H.R. McMaster and Bob Woodward are both authors of New York Times bestsellers. That is where the similarity ends. McMaster is both a genuine war hero and a recognized historian. His Dereliction of Duty, which analyzed and criticized America’s senior military and civilian leadership during the Vietnam War, remains a staple on military reading lists. A true non-partisan who believed in serving his country whatever the political circumstances, he accepted Donald Trump’s offer to replace the disgraced Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as national security advisor but retained his military rank as an Army lieutenant general. He lasted in that post for a bit over a year. At War With Ourselves is his memoir of those thirteen and one-half months.
   Bob Woodward served as a junior officer in the U.S. Navy and left service as a lieutenant. He opted not to attend law school and instead chose to pursue a career in journalism. After a year with a minor newspaper, the Washington Post hired him as a reporter. Within a year of joining the Post he became a journalist superstar when together with Carl Bernstein, his fellow newshound, he unearthed many of the details surrounding the Watergate break-in and published a series of investigative reports that ultimately led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. The two young journalists then published their account of the scandal in All The President’s Men, which proved to be a best-seller and then a hit movie.
   Woodward has published numerous books on public affairs ever since, almost all of them best sellers. Beginning with his 1991 volume The Commanders, which focused on the first Gulf War, Woodward has published a series of books relating to America’s wars, including the Iraq and Afghan wars under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. Woodward’s latest volume, simply titled War, focuses on Biden and his team of top advisors and employs Trump as a foil to the man who defeated him in the 2020 election.
   Woodward is no analyst, he is a reporter, and a selective one at that. He offers little more than contemporary history drawing primarily on what people told him, almost always “on background.” Still, it is rarely difficult to discern who actually spoke to him, especially when he relates what went through an individual’s mind. Woodward has been described as a “tape recorder with legs” and War certainly offers nothing to challenge that characterization. Moreover, unlike McMaster, who strives to relate his experiences in as non-judgmental a manner as possible, even if he often fails to do so, Woodward makes no bones about his distaste for Trump. Indeed, Woodward’s book is very much an apologia for Biden and his advisors’ at best mediocre record in national security affairs.
   Unlike many memoirs, At War With Ourselves speaks with McMaster’s own voice. This book was not ghostwritten, “as told to” a polished journalist. One can almost visualize him standing erect before the president, briefing him in clipped, military tones.
   Page after page reflects the author’s deep frustration with his boss, the president, and even more with rivals within and outside the White House. Nevertheless, McMaster considers himself a historian and tries to relate his experiences as a historian might record them. Indeed, he is at great pains to remind the reader more than once that he is a historian, and that his book is meant to be an unbiased account of his time in the White House. Though he exerts considerable effort to hew to his objective, it is obvious that he falls short. His experience simply was too painful to hide from his readers.
   McMaster felt that he could never win the cooperation of his rivals at the National Security Council table. He found himself constantly at odds with both White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the two Marine four-star generals who outranked him and treated him as a subordinate, and with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO, whom Trump fired even before McMaster himself left the administration. McMaster bitterly recalls that Kelly was constantly trying to undercut him inside the White House—though he did not push for his resignation—while Mattis and Tillerson, in seeking to preserve their secretarial prerogatives, obstructed him at every turn and even displayed “occasionally rude and petty behavior” toward him. He considered that both men were “prioritize[ing] control over collaboration” and constantly resorted to “bureaucratic power games” that undermined the coherence of US policy.
   If that were not enough, Reince Priebus, the White House Press Secretary, and Steve Bannon, senior White House strategist were, in McMaster’s eyes, agitators who constantly thwarted his efforts and would bring out the worst in Trump. Indeed, his troubles with both men began soon after he took office. He quickly discovered that the NSC leaked like the proverbial sieve, with some staffers so resentful of Trump that they “leaked what they perceived as damaging information to the press or to former Obama employees,” while others, including those “who were close to Mike Flynn or Steve Bannon, used those leaks to reinforce this us-versus-them mentality.” He also had an uneasy relationship with Keith Kellogg, who had briefly served as acting national security advisor upon Flynn’s forced departure and who had hoped to win the job himself. (Donald Trump, after his reelection, named Kellogg as his envoy for Ukraine-Russia with a mandate to end the war.) Thus, while McMaster certainly found it difficult to persuade the president to pursue anything like a coherent national security policy, he nevertheless considered that his most difficult challenge arose not from his dealings with Trump, but rather from coping with the administration’s palace intrigues.
