Michael Hirsh, a prominent columnist for Foreign Policy has just published an instructive review in that journal (partial paywall) of Bob Woodward’s forceful new book “War”. The review is entitled: “What a New Book’s Explosive Revelations Tell Us About Biden, Trump, and Putin”. Curiously, the Hirsh book review rounds out to its Biden-elevating, JFK-comparison without referring to John Mearsheimer’s directly relevant seminal article “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault”.
Certain disclosures by the widely admired author of “War” – related to former President Trump’s interactions with Russia’s President Putin – are highlighted in the review. These stress how Mr Trump spoke regularly with Mr Putin after (reluctantly) stepping down from the Presidency in 2021 noting how:
“The Book resurrects unsettling questions about Trump’s relationship to Putin and the largely unresolved mystery of the former president’s business and financial ties to Russia.”
The review also devotes significant validating space to explain how President Biden “may have stopped a nuclear war even as Trump was secretly talking to Russia’s president” concluding that:
“It was also a moment when Biden – to a degree not fully disclosed previously – may have proved his mettle as a world leader, one that was reminiscent of nothing so much as President John F Kennedy’s stand during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.”
Biden’s profane castigation of former President Obama ‘s “relatively mild response” to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 is recorded, which Biden argues was “a terrible mistake,” leading to the nuclear dilemma that he faced in 2022.
A pivotal Foreign Affairs article (partial paywall) on the development of the Ukraine crisis by Professor John Mearsheimer, entitled: “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault” was published in 2014. Apart from spelling out, in cogent detail, how the result of the US working deviously to upend Ukrainian political outcomes Washington disliked was bad for the West, Mearsheimer also highlights how then Vice-President Biden played a significant role in aggravating this American-incubated calamity, ten-years ago.
Curiously, the Hirsh book review rounds out to its Biden-elevating, JFK-comparison without referring to Mearsheimer’s directly relevant, seminal article.
Richard Cullen is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He was previously a Professor in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.