“The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru”-the title of the Times piece-sounded like a pretty cool gig. However, at least to some of us on the left, Rhodes didn’t come off so bad. In Foreign Policy, for example, Thomas Ricks wrote a piece headlined “A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president’s foreign policy guru.” 8

“The aftermath of the Samuels piece was basically a two-year information campaign against me,” Rhodes told me in a phone interview, adding: “And yeah, I do think Samuels intended that.” Rhodes regretted his cooperation, and most in the Beltway agreed that Samuels did not make him look good. Samuels portrayed the youthful aide, with a mixture of admiration and contempt, as a Holden Caulfield–esque prep-school brat and a dark mastermind manipulating the press into appeasing Tehran and allowing Syrians to be slaughtered. Perhaps the most infamous example was when he granted extensive access to the journalist David Samuels, an editor at Tablet and an outspoken critic of the Iran deal, who then wrote a profile of Rhodes for The New York Times Magazine in 2016. The criticism directed toward him was in part the result of Rhodes’s own tendency to put himself forward as the avatar of Obama’s foreign policy. It was also Rhodes who was primarily responsible for the messaging debacle that allowed the attacks on the US embassy in Benghazi to be turned into a right-wing conspiracy theory Rhodes who was called upon to defend drone strikes to the public Rhodes who championed the pro-democracy protesters of the Arab Spring and then watched helplessly as the popularly elected president of Egypt was overthrown in a military coup backed by US allies and Rhodes who was the frequent implied target of derisive, typically anonymous media leaks chastising the Obama administration for an incoherent and naive approach to foreign policy. Rhodes was also instrumental in selling Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran to Congress, led the secret negotiations to restore US-Cuba relations, and played a significant role in normalizing relations with Burma. When Obama opted not to launch air strikes against the Assad regime in Syria, Rhodes was his most vocal defender against an enraged chorus of Beltway hacks. When Obama, in Cairo, announced a new era of engagement with the Muslim world, it was Rhodes who drafted the speech. His unique position as speechwriter and adviser allowed him to function as a kind of translator between the president, the foreign-policy establishment, the media, and the public at home and abroad. What long-suppressed progressive foreign-policy goals would you try to advance? What imperial wars would you try to prevent or end? Where might you succeed and where might you fail, and how would it weigh on you? 4Īnyone who has followed international news over the past decade is familiar with Rhodes’s work. If so, Rhodes’s story, recounted in his new memoir, The World as It Is, will lead you to consider what you might do if you suddenly had the opportunity to help remake the world every day for eight years. If you have a liberal-arts education and have spent any time in DC, you’re familiar with this guy, and maybe you even identify with him. Before that, Rhodes’s foreign-policy experience had been limited to writing speeches and reports for former longtime congressman Lee Hamilton, the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank before that, Rhodes had published one piece of fiction and had just completed an MFA in creative writing at New York University. The last young idealist to gain so much influence so quickly over international affairs was Ben Rhodes, who joined Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign as a speechwriter at age 29 and closely advised the 44th president throughout his two terms in office, serving as deputy national-security adviser and playing a key role in the crafting of Obama’s foreign policy. But, nonetheless, they will have to wield it. They may question their right as Americans to wield such power or seek to mitigate its effects.

The next Democratic administration will also likely include a cohort of millennials who have never served in government before-and whatever their feelings about the American empire, they will suddenly be charged with managing and shaping it, with surprisingly few checks on their ability to do so. This will require the left to formulate not only a domestic agenda, around which there is an emerging progressive consensus, but a foreign policy as well. The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White HouseĪnd yet, if that president is a Democrat, she or he will have pledged to enact a substantial part of the left’s policy demands.

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