The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump - Hardcover

Ward, Alexander

 
9780593539071: The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593539079 ISBN 13: 9780593539071
Verlag: Portfolio, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

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 readers 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.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexander Ward is a national security reporter at Politico. Previously, Ward was the White House and national security reporter at Vox. He was an associate director on the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He has won multiple prestigious awards for his reporting and was a part of a team that was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Relearning America

November 2016—January 2021

The location was picked for what it represented. The Javits Center, a large building along the Hudson River in New York City, was wall-to-wall glass—including the ceiling. The metaphor was obvious to the thousands waiting to see Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016: they would see her shatter the highest obstacle in American politics when she was elected forty-fifth president of the United States that night.


But only hearts were breaking inside the pearl of Hell’s Kitchen that night. As Donald Trump won Ohio, and Florida, and Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Michigan, the mood turned as cool as the blustery weather outside. The once jubilant atmosphere—pregnant with promise—had soured. Sobs rang out within the center’s cavernous halls. Not until 2:00 a.m. did a member of the Clinton campaign, chairman John Podesta, come out to send the remaining hopefuls home.

“You’ve been here a long time and it’s been a long night and it’s been a long campaign,” Podesta said, his words beamed across the country and around the world. “We can wait a little longer!”

Jake Sullivan, too, would have to wait. He had worked for Clinton for years, first at the State Department and now as one of her campaign’s top policy aides. He was ready to stride back into Washington after leaving the Obama administration two years earlier, playing coy with friends and the media about whether he was plotting a return to politics. He was, and he was the odds-on favorite to be Clinton’s national security adviser— which would make him one of the most powerful people in the federal government.

What was supposed to be a dream night for him—a crowning achievement for a man who was days from turning forty—turned into a nightmare. In a Peninsula hotel room two and a half miles from the somber crowd, he watched the TV screens as the American map filled with red, not blue. When the election was called in Trump’s favor, Sullivan stood by Clinton’s side as she phoned her opponent to concede. Hearing the words “Congratulations, Mr. President-Elect,” he felt like a truck had run over him.

The former collegiate debater stayed up all night helping to craft Clinton’s concession speech, seeking an explanation for the political earthquake he had just witnessed. He grasped for anything, everything, to make sense of the moment.

Many forces combined into a perfect storm, he reasoned with himself. There was a backlash to President Barack Obama’s time in office, a demographically changing America, economic pain throughout the country, and a general animosity toward elites, such as Clinton. The inordinate focus on her emails by the media didn’t help, elevating to a national scandal what Democrats argued was at most an ill-advised administrative decision.

But in New York City, Trump’s hometown and decades-long playground, Sullivan realized that the foreign policy message from Clinton’s opponent had played a hand in his victory too. It was by no means the most vital element of Trump’s ascendancy to power, but his overall argument— that U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II hadn’t worked out so well for the “forgotten” men and women of America— had clearly hit a nerve.

And when Trump critiqued the elites responsible for forgetting those millions of people, he was unwittingly criticizing Sullivan. The Minnesota boy had allowed the wealthy, glitz-loving real estate developer to beat him at populist politics, and defeat had not been a common event in his charmed and meteoritic rise.

At Southwest High School in Minneapolis, which he graduated from in 1994, Sullivan was named “Most Likely to Succeed.” Teachers fawned over his ability to hand in flawlessly written assignments, and he led the student council while winning debate tournaments and quiz bowls. “I thought the idea of grappling with ideas and advocating for positions based on those ideas was an exciting prospect,” he told MinnPost, an online news organization, in 2016. “I didn’t think I would do it anywhere else.”

His parents, Dan Sullivan, a University of Minnesota professor, and Jean Sullivan, a guidance counselor at Jake’s high school, helped their son rise to the top of the local academic scene. “They made a point of showing us that being on top of what’s happening in the world is important to being a good citizen,” Jake Sullivan also told the local paper. “By the time I was 10 or 13, I’d learned the world capitals.” At dinners, he and his four siblings would spin a globe while racing to the bottom of a pasta bowl. When he wasn’t training his brain, he was handling pucks with friends on frozen lakes.

Sullivan left home for Yale University, where he studied political science and international relations and came in third in a national debate championship. He kept amassing knowledge, going to Yale Law School and then Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, attaining there the top seed in the world debating championship.

Despite all his success, and the rarefied air he breathed in the hallowed halls of New Haven and rural England, Sullivan never forgot his roots. “I am a dyed-in-the-wool product of the Minneapolis public school system,” he once told Minnesota’s Star Tribune.

Sullivan even came back to Minnesota for a time following a clerkship under Justice Stephen Breyer at the Supreme Court. He practiced law at Faegre & Benson, kicking back when not in the courtroom by playing on a curling team in St. Paul. But as much as Sullivan loved his home, he yearned to test himself in the cauldron of Washington, D.C.

He joined Democrat Amy Klobuchar’s Senate campaign, impressing the boss and his colleagues with a strong work ethic and an uncanny ability to quote Billy Joel lyrics and Saved by the Bell lines. When Klobuchar won, Sullivan joined her in the nation’s capital in 2007 as a policy adviser.

It didn’t take long—just over a year—before Hillary Clinton hired him as an adviser during her first bid for the presidency. Sullivan, barely five years out of law school, helped the former First Lady prepare for the debates—and when she was knocked out in the primaries, he brought his skills to Barack Obama’s successful campaign.

But Clinton didn’t let Sullivan leave her orbit for too long, luring him to the State Department as the agency’s youngest-ever policy planning director, where he would shape diplomatic strategy and develop long-term plans for U.S. foreign policy.

Even at thirty-four, Sullivan had a manner that impressed Clinton. He was wise beyond his years, she and her team believed, and he had a knack for asking the right questions at the right time. In State’s Policy Planning office, the department’s think tank, Sullivan could use his skills to prepare the new secretary and the U.S. foreign policy apparatus for what the world had in store for them.

His most impactful role, though, was kept secret for months. Clinton dispatched her little-watched aide to Oman to start talks with Iranian officials over a potential nuclear deal. He’d go on to join five other meetings alongside his colleagues. That someone so young, and so new, was trusted with that responsibility showed that he was the next big thing, not only for the administration but for the Democratic Party. “He’s essentially a once-in-a-generation talent,” Philippe Reines, a longtime Clinton staffer, said at the time.

Clinton was also Sullivan’s...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593539079
ISBN 13 
9780593539071
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse@penguinrandomhouse.com

1745 Broadway
New York
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Penguin Random House Ireland
https://eu-contact.penguin.ie

Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street
Dublin
D02 YH68
Irland