George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, almost single-handedly decided to invade Iraq. It was possibly the worst foreign-policy decision ever made by a president. The consequences dominated the Bush administration and still haunt us today.

In Bush, Jean Edward Smith demonstrates that it was not Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Condoleezza Rice but President Bush himself who took personal control of foreign policy. Bush drew on his deep religious conviction that important foreign-policy decisions were simply a matter of good versus evil. Domestically, he overreacted to 9/11 and endangered Americans' civil liberties. Smith explains that it wasn't until the financial crisis of 2008 that Bush finally accepted expert advice, something that "the Decider", as Bush called himself, had previously been unwilling to do. As a result he authorized decisions that saved the economy from possible collapse, even though some of those decisions violated Bush's own political philosophy.