Peter Bergen’s All the Presidents’ Wars is a sweeping and deeply critical history of America’s twenty-five-year struggle with terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq, ISIS, and the broader Middle Eastern conflicts that followed September 11, 2001. Bergen’s central argument is devastatingly simple: the United States repeatedly misunderstood the nature of the conflicts it had entered, and successive presidents compounded one another’s mistakes.
The book follows four presidencies—George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—and asks a fundamental question: What did these presidents know, when did they know it, and why did they make the decisions they did? Bergen is unusually qualified to ask it. He famously interviewed Osama bin Laden for CNN in 1997 and has spent decades reporting on terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq, and American national-security policy. His research for this book includes interviews with more than 500 people.
The result is not simply a history of the wars. It is a history of presidential judgment—and of repeated failures of judgment.
The deepest idea in the book is that America repeatedly fought the wrong war.
After September 11, the immediate problem was al-Qaeda and its leadership. But the Bush administration soon transformed that relatively focused counterterrorism problem into something vastly larger: the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the attempt to reconstruct Afghanistan, the doctrine of preventive war, and eventually the idea of a worldwide “war on terror.”
Bergen's most powerful criticism is that Washington repeatedly confused military activity with strategic success.
The invasion of Afghanistan initially achieved its principal objective: the Taliban government was removed and al-Qaeda lost its sanctuary. But instead of maintaining a focused campaign against al-Qaeda, Washington diverted enormous attention and resources to Iraq. The Iraq invasion, Bergen argues, was one of the great strategic blunders of modern American history. It destabilized the Middle East, contributed to the growth of jihadist organizations, and ultimately helped create the circumstances in which ISIS could flourish.
The same pattern recurred in Afghanistan. American presidents repeatedly announced goals that exceeded what military power could realistically accomplish. The United States could defeat armies and kill terrorist leaders; it was much less capable of creating stable political institutions in societies it poorly understood.
Bergen's recurring question is therefore not merely, “Did we win the battle?” but “What kind of war were we actually fighting?”
That distinction gives the book much of its intellectual power.
Bergen is harshest toward George W. Bush, particularly over Iraq.
His account portrays the invasion of Iraq as an extraordinary failure of strategic reasoning. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, and the administration's effort to connect Iraq to the larger terrorist threat led the United States into a war that had not been necessary to defeat al-Qaeda.
Even worse, the administration failed to prepare adequately for what would happen after Saddam fell.
The dissolution of the Iraqi army and the policy of de-Baathification created precisely the sort of political and military vacuum in which an insurgency could flourish. Bergen follows the consequences from Iraq's insurgency to al-Qaeda in Iraq and eventually to ISIS.
His most important criticism of Bush might be summarized as failure to think about the day after.
Winning a war and winning the peace are entirely different accomplishments.
Bergen is considerably more sympathetic to Barack Obama, but he does not spare him.
Obama inherited two wars he had not started and was much more cautious about large-scale military intervention. His administration became increasingly effective at using intelligence, special operations, drones, and local partners.
Yet Bergen argues that Obama never completely escaped the strategic problems inherited from Bush.
The intervention in Libya is a particularly important example. Muammar Qaddafi was overthrown, but the United States and its allies failed to develop an adequate political settlement for what came afterward.
Afghanistan presented a similar problem. Obama increased American forces but simultaneously announced a timetable for withdrawal, thereby undermining the possibility of a decisive long-term political settlement.
The lesson is not that Obama was another Bush. He plainly wasn't. Rather, Bergen shows how difficult it was for any president to escape the consequences of decisions made earlier.
Bergen's treatment of Donald Trump is also highly critical.
Trump entered office promising to end America's “forever wars.” Yet Bergen argues that Trump did not replace those wars with a coherent alternative strategy. Instead, decisions were frequently driven by political instinct, personal preference, and concern with appearances.
The Afghanistan policy eventually produced the Doha agreement with the Taliban, which Bergen regards as an extraordinarily generous arrangement for the Taliban and a surrender of important American leverage.
One of the book's strengths is that Bergen does not treat Trump as an isolated aberration. He places Trump's decisions in the longer chain of American mistakes. The implication is more disturbing than a simple partisan indictment: the United States had been making serious strategic errors long before Trump arrived.
Bergen's account of Joe Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan is similarly critical.
Biden inherited an extraordinarily difficult situation. The American presence had become unpopular, expensive, and politically unsustainable. But Bergen argues that Biden nevertheless ignored repeated warnings about how rapidly the Afghan government and military could collapse once American forces departed.
