Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power
by David E. Sanger
Why You'll Love This
The president who campaigned against secret wars quietly became one of their most aggressive architects — and Sanger got inside the room where it happened.
- Great if you want: a detailed, reported account of covert U.S. foreign policy in action
- The experience: dense and methodical — rewards readers who want depth over drama
- The writing: Sanger structures complex geopolitics like a seasoned beat reporter: clear, sourced, precise
- Skip if: you want narrative storytelling — this reads closer to long-form journalism
About This Book
In the years after 9/11, the United States rewrote the rules of war in ways the public was rarely allowed to see — drone strikes, cyberweapons, covert operations conducted in the shadows of official policy. David E. Sanger pulls back that curtain to reveal how Barack Obama, a president who came to office skeptical of unchecked executive power, quietly built one of the most aggressive covert warfare programs in American history. From the secret campaign to sabotage Iran's nuclear program to the fraught calculus behind every Predator strike over Pakistan, the book forces a reckoning with the distance between a president's public rhetoric and private decisions — and what that gap means for democracy, allies, and enemies alike.
Sanger brings the precision of a veteran national security correspondent to every page, and the result reads less like traditional political journalism and more like a carefully assembled intelligence briefing — one with the narrative tension of a thriller. His access is remarkable, his sourcing deep, and his willingness to complicate the portrait of a leader he neither lionizes nor dismisses gives the book unusual intellectual honesty. Readers who want to understand not just what happened but why, and at what cost, will find this a genuinely illuminating account.