   Working with Trump was by no means an easy matter, however. McMaster relates many of the president’s now familiar shortcomings in considerable detail. Like many military personnel of his generation, McMaster venerates Ronald Reagan, and when comparing the “Great Communicator” with Trump the media star, it is Trump who falls short. McMaster points out that at least superficially, the two had much in common. Both men entered politics as media celebrities, both men were elected in the shadow of economic and foreign policy failures, both men were effective communicators, and both had similar slogans: “Make America Great Again” was obviously derivative of Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Yet McMaster then demonstrates that “the differences between the two presidents who came into office with similar agendas (including tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments, and increased military spending) were as stark as the contrast between Reagan’s rustic Western-style White House and Trump’s lavish southern white house at Mar-a Lago.”
   Whereas Reagan was “polished,” Trump was “coarse.” Reagan often poked fun at himself, but Trump’s “vanity precluded any form of self-deprecation. He could be funny, but his preferred form of amusement was ridicule and name-calling.” In that regard, McMaster views Trump’s behavior as more akin to that of Lyndon Johnson, about whom he had extensively written in Dereliction of Duty.
     “As with LBJ, he writes, “Trump’s insecurities and desire for attention left him perpetually distracted and vulnerable to a mainstream media that was vehemently opposed to him. Also, like LBJ, he had a loose connection with the truth a tendency toward hyperbole.” In addition, McMaster recalls, “Trump shared with LBJ the tendency to belittle others to make himself seem bigger and to hide his own insecurities, fears and flaws.” These and other passages throughout the book make it very clear that while McMaster did his utmost to serve Trump the president, the strait-laced soldier who takes his Catholic faith most seriously (though he does not carry it on his sleeve), had little time for Trump the man.
   It is well-known, at least among the military and many of the civilians who deal with military officials, that “sir” can have many connotations, ranging from “certainly, boss,” to “I’ll do it because you ordered me to, but you’re an idiot.” McMaster’s numerous observations and asides reveal that his feelings about his boss tend toward the latter version of “sir.”
   He recalls with unmistakable disapproval that even when he had only just begun his tour of duty in the White House, he recognized that “the president was more enthusiastic about golfing…and he was often not in a great mood when I arrived in the sitting room outside his apartment [at Mar-a-Lago] with work for him to do.” Indeed, when McMaster interviewed for the job, the president asked him if he golfed. McMaster’s reply was priceless: “If you are looking for a good golfer, you would have better luck with an Air Force officer.”
    McMaster, himself an overachiever, notes with some distaste that Trump “hated formal preparation.” He points out that “Trump is not a morning person,” a serious challenge for a national security community that usually begins its day well before 7 a.m. He also was taken aback by Trump’s ignorance. For example, when the president visited the French Army’s military museum during his trip to Paris to mark Bastille Day, McMaster notes that he “smiled when President Trump remarked that he did not know France had such a rich military history.” The implication is that the president probably had never heard of a certain Napoleon Bonaparte.
   When McMaster advised John Bolton, his successor, about Trump’s modus operandi, he pointed out that “you will find that when presented with good analysis …Trump will make tough decisions. The problem is that he finds it very difficult to stick with them.” When describing a Trump speech at the Blue House, the residence of the South Korean president, McMaster notes that Trump “reverted to his reality-tv promoter persona.” It is hard to miss what the general thinks of that “persona.”
   McMaster came to realize “that Trump was not a team builder. He enjoyed and contributed to interpersonal drama across the administration.” The general somewhat naively “underestimated the difficulty insulating the NSC from the vitriolic partisanship afflicting Washington and the nation.” As much of McMaster’s volume demonstrates, that was a serious understatement.
   As much as McMaster was less than enthralled with Trump’s character, he recalls that he was equally flummoxed by the many “contradictions in Trump’s worldview.” He provides a rather long list of these inconsistencies, including Trump’s belief in American exceptionalism” while at the same time #manifest[ing] moral equivalence;“ his opposition to communism while “ambivalent at best about the dictators of Russia and China;” and his desire for fair trade and economic relationships while being “biased against trade agreements that might advance those objectives.”
