Editor’s Note: The story below contains explicit language.
The arrival of a new Bob Woodward book has a well-established choreography; enterprising reporters get hold of copies of the heavily embargoed volume a week or so ahead of its publication date and mine it for the news it contains.
Both CNN and The Washington Post, where Woodward retains the honorific title of associate editor, covered the news in the latest book, “War,” last week. And news there was: At the height of the pandemic, President Donald Trump sent Russian President Vladimir Putin a secret shipment of Covid-19 testing equipment, and since he has left office, Trump has called Putin as many as seven times.
Ahead of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden blamed former President Barack Obama for not doing more to counter the Russian leader when he invaded Crimea in 2014, telling a friend, “That’s why we are here. We fucked it up. Barack never took Putin seriously.”
Putin had a heated call with Biden in the run-up to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, in which the Russian president threatened a nuclear war. Later, Biden’s national security team assessed there was a 50% chance Putin might use a tactical nuclear weapon during the Ukraine conflict. It is worth noting that back in March, CNN’s Jim Sciutto had similar detailed reporting about Putin’s possible use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine in late 2022.
As has been the case for previous Woodward books, those who don’t come out well from his reporting publicly dismiss it. The Trump campaign said: “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true.”
The deluge of publicity that precedes the publication of Woodward’s book ensures that the book shoots to the top of the bestseller lists before Woodward does any media himself. Even before “War” goes on sale Tuesday, it’s already No. 5 on Amazon’s bestseller list, so it could also be on the way to being Woodward’s 16th No. 1 New York Times bestseller, an astonishing record of success.
Woodward has a penchant for one-word titles for his books about Trump: “Peril,” “Rage” and “Fear.” He has also written extensively about the post-9/11 wars in books such as “Bush at War” and “Obama’s Wars.” So how does “War” stack up against those books, and what are its big themes?
At the heart of “War,” Woodward reports about how Biden’s national security team handled three wars: in Afghanistan, the Ukraine conflict, and the war in Gaza, now in its second year, which has embroiled the Middle East in a widening conflict.
Like Woodward’s several other books about war, the front lines of the conflicts he covers are not on the battlefields but in the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room. I reviewed White House visitor logs showing that Robert Woodward (his legal name) visited the White House more than two dozen times from December 2022 to April 2024, a period that “War” covers in detail.
Woodward rarely strays far from this apex of American power. As a result, “War” is not suffused with the sound of gunfire, but the ringing of cell phones as senior Biden officials get on secure conference calls.
Woodward notes that neither Biden nor Trump spoke to him for this book, but he still got great access. It’s clear from a close reading of “War” that almost every top national security official in the Biden administration spoke with him. Those officials did so surely because they understood that if they didn’t talk to Woodward, their peers certainly would. So, if they wanted to get their version of history told, it only made sense to cooperate with the legendary reporter, who, at age 81, has more energy and puts in more shoe leather than reporters half his age.
Typically, in Woodward’s books, he lets his reporting speak for itself and doesn’t make sweeping pronouncements that tell the reader about his own conclusions, but “War” is different. Woodward, who has covered every president since Nixon, writes that Trump is “not only the wrong man for the presidency, he is also unfit to lead the country. Trump was far worse than Richard Nixon, the provably criminal president. … Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history.” Ouch!
By contrast, the final sentence of “War” asserts, “Based on the evidence available now, I believe President Biden and this team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.”
Biden’s Afghan withdrawal fiasco
Yet, that conclusion of steady and purposeful leadership is quite at odds with the fiasco of the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, which handed the country back to the Taliban, and during which a suicide bomber killed 13 American service members and some 170 Afghans. This was an own goal scored by Biden’s decision to go against the advice of his top generals, who told him the withdrawal of the small contingent of 2,500 US troops then in Afghanistan would lead to the collapse of the Afghan military.
