Morning Glory: Biden and his disastrous national security choices

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Don’t let the title fool you. "The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump," a new book by Alexander Ward, a national security reporter at Politico, may lead you to think "puff job." It’s not, even though the title fairly screams at a browser in one of the Beltway’s bookstores or passing by the kiosks of Reagan and Dulles airports that President Joe Biden and his two key aides, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are real-life Jedi Knights come together to rebuild not just one but many alliances from the ruins left behind by President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor Ambassador Robert O’Brien.

Whomever signed off on the vast access given Ward must surely have counted on at least a little bit of love in return for the sort of welcome usually reserved for Bob Woodward at 1600 when presidents and their inner circles want "their side of the story" out there. This play rarely works out. It certainly didn’t here. For the picture that emerges of Team Biden is of would-be NBA All Stars of national security who have, through three years, steadily, relentlessly, almost purposefully proved themselves to be the Washington Generals of the post World War II era. Sharpshooters from beyond the line in their own mind, they turn out to be bricklayers of the most cringe-inducing sort.

Biden, et al. have confronted five crucial moments in his slightly more than first two years as captain of our national security ship: Three of them became major and deadly-beyond-imagining-in-2020 disasters, plus two smaller dramas that seemed like good ideas with good results at the time.

Biden wanted