He also was caught up short by some of the president’s sudden and troubling impulses, such as when Trump mused about withdrawing from South Korea [RoK] and leaving it to Russia and China to “deal with North Korea.” Or again when Trump’s reaction upon learning that the United States had a trade deficit with the RoK was “Why are we defending people who hate us?”
   McMaster was especially flummoxed by what he describes as “Putin’s hold” on the president. He could not bring Trump to acknowledge the Russian disinformation campaign, which “he thought might bolster those who were attacking the legitimacy of his presidency.” He failed to dissuade Trump from making a congratulatory call to Putin on the Russian’s electoral victory. He then tried to convince the president at least to use that phone call as an opportunity to condemn the attack on Sergei Skripol in Salisbury, England that “very likely Putin himself” had ordered. Failing to convince Trump, he instead urged him to raise the issue of Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria but he failed again as the president congratulated Putin while “go[ing] soft on Salisbury and Syria.
   McMaster points out that Trump reached the wrong conclusions on other major national security issues, due to what he terms “the atmosphere of inconsistency that Trump has created before he left office.” McMaster asserts that Trump’s betrayal of America’s Afghan allies was forged in the deeply flawed February 2020 withdrawal agreement that he approved. He goes on to say that “Trump foolishly asked” the “virulently anti-American” Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan “to help resolve the security problems in Afghanistan … for which the Pakistani Army was largely responsible.”
   Nevertheless, for all his not-so-veiled criticism of Trump’s character, he has some good to say about the man and contrasts him with his predecessor. For example, when Trump was considering pulling American troops out of Syria, which would have left the Kurdish-dominated Syria Democratic Forces to the tender mercies of both Bashar al Assad and Turkey, McMaster won him over by pointing out that “ordering U.S. forces prematurely would be the same as Obama leaving Iraq in 2011, which set the stage for the rise of ISIS.” Indeed, American forces remain in Syria; Trump never pulled them out even after McMaster had departed the White House.
   Similarly, when protests erupted once again in Iran, McMaster successfully recommended to the president that “in contrast to the Obama Administration’s silence during massive protests in 2009, Trump tweet his support for the protesters.” Trump followed his advice. McMaster notes that while Trump endured yet another round of criticism for his tweets, the Iranian protesters chanted ‘Our enemy is right here, they are lying that this is America.’
   McMaster recounts the frustration on the part of General Mick Nicolson, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, who had to lead undermanned Army units because of arbitrary limitations that the Obama administration had placed on the number of troops deployed, consistent with the Obama plan for a scheduled withdrawal from that country. Having himself served in Afghanistan, McMaster was able to convince his boss of the need to replace what he considered to be the Obama administration’s “short war mentality,” which in his view actually lengthened the war. McMaster’s strategy for Afghanistan instead called for dropping an a priori timetable for the departure of American forces.
   If McMaster’s assessment of his boss’ proclivities is decidedly mixed, he has surprisingly unreserved praise for Vice President Mike Pence. In contrast to the vice president’s image in the mainstream media, which tended to characterize Pence as nothing but a cipher, McMaster describes him as a trusted advisor and counselor both to himself and to Trump. “Although he was tactful and reserved in demeanor,” writes McMaster, “he never hesitated to tell Trump when the presidents ‘instincts’ were leading him to self-defeating rhetoric or behavior on topics like NATO or the alliance with South Korea.” And McMaster adds, Pence did not falter on those occasions nor would he during the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.”
   Finally, McMaster argues that whereas his team was able to put together a coherent national security strategy for the United States, the Obama White House did nothing of the sort. He felt that the Obama team’s approach was based on “fundamentally flawed assumptions.” He quotes Henry Kissinger who described what was termed “the Obama Doctrine” as “an essentially reactive and passive foreign policy” that sought “vindication of its values by withdrawing from regions where we can only make things worse.”
   If Obama’s strategy was reactive, and Trump’s assertive, at least according to McMaster, both administrations nevertheless had a strategy of sorts. The same cannot be said of the Biden administration. It is hard to discern what Biden and his team sought to accomplish strategically over the long term. Their focus was to put out fires, whether short-term ones or those of many years’ standing. Perhaps their most glaring oversight was not to recognize that Russia was as great a threat to American and allied interests as China, which alone was termed a “pacing” threat. Indeed, one seeks in vain for Woodward’s description of a Biden strategy; his index does not even mention the word, nor does it mention a National Security Strategy document.