Collapse it did, and now the Taliban rule over Afghanistan with an iron, misogynistic fist enabled by many billions of dollars of military equipment that the US left behind. The Taliban are also accommodating some 20 terrorist organizations, according to the United Nations.
The Afghanistan withdrawal also signaled to Putin that the US was withdrawing from the world in general, which seems to have accelerated his plans to invade Ukraine. Woodward’s reporting underlines this point. He writes that top generals at the Pentagon learned that a few weeks after the Afghanistan withdrawal, “new pieces of intelligence were coming in that suggested Russia was planning a large-scale military attack on Ukraine.”
Biden then dispatched CIA Director Bill Burns, who had dealt with Putin during his stint as US ambassador to Russia, to warn the Russian leader that the US knew he was planning an invasion of Ukraine and to try to dissuade him. Along with Burns on the trip to Russia was the National Security Council director for Russia, Eric Green. According to Woodward, Green “picked up a sense that the Russians were feeling kind of full of themselves after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Green told Woodward, “I think it reinforced Putin’s conception about how easy it would be. … Here’s a military force that has been supported by the US for decades at that stage. They just collapsed. The Americans didn’t back them up.”
Biden gets it right on Ukraine
By contrast, the Biden team did show real leadership when it tried to warn the world of Putin’s impending invasion of Ukraine and then, when it happened, steadily supplied the Ukrainians with weapons and substantial aid so that they have held off the Russians for more than two and a half years. This has all been achieved without any American boots on the ground, a key Biden goal for the war.
In the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine, Biden and his team warned in private discussions with the Ukrainians and NATO allies that, based on their intelligence, Putin was close to invading. They also innovated by making this intelligence public. Not surprisingly, this was met with some initial resistance from the US intelligence community, yet it was smart policy. After all, secrecy serves policy; it is not a policy goal in and of itself.
On December 3, 2021, The Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Russia planning a massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns.” Although this declassification of intelligence didn’t, in the end, stop Putin from invading Ukraine, it likely made NATO allies and the Ukrainians better prepared for how to respond once the invasion began.
If the Afghanistan withdrawal was a spectacular own goal scored by Biden himself since he was the leading proponent of the policy, the Biden administration’s response to the Ukraine invasion was about as good as it gets. Biden wanted to support the Ukrainians substantially but did not want to trigger World War III inadvertently. That policy has largely been a success. When US intelligence found that Putin was seriously contemplating using a tactical nuclear weapon, the Biden administration “mobilized every communication line, calling the Chinese, the Indians, the Israelis, the Turks — countries friendly with Russia” to get them to tell Putin to stand down. He did.
One of Putin’s key goals when he invaded Ukraine was to ensure the country never joined NATO. Instead, because of the invasion, Putin made NATO Great Again. Multiple NATO countries started ramping up their own spending on defense, and the alliance added two new members, the formerly neutral states of Sweden and Finland, Russia’s neighbor.
While the war has stalemated now with a slight advantage to the Russians, who are advancing slowly in eastern Ukraine, in August, the Ukrainians seized hundreds of square miles of territory in the Kursk region of Russia itself, which they have retained. No matter how much Putin’s propagandists proclaim that victory is close, the Russians are estimated to have already suffered 600,000 dead and wounded, according to a Pentagon briefing last week.
The Middle East regional war Biden tried to avoid
A year after Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis, the Biden team has not prevented an escalating regional conflict. Instead of showing purposeful leadership, the Biden administration has repeatedly handed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check, which he has used to carry out large-scale attacks not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank and Lebanon, as well as more targeted operations in Syria and Yemen.
The war is Gaza has claimed the lives of 42,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, while the death toll in Lebanon is more than 1,500 since Israel launched a ground operation there in recent weeks, and a million Lebanese have fled their homes, according to the UN.
Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen have effectively shut down shipping through the key Red Sea global trade route using Iran-supplied missiles and drones and have also fired them at Israel. In the past six months, Iran has launched two massive attacks on Israel using ballistic missiles and drones, widening the war to the regional conflict that the Biden administration was strenuously seeking to avoid when Hamas launched its attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023.
