The Internationalists

The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump

By: Alexander Ward

Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin

The inside story of Biden’s foreign policy team and their struggle to restore America’s global influence in the aftermath of Trump

When Joe Biden assumed the United States presidency, he brought with him a team of all-star talent, perhaps the most experienced ensemble of policy experts in modern U.S. history. Their mission: repair America’s damaged reputation abroad and decide the course of its global future.

The challenges and risks could not have been greater. Around the world, adversaries were consolidating power, allies were drifting away, wars were raging, and climate change was accelerating, all while Russia was disrupting democracies and China was seeking to replace the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power. Now for the first time since World War II, the United States risked falling from its unrivaled position. If Biden and his team failed, it would likely mark the end of an American era and the rise of a fractured and autocratic world order.

In The Internationalists, acclaimed national security reporter Alexander Ward takes us behind the scenes to reveal the struggle to enact a coherent and effective set of policies in a time of global crisis. Against the failure of Afghanistan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden’s all-star team-of-rivals must band together against incredible odds. Their successes, and their failures, will decide not just Biden’s presidency. They will decide the very course of America’s global future.

As The Best and The Brightest chronicled the smoke-filled rooms of the Kennedy Administration, and The Rise of The Vulcans detailed the inner workings of George Bush's war machine, The Internationalists takes listeners behind the scenes as Joe Biden and his cabinet embark on some of the most ambitious foreign policy initiatives of any president since Richard M. Nixon.

Thanks to rigorous reporting and sources in the rooms where it happened, Ward delivers the first draft of history, the first definitive, unvarnished account of the Biden Doctrine, from the Fall of Kabul to the Rise of Kiev.

©2024 Alexander Ward (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“The most important book you’ll read on the Biden administration.”—Sean Illing, author of The Paradox of Democracy and host of “The Gray Area” podcast

"From one of the best reporters in Washington, this is the first behind-the-scenes account of the Biden Doctrine. Ward uses remarkable details to explore Biden's massively consequential foreign policy, a tenet shaped by one war the president was desperate to end and another that stunned the globe."—Jonathan Lemire, host of "Way Too Early" on MSNBC, White House Bureau Chief at Politico and author of The New York Times bestseller The Big Lie.

“The Internationalists offers a rapid-fire reported account of the world of challenges faced by President Biden and his administration as they sought to restore American global leadership at a time of tumult. The chapters on the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan are a particular page-turner. Most importantly, the book recounts with newsy detail how an administration that came to office planning to focus on the long-term strategic threat posed by China ended up pivoting to deal with the consequences of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine—the largest land war in Europe since World War II. The book is a testament to the virtues of having a dogged reporter on one of the most important beats in the world."—Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker, and co-author of The New York Times bestsellers The Man Who Ran Washington and The Divider

Misses the big picture

This book is filled with lots of behind the scenes details, as you would expect from a Politico reporter. The bulk of the book is made up of detailed tick tocks about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the run up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What’s missing is any look at overall strategy. The details are interesting but what was the Administration’s overall plan. The author says the adults were back in charge after the Trump administration but how were they adults? He actually calls them the A team.

There are many criticisms to be made of the Biden foreign policy but the author can’t think of any. The author does not think it’s worthwhile to look at the pattern of timidity and subservience to adversaries such as China and Iran. Instead, at the beginning and the end, we get discussion of Jake Sullivan as a deep thinker.

I was a bit reluctant to buy this book because given the source I expected it to be partial to the Biden administration and anti-Trump. For example, if you need a negative quote about Trump, go to John Kirby, who worked in the Obama administration and now is a Biden spokesman. But even better, if you’re writing a serious foreign policy book, there’s no better source than Stephen Colbert. Yes, he quotes Colbert.