.