This temperamental gulf between Biden and his advisers is illustrated most dramatically in the debates about the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, which Biden insisted had to be completed within his first year in office and ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. To the anti-war left, Biden’s stubbornness on this point could be read as one of his greatest strengths. As Obama’s vice president, he had famously dissented on the decision to surge troops into Afghanistan in 2009, which prolonged the war by more than a decade. But for Biden, the matter was as much personal as political: Because of Beau’s service, he had a particular sensitivity to military families and an overriding desire to bring the troops home from what he had judged long ago to be a futile war.

With regard to Afghanistan, there was little daylight between Biden and progressives like the Marine veteran Alexander McCoy, the leader of the anti-war group Common Defense, who features prominently in The Internationalists as one of the activists the West Wing coordinated with on the withdrawal. Much of the Beltway foreign-policy establishment and the military elite—in particular Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—disagreed. They were invested deeply in salvaging some sort of military victory in Afghanistan; the sunk-cost fallacy weighed powerfully over Washington. The A-Team ended up having to implement the president’s will in the face of institutional resistance, and the outcome was a fiasco—what Ward calls “the Great Humbling.”

Anyone who followed the news in the summer of 2021 will recall what made this moment such a humbling one: As US troops started pulling out, Taliban forces seized control of the whole country far more rapidly than the Biden team had anticipated. The US-trained Afghan Army melted away, Kabul surrendered to the Taliban, and the hapless President Ashraf Ghani fled abroad. The evacuation of US personnel and the Afghan citizens who had cooperated with them was hastily improvised, in part through a mass volunteer effort by heartbroken US national-security professionals. Defenders of Biden’s decision argued that the speed of Afghanistan’s collapse proved he was right all along; critics countered that the small remaining force Biden inherited when he took office could have been maintained in the country indefinitely as a low-cost investment in regional stability. Either way, the withdrawal itself went disastrously, and the president’s approval numbers plummeted.

Ward recounts how Biden faced demands to make some heads roll in the aftermath of the pullout, and perhaps that might have been the politically savvy move. But Biden stood by his A-Team: “Leaving Afghanistan was always going to be messy,” Ward writes, summarizing the White House’s internal consensus. Still, everyone felt chastened by what had happened, and Sullivan perhaps most of all. “More than anyone,” Ward notes, Sullivan “was looking to get the administration a much-needed win.”

The idea of “getting a win” for the Biden administration is representative of a larger problem with how the A-Team views US foreign policy. Their decisions have real and often bloody consequences on the ground, but wins and losses are tallied in terms of the political consequences for Biden and the professional standing of his advisers. What these wins and losses might mean for the rest of the world is rarely remarked upon. Sullivan and his colleagues are instead concerned with how a failure (stipulating that’s what it was) in Afghanistan can be redeemed by a success (if that’s what it is) in Ukraine. But does a triumphant outcome in one country offset a dismal outcome in another? Sullivan and his colleagues seem to think so, and Ward seems to agree, but what about the Afghans and Ukrainians—which policies are wins and which are losses for them?

The narrowness of The Internationalists’ framing is noticeable in Ward’s section about the run-up to the war in Ukraine. Ward casts US support for Ukraine as redemptive for Team Biden: He describes, as they would, how America successfully stood up for a beleaguered democracy invaded by its far larger authoritarian neighbor. Even so, much of this section reads like a series of cascading disasters—from the failed diplomatic campaign to prevent Vladimir Putin from doing the unthinkable to the frustrating efforts to persuade Volodymyr Zelensky that an invasion was imminent. In Ward’s telling, Biden and his team never sought war and tried at every opportunity to avert it, and this is probably correct as far as it goes, but of course the backstory of the Ukraine war didn’t begin under the Biden administration; it was the result of years of escalating tensions between the US and Russia, tensions that were sometimes stoked by hawks in Washington. The war that resulted hasn’t been an unmitigated success either, especially after last summer’s failed Ukrainian counteroffensive; proclaiming it a redemption story for American foreign policy is premature at best.