   For his part, Woodward attempts to demonstrate that the president and his immediate staff worked hard at cleaning up messes that Trump purportedly left them. In contrast to the central theme of McMaster’s book that the administration’s leadership was at war with itself, Woodward portrays National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and CIA Director Bill Burns as working hand-in-hand and in harmony. That certainly is a highly commendable way to manage the nation’s security, and Sullivan deserves credit for restoring a degree of structure to a process that often has been unruly under many presidents. Yet Sullivan and Blinken, who clearly had the lead in developing national security policy, were Biden’s former staffers, and staffers rarely challenge their boss’ views and decisions, regardless of their merits. In particular, Woodward calls Sullivan “the operational coordinator of Biden’s foreign policy,” yet in contrast to McMaster’s account of his own and Pence’s frequent pushbacks against Trump’s worst impulses, Woodward records only a very few occasions when Sullivan questioned Biden’s instincts. And when he did, as when he argued for bluffing Putin that the United States might send troops to support Ukraine in the event that Russia invaded, he did so half-heartedly, citing the intelligence community’s opposition to such a move and then backing off quickly because “it wasn’t [his] call to make.”
   Woodward likewise has little to report about Blinken’s resistance to his boss’ impulses, although Blinken, perhaps Biden’s longest-serving staffer, would push Biden in order to get him to reach a middle ground. That was how he managed to persuade Biden to allow Ukrainians to begin training on F-16 fighter aircraft while opposing sending them to the beleaguered country.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin likewise appears to have issued few if any reclamas against White House decisions, whether on policy or the defense budget, which Biden sought to cap in real terms. Austin, whose forty-one years in the active military Woodward wrongly claims as the “unmatched war fighting experience of a secretary of defense”—George Marshall served forty-three years and Jim Mattis forty-four—plays a relatively smaller part in Woodward’s story. He was an implementer, carefully ensuring that the Pentagon fully supported White House policies and instructions and always in consonance with the State Department. In that regard, Austin was in the mold of several of Eisenhower’s secretaries of defense, as opposed to Caspar Weinberger or Donald Rumsfeld, who often clashed with the State Department and on occasion the NSC.
   The absence of pushback led to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. While serving as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden had advocated for a withdrawal from Afghanistan but his views did not prevail. Those views had not changed, and Biden remained determined to get all American troops out of the country.
   No one appears to have attempted to convince Biden that the clear inability of Afghan troops to defend themselves called for a more extended withdrawal from that country, rather than a hasty departure that was certain to be uncoordinated. Woodward’s assessment is that the White House made the right decision under the circumstances, and simply did not, and could not, foresee the rapid collapse of the Afghan Army.
   Woodward absolves the Biden team for the decision to withdraw arguing that “the real culprit was the untamed, impulsive desire to insert U.S. troops in a foreign country believing they were a fix and ignoring the lessons of Vietnam.” It is not clear what exactly is the basis for Woodward’s assertion. He is wrong to compare Afghanistan to Vietnam. When George W. Bush first ordered American troops into Afghanistan, with almost unanimous bipartisan support from Congress, it was hardly an impulsive decision. 9/11 was no Gulf of Tonkin attack. It was very real, a strike against America on its territory. If Iraq overshadowed the Afghan mission to the point that the Taliban was able to regroup, that was a different matter, but there was no impulsiveness in September and October 2001. Indeed, the Iraq War might have offered Woodward a better parallel to Vietnam, but he says little about that country other than in the context of militias operating there. And he says nothing at all about the fact that Biden did not pull troops out of Iraq despite it too being the scene of a “forever war.”
   Biden had it in his power to renounce the poorly negotiated agreement that Trump’s negotiator reached with the Taliban. The terrorist group had not lived up to the provisions of that agreement. The Biden team’s argument that it was locked into Trump’s agreement, collapses given Biden’s reversal of a host of Trump-related decisions, including restoring funding to UNWRA and the UN Human Rights Commission without demanding reforms or changes of any kind. Woodward’s excuses notwithstanding, responsibility for the tragedy that was America’s departure from Afghanistan lies squarely with Biden and his leadership team, not with Trump, however misguided he was on that issue.
