War

In his latest fly-on-the-wall presidential chronicle, Pulitzer winner Woodward (Peril) explores the efforts of Joe Biden and his administration to cope with foreign conflicts while a baleful Donald Trump waits in the wings. Opening with Biden’s chaotic 2021 pullout from Afghanistan, Woodward moves on to what he depicts as a masterful handling of the war in Ukraine—he characterizes Biden as handing Putin a strategic defeat via an expanded NATO—and an account of the Gaza war centered on the administration’s struggles with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who resisted Biden’s demands to allow aid into Gaza and negotiate a ceasefire. Woodward paints Biden as a sharp, thoughtful, decisive commander-in-chief (he includes only a few somewhat discordant nods to Biden’s obvious public mental decline). Donald Trump, meanwhile, is a disruptive presence in the book, with Woodward depicting him as a dishonest, erratic dupe of Putin. Working from extensive insider interviews, Woodward takes readers into the situation rooms and diplomatic dinners where policy is hashed out in an often emotional fashion (“He’s a bad fucking guy!” raged Biden at Netanyahu’s intransigence), relays vivid anecdotes deriding Trump’s pomposity (“Going to Mar-a-Lago is a little bit like going to North Korea,” observes Sen. Lindsey Graham. “Everybody stands up and claps every time Trump comes in”), and delivers several dramatic revelations, among them that Trump made illicit phone calls to Putin concerning Ukraine after leaving office. It’s a captivating analysis of high-wire statesmanship. (Oct.)