Without being unkind to author Alex Ward, The Internationalists is perhaps one of the most depressing books I’ve read in a long time. I’m not sure what Ward’s aim was, here, but what I took away was that the foreign policy apparatus of the United States of America was better off being run by inexperienced, Trump-era operatives who improvised on the fly rather than the “well-educated” and “experienced expert” class promoted by Joe Biden.
Self-evident to most of this audience, I’m sure, and a reiteration of Buckley’s 1961 phone book gambit, but The Internationalists really does underscore how utterly outplayed the Biden national security operation has been at every turn. It’s a “how not to,” as if we needed it.
Cloaked in pseudo-morality and the mantra of “standing up to tyrants,” the book takes the reader on a brief but tumultuous journey of Biden’s atrocious Afghanistan withdrawal, followed by the beginning of the war in Ukraine. At almost every juncture, the “experts” were caught off guard by their foreign counterparts.
Would I recommend this book? Not unless you’re looking for your existing beliefs to be confirmed by someone who appears to abhor doing so. 5/10.
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