   Biden was driven by his own ideological impulses. As Woodward notes, without comment, Biden “loathed” the counterinsurgency strategy that America employed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. One does not “loath” a strategy. One develops a different one. Cutting and running from Kabul on C-17s was not a strategy. In that regard, it did indeed resemble the escape from Saigon.
   If the Biden team fell flat when it came to predicting the fall of Afghanistan, it was far more successful in forecasting Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Woodward devotes a considerable portion of his book to the Russia-Ukraine war and on his interviews, and he outlines in great detail how the Biden administration decided to reveal what might otherwise have been highly classified information about Russia’s pre-invasion deployments.
   Nevertheless, Biden could have ramped up his support for Ukraine’s military requirements well before the invasion began. As Woodward notes, all the signs of Putin’s intentions were there from the time Biden took office. Woodward recounts that “Sullivan had heard that during a phone call between Putin and German chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin said you wouldn’t believe the stuff that I’ve been finding in the Russian archives … It was clear to Merkel that Putin had spent a lot of his time in isolation just digging around in the archives.”
   Actually, Putin had transferred the archives from the Ministry of Culture to the presidential office, and though he was not personally “digging around,” he was bombarding the archives staff with questions in order to establish the extent of the Czarist empire that he now wished to restore. Woodward evidently is not aware of this fact, which was known to many Western diplomats, but evidently not to Sullivan, his obvious source regarding the phone call.
   The problem was that while Sullivan and his deputy Jon Finer (the source of many “thoughts” that Woodward records) took Putin’s obsession with Czarist history and especially his July 2021 statement that Ukraine was not a real country seriously, “it did not strike them as an alarm bell or a declaration of war.” Perhaps it was not a declaration of war, but it certainly was enough of an alarm bell for Biden to have chosen to ship more weapons to Kyiv, even if, as Woodward records, the Ukrainians themselves doubted that an invasion was imminent and continued to do so even after Washington concluded that it was.
   Three themes underlie Woodward’s recounting of the administration’s response to the Russian invasion. First, he contrasts White House attitudes towards Putin with Trump’s strange and unexplained relationship with the Russian dictator. He points out that “Trump’s unwillingness to criticize Putin was…a consistent character trait.” Indeed, Woodward goes well beyond McMaster in documenting how far Trump was prepared to go to win the Russians’ favor. As the American media highlighted upon War’s publication, “Trump secretly sent a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use as the virus spread rapidly through Russia,” this at a time when there were not yet sufficient tests available to all Americans who sought them.
   As for Ukraine, Woodward recounts Keith Kellogg’s comment that Ukraine wasn’t on the top of [Trump’s] hit list at all.” Ukraine, may not have been at the top of his hit list, but it was Trump who reversed Barack Obama’s decision to withhold lethal weapons, specifically Javelin anti-tank missiles, from Ukraine, a fact that Woodward acknowledges, though rather grudgingly. In contrast, Woodward makes much of the fact that as the prospect of Russian invasion became very real, the Biden administration shipped $60 million worth of Javelins to Kyiv. Yet that assistance was not all that much greater than the $39 million worth of Javelins that Trump had authorized for Ukraine. Moreover, it was but a fraction of what Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky desperately needed, and indeed of what the United States subsequently shipped to Ukraine.
   Second, Woodward demonstrates that for too long Biden simply was unprepared to confront Putin. Woodward notes that when Russia clearly began to organize for the invasion, denying that it was doing so, Biden, Sullivan, and CIA Director Bill Burns “weighed how best to confront Putin … and in … direct terms to lay out the consequences for Russia.” One might have thought that “confronted with the possibility of a war that could threaten the entire international order, Biden could have met the moment and delivered the warning to President Putin in person himself … The only messenger from the United States with the weight and influence to stop Putin was the president himself.” But Biden did no such thing. He shied away from any kind of direct confrontation, which might have stopped the Russian dictator in his tracks. In one of his relatively few critiques of the president, Woodward rightly observes, “Maybe Putin was immovable, but it would have been worth trying. Leadership is often about making risky big plays.”
