I sat down with Politico national security reporter Alex Ward to talk about his new book “The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump.”
Biden, in my experience, is first and foremost a national security guy even though most of his supporters are probably more interested in his domestic policy legacy. This ends up being both a strength and a weakness of his administration in different ways, but I think that if you want to understand his presidency you most of all need to understand his sense of America’s role in the world and how his policies align with that. In his book and in the interview, Ward contextualizes Biden’s decision-making around Afghanistan — including the crucial point that the military leaders charged with the flawed implementation of withdrawal simply opposed the idea of implementing the withdrawal agreement Trump negotiated at all — and talks about the lessons Biden took away from the Obama administration’s experience dealing with Vladimir Putin and Bibi Netanyahu.
Full transcript, as usual, is available below the paywall.
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