An inside story of Joe Biden’s foreign policy

A new book explains how the White House struggled with the practical challenges of running a global superpower, including defending Ukraine.

Paul Musgrave

Mar 8, 2024 – 5.00am

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The Internationalists, Alexander Ward’s new chronicle of the Biden administration’s foreign policy efforts, opens on election night in 2016 as Jake Sullivan, then a staffer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, watched the victory of Donald Trump, who had rejected establishment catechisms about the benefits of alliances and globalisation with a brazen unilateralism.

It concludes in 2023 with Sullivan, by then President Biden’s national security adviser, proclaiming a new Democratic foreign policy agenda that promotes US interests – especially those of the middle class – more directly than either Clinton’s globalised orthodoxy or Trump’s “America First” isolationism.

Washington Post