Take Joe Biden’s foul-mouthed disdain for Barack Obama’s 2014 response when Russian dictator Vladimir Putin seized Crimea and the eastern Donbas from Ukraine. As Woodward explains, "Obama and their team had failed to spot Putin’s brazen land grab for what it was and adequately push back on it." Biden put it more bluntly: "They fucked up … Barack never took Putin seriously," and "We did nothing. We gave Putin a license to continue," as he did in February 2022.

Furthermore, Biden’s own disastrous 2021 decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan contributed significantly to Putin’s renewed military aggression six months later. In 2021 all of Biden’s top military advisers opposed a total withdrawal, but Biden stubbornly discounted their advice, and the result was "devastating chaos" and the deaths of 13 U.S. service members at Kabul’s airport. "They had failed to anticipate contingencies and plan for worst-case scenarios," Woodward observes. As former president George W. Bush predicted at the time, "I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm," as indeed they have, while Biden vapidly insisted the U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan was an "extraordinary success."

As Woodward explains, "the fiasco of the U.S. withdrawal was a centerpiece of Putin’s disdain" for Biden’s decision-making, and within several months U.S. intelligence agencies learned that Putin was planning an intensified assault against Ukraine.