WAR
Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster
Rs.623 Pages 448

The author uses direct quotations and spare narrative with minimal context and analysis to produce a highly readable page-turner that almost reads like a thriller

Bob Woodward of Watergate fame has written an illuminating account of the Biden Presidency’s handling of wars in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, interspersed with Trump’s attacks on that Presidency. As in other recent works in his oeuvre, Woodward uses direct quotations and a spare narrative with minimal context and analysis to produce a highly readable page-turner that almost reads like a thriller, even though we are aware from newspaper headlines as to where the story leads.

Writing on high level decision-making while history is being made is never easy. Woodward has mastered the art of getting principals, including Trump in the past, to speak of what they knew and why they did what they did in near real time.

This book is thus fascinating in what it reveals of the working of the Biden Presidency on foreign and security policy. War is a blow-by-blow account of the Biden administration’s response to the Ukraine and Palestine crises.

This method of collecting material and telling the story, and his reliance solely on American sources mean that the US comes out looking good. War is unmatched as an account from a US viewpoint. This is reportage of very high quality, not quite contemporary history, but the first draft of history; the raw material that will be relied upon when contemporary history comes to be written by future historians.

The scar of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan weighed heavily on the choices Biden and his team made in their Ukraine policy, creating, at the outset, a determination not to put US troops on the ground in Ukraine. On the decision in 2021 to go public with intelligence suggesting that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine, one wonders whether it did not amount to a psychological dare that Putin could not resist?

The book also traces Trump’s shifting position on assistance to Ukraine, which seemed to be determined solely by his calculation of whether it helped his candidacy for President or not. As US public opinion shifted from overwhelming support for arming Ukraine to a more mixed picture, Trump’s position also evolved. The world now awaits how he plans to bring peace to Ukraine as he promised repeatedly during the campaign.

Woodward makes the best case possible for Biden’s Ukraine policy. For US $51 billion (as of June 2024) in arms to Ukraine, the US managed to consolidate the West, degrade Russian military and economic strength, isolate Russia, drive Russia into Chinese arms, and demonstrate the limits of China’s power and influence while driving a wedge between China and Europe. Of course, it remains to be seen whether these are gains, and how long they will endure, especially with Trump coming to power in the US.

On the debit side is alienation of the Global South from the West, particularly when the US attitude to the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine contrasted with US support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The broader point that Woodward exposes is however true, that war is primarily political, not just about winning or losing the ground war. The politics so far has, on balance, worked, cheaply, for the West.

Woodward’s account of Israel’s wars against Hamas, the Palestinians, Lebanon and Iran is equally racy, describing CIA Director Burns and Secretary of State Blinken’s multiple visits to West Asia, and Biden’s conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu in considerable detail, ascribing to them the success of having prevented the outbreak of a greater war in the region. Indeed, War leaves you wondering how much of the supposed US support for humanitarian relief to Gaza and shuttle diplomacy was mere window dressing.

At least two actions under Biden suggest a much greater US complicity and involvement in Israel’s actions. This is the first of Israel’s wars in which the US military is on the ground in Israel defending her. In addition, the US organised a coordinated multinational military coalition consisting of the US, UK, Jordan and Saudi Arabia which defended Israel against Iranian missile attacks in April 2024.

Secondly, the US has acquiesced, we do not know with what foreknowledge, in the Israeli assassination of leaders of Iran-supported terrorist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah, and in the wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians on a scale unseen since WW II. That Israel could take out Iranian air defences around Isfahan, thereby making significant Iranian nuclear assets vulnerable, without US help seems improbable.

Overall, one is struck by how diminished the US role now is compared to previous rounds of bloodletting in West Asia. The US role in this telling is reactive, and agency is with Hamas, Israel and Iran. The contrast becomes stark when you compare Blinken’s limited success with Kissinger and Nixon’s setting the terms of peace and dictating actions to Israel, Egypt, and others in the wake of the 1974 Yom Kippur war. In January 1974, Kissinger helped negotiate the first Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement in eight days, and in May he arranged a Syrian-Israeli disengagement after a month of intense negotiations.

India and China figure only parenthetically in this account, and mostly as part of Trump’s challenge to Biden. All in all, War is an essential and enjoyable read for anyone interested in contemporary world affairs, US foreign policy, and the two conflicts that defined the Biden Presidency. As for history’s verdict, that will have to wait.

Shivshankar Menon
(The Book Review)