Ward might have framed the Ukraine war a little more skeptically had he focused more on one of the key figures shaping US policy toward Russia and Ukraine both before and during the Biden administration: Victoria Nuland, the outgoing under secretary of state for political affairs, whom Ward himself describes, in one of the few times he refers to her, as “notorious for her years as a staunch Russia hawk.” Nuland’s consistently aggressive posture toward Russia in the lead-up to the war, which Ward notes initially put her in a minority within the Biden administration, has drawn intense scrutiny from Moscow; her many years as a Russian policy hand, in a career spanning the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, point to a deeper backstory to the current crisis. However one feels about Nuland or her policy preferences, she is an example of how US foreign policy operates on a longer timeline than any one presidency; had Ward emphasized her a bit more, he might have also been able to shed some light on how Team Biden came to be so deeply enmeshed in Ukraine.

An analogous figure who appears only briefly in The Internationalists is Brett McGurk, who in recent months has become widely recognized as a key player shaping Biden’s increasingly controversial Middle East policy. Like Nuland, McGurk is a hawk and a veteran of multiple administrations under both parties (though unlike Nuland, he even served during the Trump years). McGurk has been primarily responsible for the Biden administration’s overriding priority of brokering a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel—an extension of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “Abraham Accords”—and it has also been under his watch that the status of the Palestinians has remained a marginal issue in US Middle East policy, at least until Hamas forced it into international headlines last fall. McGurk comes up only briefly in The Internationalists, when an anonymous source in touch with administration officials blames him for how the administration was caught flat-footed by the war between Hamas and Israel that broke out in May 2021. Had Ward followed McGurk’s story more closely, and had the Middle East taken up more than one chapter, his book might have cast the overarching priorities of US foreign policy in a more cynical light. By centering the A-Team and replicating its de-emphasis on the Middle East, Ward is instead able to tell a more sympathetic story—albeit one that already feels dated.

Sullivan’s speech at the Brookings Institution at the end of The Internationalists makes for an odd coda. It returns to the themes of a “middle class”–oriented, post-globalization foreign policy that Ward emphasizes in his introduction, even as most of the book has been focused on the management of long-standing national-security issues and geopolitical crises that are only secondarily connected to such a policy. (According to its index, the term “middle class” comes up multiple times in the book’s first chapter and epilogue, but is barely mentioned anywhere in between.) Yet in Ward’s view, Sullivan’s speech, and his tenure in office, marked an important break: In criticizing the Washington consensus on globalization, Sullivan “was dismantling, point by point, the dominant world view that Biden held for decades and that the national security adviser grew up believing until Donald Trump won the election in November 2016.”

It’s certainly true, as Ward notes, that Sullivan and the Biden team broke with the Beltway consensus on their divisive decision to leave Afghanistan and that they paid real political costs for doing so. It’s also true that on domestic economic policy, Biden took significant cues from the Bernie Sanders–Elizabeth Warren wing of the party, in a departure from the Clinton and Obama administrations. On the other hand, in Eastern Europe, the administration has been pulled into a hellish quagmire that has put significant strain on the global economy, and by extension the American middle class, threatening Sullivan’s own political vision along with Biden’s reelection.

In the Middle East, too, the policies of the administration have damaged Biden’s popularity and thus put his domestic accomplishments at risk. The A-Team inherited and maintained a dysfunctional status quo policy that, mere months after Sullivan’s speech, would deteriorate into a calamitous war in Gaza and implicate Washington in the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians—a policy that horrifies large numbers of key Democratic constituencies while doing nothing to materially benefit most Americans. And this is to say nothing of a potential confrontation with China over the Taiwan Strait, which looms in the background of The Internationalists as it does over US foreign policy in general. Given all this, Ward’s anodyne, Sullivan-channeling conclusion—“America was ready for renewal. The world was there to remake. There were at least two more years to get it done”—reads as more than a little off.

Sullivan comes across in the book as bright, competent, and well-intentioned, even if his thinking remains far more conventional than he wants it to seem. But good intentions will get you only so far when your job is to steer an imperial superpower through the multiple crises that it spent years getting itself into. Ward likewise does a capable job of recounting how Sullivan and the Biden team have tried to navigate those crises, but The Internationalists would be more compelling if it looked deeper into the underlying contradictions that make US foreign policy so crisis-prone in the first place. One has to squint pretty hard to see what most of these overseas entanglements have to do with the well-being of the American middle class, however one defines it, and one has to squint even harder to see how any of them might be considered wins.