The disastrous evacuation from Kabul therefore becomes, in Bergen's telling, another example of a president wanting an outcome—American withdrawal—without adequately confronting the consequences of achieving it.
Again, the book's larger theme is not simply that Biden made a mistake. It is that presidents repeatedly attempted to impose their preferred narrative on complicated political realities.
One of Bergen's greatest virtues is his willingness to criticize presidents of both parties.
This is not a partisan book masquerading as history.
Bush is severely criticized for Iraq. Obama is criticized for Libya, Afghanistan, and the extensive use of drones. Trump is criticized for his erratic foreign policy and the Afghanistan negotiations. Biden is criticized for the manner in which he ended the Afghanistan war.
At the same time, Bergen acknowledges genuine accomplishments.
The United States did not experience another attack on the scale of September 11. Osama bin Laden was eventually killed. Al-Qaeda's original sanctuary was destroyed. ISIS lost its territorial caliphate. American intelligence and military organizations became much more effective at detecting and disrupting terrorist plots.
That balance is important.
Bergen is not arguing that everything America did after 9/11 was a failure. He is arguing that the successes were purchased at an extraordinarily high cost and were accompanied by enormous strategic mistakes.
The book's greatest weakness is also partly a consequence of its ambition.
Bergen covers an enormous amount of territory in relatively few pages. The reader moves rapidly from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to ISIS to Syria and back again. Readers who already know this history will sometimes wish for deeper examination of particular decisions.
The book is also much stronger at identifying bad decisions than at developing a comprehensive alternative strategy. It is easier to demonstrate that Iraq was a mistake than to explain precisely what America should have done instead over the following twenty-five years.
There is another limitation. The presidential focus can sometimes make American foreign policy appear more presidential than it really is. Congress, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, diplomats, allies, journalists, public opinion, and foreign governments all shaped these wars. Bergen discusses many of these forces, but the organizing structure inevitably keeps the presidents at center stage.
Finally, readers may sometimes feel that Bergen's accumulation of errors becomes almost overwhelming. The book can produce the impression that American national-security policy consisted of one blunder following another. Yet governments sometimes make good decisions precisely because they learn from earlier failures. Bergen acknowledges this, but the darker narrative occasionally overwhelms the more complicated one.
The book's most important lesson is not about Afghanistan or Iraq.
It is about judgment.
Military power is not the same thing as political power. Destroying an enemy's army does not necessarily produce a stable government. Killing terrorist leaders does not eliminate the political and social conditions that produce terrorism. And announcing an American withdrawal does not mean that the political problem has disappeared.
Bergen repeatedly returns to the basic strategic requirement that leaders must first understand what kind of conflict they have entered.
That sounds obvious. The history Bergen tells demonstrates how frequently it has been ignored.
Almost anyone interested in American foreign policy since September 11 should read All the Presidents' Wars.
It is particularly valuable for:
Readers who lived through the post-9/11 period and want to understand the chain of decisions more clearly.
Students of American history and foreign policy, who will find a useful overview of the period.
Veterans and military readers, especially those interested in how political decisions shaped military operations.
Readers interested in the presidency, because the book is ultimately a study in presidential decision-making.
Anyone trying to understand today's Middle East, because many current problems cannot be understood without knowing the decisions made after 2001.
It is also an excellent book for readers who think they already know the story. Bergen's great contribution is not that he reveals an entirely unknown history. It is that he connects the decisions: Afghanistan led to Iraq; Iraq helped produce an insurgency; the insurgency helped produce ISIS; the instability of the region shaped later American interventions; and Afghanistan ultimately ended with the Taliban back in power.
All the Presidents' Wars is an important, sobering, and highly readable account of one of the most consequential periods in recent American history.
Its ultimate judgment is bleak. The United States possessed extraordinary military power but repeatedly demonstrated that military power alone could not solve the political problems it confronted. Presidents of very different personalities and ideologies inherited mistakes from their predecessors and, despite learning some lessons, often repeated the underlying error: they failed to understand the political nature of the wars they were fighting.
The book's greatest achievement is therefore not its indictment of Bush, Obama, Trump, or Biden individually. It is its indictment of a larger American habit—the belief that enormous resources, superior weapons, and determined leadership can compensate for inadequate understanding.
The United States won important battles after September 11. It killed terrorist leaders, dismantled organizations, prevented attacks, and developed much more sophisticated counterterrorism capabilities.
But Bergen leaves the reader with the uncomfortable question of whether the country understood what victory actually meant.
That makes All the Presidents' Wars more than a history of the war on terror. It is a cautionary study of how great powers can possess overwhelming strength and still make catastrophically bad judgments.
Rating: 4½ out of 5 stars.