Politico reporter Alexander Ward’s new book, The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump, is a document that may prove of interest to historians several decades from now. As a brisk narrative of the first two years of us foreign policy under Biden, it outlines the contributions of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, two of the Administration’s most powerful figures. It explains how they digested Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat at the hands of Donald Trump and then used their four years out of power to develop a foreign policy that could withstand the attacks of right-wing populism, thus insulating a longer-term effort to shore up America’s global standing against the rambunctiousness of the country’s domestic politics.footnote¹

According to Ward, Democrats began to formulate this programme at National Security Action, a thinktank and ‘incubator’ founded by Sullivan and Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes in 2018. As Biden campaigned through 2020 and then took office the following year, and as he staffed his Administration with people who had spent time at NatSec Action, us foreign policy was condensed into two slogans. One of these was ‘a foreign policy for the middle class’, the idea being that Biden would only pursue goals that he could plausibly describe as materially benefiting ordinary Americans.footnote² This became a key component of his efforts to sell the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan to the wider public: why keep throwing money at an unwinnable war when it could be spent on infrastructure or green industry at home instead? The second slogan asserted that ‘the world’s greatest challenge was one of autocracies versus democracies’.footnote³ This aimed to position Trump and his supporters as part of a global authoritarian axis that also included Putin, Xi and Kim Jong-Un. There could be no defending and revitalizing democracy at home—and January 6 had made it clear that such a defence was needed—without confronting leaders who worked to erode democracy abroad.

In Ward’s account, the effort to repair relations with Europe following four years of Trump-induced chaos was motivated almost entirely by Biden’s view that the United States could not afford to confront Russia as a lone superpower. It had to do so as the leader of a world system, a ‘rules-based international order’, to use our historical moment’s preferred euphemism for ‘empire’. If American intervention in the Balkans had certified nato’s continued usefulness in a world no longer defined by great-power conflict, a collective response to Putin’s aggression would confirm that nato still remained useful in a world to which such conflict had returned. ‘If Putin succeeded in wiping Ukraine off the map’, Ward writes, ‘the world America helped build would crumble on this administration’s watch’.footnote⁴ Or, as one general said as Biden prepared to give a speech in Warsaw following the invasion, ‘We have to preserve the order that has brought peace and stability to the world since the end of World War II. If Putin wins, the order goes poof. It would set the conditions for the next great war.’footnote⁵

The Biden Administration viewed China as presenting an even greater challenge. Its October 2022 National Security Strategy left no doubt that competition with Beijing was now the organizing principle of United States foreign policy. ‘The People’s Republic of China’, it says, ‘harbours the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favour of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit’. The next ten years, it warns, will be the ‘decisive decade’, a phrase it repeats five times. Preventing China from overtaking the us as the world’s strongest economy and establishing itself as regional hegemon in East Asia ‘will demand more of the United States in the Indo-Pacific than has been asked of us since the Second World War’, an eye-catching assertion when one considers the resources the United States devoted to its conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.footnote⁶ While the Biden Administration’s exchanges with China haven’t involved as much sabre rattling as Trump’s, it is also clear that military conflict is on the table in the event that economic competition doesn’t go well for the United States.

Heads of state are obliged to claim that the period in which they take power is a crucial one for their country’s future, and Americans who lived through the decade-plus of hysterics that followed September 11, who spent years being told that Al Qaeda and isis had not just the desire but the ability to bring the United States to its knees, may be understandably suspicious of such rhetoric. But Biden’s understanding of the stakes for American hegemony is probably reasonable. Putin may be paranoid, but he is not a ‘madman’, and he would not have invaded Ukraine had he not decided that the us—and, by extension, the alliance system that serves as the foundation of its trans-oceanic power—was weaker than at any point in at least the past thirty years. And in China, the us faces a credible rival for superpower status for the first time in forty years. These challenges to us supremacy have come at a time when America’s ability to keep both its allies and enemies in line is markedly diminished. As one official lamented to Ward shortly before Putin’s invasion, ‘We’re doing everything right and the Russians are probably going to invade anyway’. Ward asked him if that ‘meant something bigger—that America, even when everything was going well, couldn’t stop major global crises anymore’. The official replied, ‘Yeah, that’s certainly part of the frustration’.footnote⁷

The real interest of Ward’s book, however, is that it shares the Democratic Party’s worldview, fantasies and blind spots. It is a manifestation of the ideology it attempts to describe. Ward seems to be infatuated with the Administration’s foreign-policy stars, particularly Sullivan, whom he records one Clinton loyalist describing as ‘essentially a once-in-a-generation talent’. The youngest National Security Advisor since McGeorge Bundy, Sullivan, we are told, was named ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ in his Minnesota high school, where teachers ‘fawned over his ability to hand in flawlessly written assignments’. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale, got himself to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, and then returned to Yale for a law degree. As a staffer on Amy Klobuchar’s Senate campaign, he impressed his colleagues by demonstrating an ‘uncanny ability’ to recall Billy Joel lyrics.footnote⁸ When someone starts telling you that remembering the lyrics to pop songs is not just impressive but uncanny, implying such an ability may be counted as among someone’s qualifications to serve as National Security Advisor, you have entered the ideological world of the Democratic Party. Of Sullivan’s intellectual contributions to America’s global thinking, we don’t hear much (Ward even praises Sullivan at one point for never revealing ‘what his true view on Afghanistan was’).footnote⁹ Ward presents Sullivan as more of an advertising guy, someone with ideas on how Democrats might better sell the old foreign-policy plan (American supremacy forever, because it’s the right thing to do) to voters whose consumer preferences have evolved. Reading between the lines, one suspects that Sullivan’s apparent lack of intellectual ambition has something to do with his professional success. To be a Wunderkind in the eyes of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden is likely a matter of telling your elders that they have been right all along.

The larger story that Ward tells is naturally one of decency, setbacks, perseverance and ultimate triumph. The future captains of foreign policy spend the Trump Administration in ‘the wilderness’, as Ward titles the book’s first section. They assume power with a grand vision for the restoration of America’s global leadership, but first they must extricate the us from the quagmire of Afghanistan, and withdrawal turns out to be more chaotic than anyone anticipated (that’s the setback). Determined to be remembered for more than Afghanistan, however, the foreign-policy ‘A-Team’ pulls itself off the mat and rallies the free world to Ukraine’s defence, eventually convincing a sceptical Europe that Putin is about to make good on years of threats. This show of diplomatic strength isn’t enough to deter Putin from invading, but the Russian army gets bogged down in the countryside and fails to take Kyiv, and the autocrat’s anticipated triumph turns into a humiliating stalemate. Though the fate of Ukraine continues to hang in the balance, the us has returned to its seat at the head of the table. Ward’s book ends with a near panegyric to Bidenism abroad. ‘America was ready for renewal’, the book’s final sentences read. ‘The world was there to remake. There were at least two more years to get it done.’footnote¹⁰