Who’s Really Behind the Biden Administration’s Foreign Policy?
16th February 2024
If you’re one of the many people worried that US foreign policy is in the hands of a visibly declining eighty-one year-old president, Alexander Ward’s account of the Biden administration’s first two years in office may — or may not — make you feel better, for he leaves readers with little doubt as to who is actually the executive branch’s most influential decision-maker: forty-seven year-old national security advisor Jake Sullivan.
Ward might deny any such authorial intent, but time and again he shows his hand, as when he invokes “Sullivan’s first two years at the helm alongside Biden.” Secretary of state Antony Blinken is of course close on Sullivan’s heels, but Ward’s thoroughly reported book, along with Chris Whipple’s similar tome from early 2023, The Fight of His Life, both remind anyone tempted to forget that the calamitous August 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan remains the defining event of Joe Biden’s first term in the White House.