Klion:
Along with Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken, the key figures on Biden’s foreign-policy team include Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and, of course, Biden himself. Of these, Sullivan features most prominently in Ward’s book—both the first chapter and the epilogue are structured around him, and we learn more about his personal background than anyone else’s. One gets the sense that Sullivan and Ward spoke often and that Ward identifies with him. Though the main role of any national security adviser is to advise the president, each individual to hold the job brings their own unique approach, and Sullivan’s particular talent seems to be as a crafter of narratives designed to appeal to journalists.
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Sullivan comes across in the book as bright, competent, and well-intentioned, even if his thinking remains far more conventional than he wants it to seem. But good intentions will get you only so far when your job is to steer an imperial superpower through the multiple crises that it spent years getting itself into. Ward likewise does a capable job of recounting how Sullivan and the Biden team have tried to navigate those crises, but The Internationalists would be more compelling if it looked deeper into the underlying contradictions that make US foreign policy so crisis-prone in the first place. One has to squint pretty hard to see what most of these overseas entanglements have to do with the well-being of the American middle class, however one defines it, and one has to squint even harder to see how any of them might be considered wins.