The possibility of a ceasefire with Hamas and the return of the hostages held by the terrorist group seems quite remote at this point since the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, and Netanyahu are unwilling to compromise, and both seem to believe that the continuation of the war benefits their interests.
On Sunday, the Israeli Cabinet met to decide how to respond to the most recent Iranian missile strike on Israel two weeks ago. Biden has urged the Israelis not to strike Iranian nuclear sites. Let’s see whether they listen. The record so far has not been encouraging.
Biden’s unwavering support for Netanyahu even has a name — “the bear hug”— and while the president has occasionally protested publicly about the level of casualties in Gaza, the de facto policy is strong support for Israel; for instance, the Biden administration is going forward with the sale of $18 billion of F-15 fighter jets to the country.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration tried without success to get Netanyahu not to attack the densely populated Gazan city of Rafah, where an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians were sheltering, many of them evicted from their homes earlier in the conflict.
Biden called Netanyahu on February 15, 2024, telling him, “We already said we are not going to support an operation absent a plan to get civilians out of harm’s way.” Netanyahu ignored this warning and went ahead with the attack on Rafah. Woodward’s assessment of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s efforts to rein in Netanyahu during this period is damning and direct: “It was obvious Blinken had no influence.”
It’s mystifying why the Biden administration hasn’t used more of its considerable leverage over Netanyahu; after all, in the past year, the US has approved $17.9 billion for security assistance to Israel, according to a report by Brown University released last week; the most aid in any year that the US has ever sent to Israel. The Biden administration has halted the shipment of massive 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, but otherwise, the large flow of American weapons to the Jewish state continues.
Vice President Kamala Harris
Though Vice President Kamala Harris adorns the cover of “War” — likely a marketing decision given her presidential run — she does not play a prominent role in the book compared with Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
Yet, when Harris appears in the book, she does give sound advice. When Biden asked her what her view was in mid-April after Iran had fired some 300 missiles and drones at Israel, almost all of which were then shot down by Israel, the US and other allies, Harris said simply, “Tell Bibi to take the win.”
Harris also has one of the funnier lines in the book, saying Biden likes her company because “he knows that I’m the only person around who knows how to properly pronounce the word motherfucker.” Indeed, we learn from Woodward that “Joe from Scranton” sure does use the F-word a lot, particularly when it comes to Netanyahu, who Biden variously describes as one of “the biggest fucking assholes in the world,” “a bad fucking guy” and “a fucking liar.” And for good measure, Biden yells at Netanyahu, “Bibi, what the fuck?” after the Israelis assassinated a Hezbollah leader living in a densely populated area of the capital of Lebanon, also killing at least three civilians.
“War” is a deeply reported account of the wars on the Biden administration’s watch. At the same time, its overall assessment that the Biden team showed purposeful leadership regarding these conflicts isn’t supported by the facts of the Afghan withdrawal, the present conflagration in the Middle East, and even Woodward’s own reporting. However, regarding Ukraine, the Biden administration has operated very deftly, keeping NATO together and expanding the alliance while avoiding any direct American involvement in the war that might have triggered an escalatory response from the Russians. Certainly, this is a real achievement that Biden can savor when he enjoys his well-earned retirement back in Delaware.
It is anyone’s guess what Trump might do about Ukraine if he were to win the presidency, given the former president’s odd bromance with Putin, which even top aides such as Trump’s director of national Intelligence, Dan Coats, cannot explain. Coats told Woodward, “It’s still a mystery to me how he deals with Putin and what he says to Putin. … It’s an enigma, and it hasn’t been broken yet.”
Trump has claimed he could quickly settle the Ukraine conflict, but since the Russians and Ukrainians have been at war for a decade since Putin first seized Crimea in 2014, this seems like wishful thinking.