   Moreover, mirror-imaging the American experience was not the monopoly of think tank analysts. That Biden could assert “I know leaders. Leaders tend to think a lot more about down side risk than upside gain and Putin is … pretty risk averse” showed that he suffered from the same misconception.
When Washington finally ramped up its support for Ukraine once Russia launched its invasion, it did so with considerable foot-dragging. The reason, which is the third underlying theme of Woodward’s recounting of the Biden team’s response to the war, was that the White House was deeply troubled by the prospect that Putin could retaliate for the West’s weapons shipments by exploding a nuclear device.
   Yet as Woodward recounts, the Biden team had early on made it abundantly clear to the Russians that, as Lloyd Austin told his counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, on October 21, 2022, should Moscow explode a nuclear weapon all constraints that Washington had placed on Ukrainian use of American weapons since the beginning of the invasion “would be reconsidered.” When Shoigu remarked “I don’t take kindly to being threatened” Austin responded bluntly with not a hint of anger, “I am the leader of the most powerful military in the world, I don’t make threats.” Woodward also records that when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley had a more cordial but similarly blunt exchange with his own counterpart, General Valery Gerasimov, the Russian backed away from making any nuclear threats. Moreover, the United States kept crossing Russian red lines regarding the weapons nature and use that it and its allies shipped to Ukraine—from Patriots to Bradley armored personnel carriers, HIMARS, tanks, and F-16s—and Moscow did not fire off a nuclear weapon.
   Why Biden, Sullivan, and the others continued to fear Russian nuclear saber-rattling is quite puzzling. It may well be due to Biden’s tendency to “go wobbly,” to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher’s admonition to George H.W. Bush when he hesitated to move against Saddam Hussein. Just as Biden initially had backed away from confronting Putin before the invasion, he also refused to countenance any idea of a nuclear response in the event Russia fired off a nuclear weapon. Whatever Austin and Milley implied to the Russians Biden stressed to his senior advisors that “I’m not going to have a nuclear response to battlefield use in Ukraine.” And while Woodward reports that “nuclear weapons were always a possibility once escalation began,” it was quite clear that Biden had definitively ruled out that option.
   The administration thus gave Russia a nuclear-free pass if it employed nukes. Given Biden’s decision, the only way to prevent Russia from employing these weapons was to put limits on what could be shipped to Ukraine and how Ukraine could employ what it received. Biden’s hesitation, which he only overcame after the 2024 election that made him a weak lame duck, may well have prolonged the devastating carnage on both sides, a fact that Woodward simply and perhaps deliberately chooses to ignore.
   Biden also gave the Russians freedom of the skies, though ultimately the Ukrainians were able to confound much of Russia’s airpower. Shortly after the initial Russian onslaught, Zelensky pressed Biden to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine. “Biden said no. Enforcing a no-fly zone would require U.S. or NATO planes to shoot down Russian aircraft—an impossible escalation for Biden.” Woodward simply reports and makes no comment regarding Biden’s decision. Certainly, declaring a no-fly zone involved a major risk, but only if Russia challenged American fighter jets. Whether Putin would have taken that risk will never be known, but again, it was Biden, not Putin, who preemptively flinched.
   Woodward devotes many of War’s final chapters to Israel’s conflict with Hamas. Despite his clear love for Israel, Biden could not stomach Israel Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. Neither did his staff, indeed, neither did Woodward. He quotes Biden calling both Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as “two of the biggest assholes in the world.” Whatever Biden privately thought of Netanyahu, who is the leader of a close American ally, or even Abbas, who is not, neither he nor his aides should not have leaked that quote to Woodward, even if he is an acknowledged master at extracting “thoughts.” All the quote did, apart from serving juicy snippets for pre-publication publicity, was complicate an already strained relationship between the American president and the Israeli prime minister.
   Woodward quotes Brett McGurk, Biden’s Middle East coordinator on the National Security Council staff who, upon hearing reports that there was no intelligence regarding a Hezbollah paraglider attack, immediately “thought” that “The Israelis always do this … 50 per cent of the time the so-called intel doesn’t actually show up.” Given the U.S. intelligence community’s having been taken by complete surprise when Bashar al-Assad fell, only two years after the October 7 Hamas attacks also came as a surprise, as Woodward himself notes, it is arguable that batting .500 on intelligence is not a bad record.
