Failing to Learn from Catastrophe

There is famously no accountability for foreign policy failure in Washington.

Matt Duss reviews Bob Woodward’s War, an account of the Biden administration’s handling of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza:

War is an elegy for this elite coalition, far less valuable as a record of what went down than of how the 2024 Washington foreign policy establishment wants to see itself. In its total absence of interest in any real reflection on what the Biden administration could have gotten wrong, the book serves instead as a compelling brief on why Trump was reelected.

There is famously no accountability for foreign policy failure in Washington. One reason for this is that the officials responsible for those failures are the ones that get to explain away those failures with the help of eager stenographers and sympathetic chroniclers. Biden administration officials were responsible for enabling a genocide, protecting the genocidal Israeli government, and fueling Israel’s regional aggression, but in their telling they were doing everything they could to make the region stable and peaceful. Insiders might be in a position to tell us what really happened, but most of the time they are looking to settle scores with rivals and make themselves look good.