   At the outset of Woodward’s reporting on the administration’s response to the Gaza war, he inadvertently points to Biden’s fundamental failure in dealing with the conflict. “Hostages were the emotional spine for most leaders, especially Biden. Getting the hostages back safely would be a victory, failure to do so could permanently stain a presidency.” For two years Biden could not bring them back.
   Indeed, he not only failed to achieve an arrangement to free about one hundred hostages, including seven Americans, but appeared to apply far more pressure on Israel to cease its operations than on Hamas, or, more importantly on its Turkish, Qatari and Iranian patrons, to release the hostages. Had they done so, and Hamas caved under their combined pressure, Netanyahu would have had no choice but to stop the bombings of Gaza, which he had promised to halt upon the hostages’ release.
   If Biden finally did succeed in getting some of the hostages freed, it was for three reasons having little or nothing to do with him. First, it was Israel’s smashing of Hezbollah, in response to the terrorist group’s missile attacks on Israel’s north, which displaced 70,000 Israelis. Second, it was due to the fall of Bashar Assad, ensuring that Hezbollah, Iran’s primary client, would not regroup any time soon, and leaving Hamas without a major supporter. And finally, it was due to Trump’s impending return to the White House, and his threat that if Hamas did not release the hostages there would be “hell to pay.”
   None of these considerations appear in Woodward’s book; they took place after its hurried release before the election. In the meantime, Woodward goes into great detail regarding Biden’s commitment to defend Israel against Hezbollah missile attacks while telling Netanyahu not to go to war against Hezbollah. Yet it was precisely Netanyahu’s defiance of the White House’s incessant admonitions that enabled Israel to smash the Lebanese group.
   As for the Iranians, who supported both Hezbollah and Hamas, they must have viewed Biden as rather gullible, given his revocation of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign and his granting of waivers enabling Tehran to amass billions from petroleum sales. Woodward says virtually nothing about those waivers. Not surprisingly, therefore, it was not any action on the part of the Biden administration, which did not give up its pipe dream of a new nuclear agreement with Iran, but rather the combination of Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah and its powerful November air strikes on Iranian facilities, including at least one nuclear facility, that chastened Tehran. In turn, neither Iran nor Hezbollah was in a position to prevent the sudden collapse of the Asad regime.
   Woodward’s book appeared only weeks before the 2024 presidential election. It was unabashedly geared to boost the Harris candidacy and to undermine Trump’s. He played up Kamala Harris’ role in dealing with the various crises that the administration faced, presumably to boost her rather thin national security credentials. He went after Trump with headline-grabbing quotes like Mark Milley’s on-the-record observation that Trump is “a fascist to the core,” or by quoting Trump himself that “I get along with him [Putin] really well.” He made no bones about his preferences: “Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency, he is unfit to lead the country” calling him “the most reckless and impulsive president in American history.”
   But Woodward also wanted to vindicate the Biden presidency and minimize its faults. The Biden team certainly made some important contributions to the nation’s security. It strengthened America’s alliances in East Asia, especially bringing Japan and South Korea ever closer to each other. It revitalized America’s relationship with the Philippines. It joined Australia and the UK in forging a new AUKUS agreement that would add nuclear submarines to the Australian Navy and jointly develop cutting-edge technologies among the three partners. It played a major role in bringing Sweden and Finland into NATO.
   Yet there is no overlooking the administration’s egregious failure in Afghanistan; its restrictions on Ukrainian employment of the systems it provided; its failure both to foresee the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians and to prevent war with Hezbollah; and its half-hearted sanctions on Iran. Woodward might contend, as do Biden’s acolytes and supporters, that Biden’s failings due to his advanced age never got in the way of his presidential leadership. But his “jumbled, confused” performance in his June 27 debate with Trump belies that assertion.
   It is therefore the height of hyperbole to assert, as Woodward does in the book’s concluding sentence that “based on the evidence available now … President Biden and his team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.” But hyperbole is key to any presidential campaign, and Woodward’s book, however detailed its reporting, was also meant to be as much a manifesto for Kamala Harris and a scathing critique of Trump as it was an apologia for the Biden years. Too bad for Woodward that Harris lost.