The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

in 2013, the partisanship in our politics merged with new media platforms and allowed “Benghazi” to survive the long stretches when it wasn’t dominating the news cycle.

another question emerged: Would Obama meet with Rouhani, who was also coming to New York? Overruling his political advisors, who thought the last thing Obama needed was a photo with the Iranian president, Obama told us that he’d do the meeting. I took it as a signal that he was prepared to take on a lot of political risk if it meant achieving a nuclear agreement.

It should not be politically impossible for the leaders of two nations on a collision course involving nuclear weapons and war to meet at the United Nations.

Netanyahu was unfailingly confrontational, casting himself as an Israeli Churchill standing up to the ayatollahs, except that instead of taking on Iran himself, he wanted the United States to do it.

It was there when Obama said that it was stupid for a black professor to be arrested in his own home and got criticized for days while the white police officer was turned into a victim. It was there when a white Southern member of Congress yelled “You lie!” at Obama while he addressed a joint session of Congress. It was there when a New York reality show star built an entire political brand on the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, an idea that was covered as national news for months and is still believed by a majority of Republicans. It was there in the way Obama was talked about in the right-wing media, which spent eight years insisting that he hated America, disparaging his every move, inventing scandals where there were none, attacking him for any time that he took off from work.

was there in the refusal of Republicans in Congress to work with him for eight full years, something that Obama was also blamed for no matter what he did. One time, Obama invited congressional Republicans to attend a screening of Lincoln in the White House movie theater—a Steven Spielberg film about how Abraham Lincoln worked with Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Not one of them came.

Putin must have been watching with growing concern as protests driven by corruption toppled long-standing dictators, and oil prices began to drop. His own election in 2012 was marked by large street demonstrations and a healthy opposition. Once he was restored to power, the momentum in the U.S.-Russia relationship ground to a halt.

Russia continued its blank check of support for Assad. In August of 2013, Russia granted Edward Snowden asylum in Moscow. As a former spy, Putin surely understood the gravity of someone making off with the blueprints for how a nation conducts surveillance. In response, Obama canceled a planned state visit to Moscow.

Ukraine was a tipping point. To Putin, it was an existential threat to his rule and a part of Russia.

On March 18, Crimea was annexed. We

Our response went far beyond anything that the Bush administration had done to Russia after it invaded Georgia in 2008, but Republicans still castigated Obama as weak. Some even praised Putin as a strong leader,

something of a turning point for a Republican Party that had been rooted in opposition to Russia for decades. In Obama’s view, the praise for Putin that you could see on Fox News went beyond partisanship, though that was part of it; Putin was a white man standing up for a politics rooted in patriarchy, tribe, and religion, the antiglobalist. “Some of these folks,” he said of the more right-wing elements in the United States, “have more in common with Putin than with me.”

Advocating intervention gets attention. And there’s something innately American about believing that there must be a solution. Many of the people who work in American foreign policy today were shaped by the experience of the 1990s, when the United States was ascendant. The Berlin Wall had come down. Democracy was spreading across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. Russia was on its back foot, and China had not yet risen. We really could shape events in much of the world. NATO could expand into the former Soviet Union without fear that Russia would invade one of those countries. We could bring together the whole world to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Obama

Speaking in paragraphs, he tied together Putin, the emergence of right-wing political parties in Europe, and ISIL. These are people, he said, who fundamentally reject the legitimacy of the liberal order. They are looking for another form of legitimacy—one that is counter to our notion of progress. After the meeting, I joined Obama for lunch and told him I thought Ilves did the best job I’d heard of tying these disparate threads together, explaining a theory of the forces at work in the world without having to rely on a construct that roots them all in American foreign policy. Without missing a beat, Obama said, “That’s the same dynamic as with the Tea Party.

people always look to tear down an ‘other’ when they need legitimacy—immigrants, gays, minorities, other countries.”

“You know,” he said, “I can see how the Iraq War happened.” “What do you mean?” “People are so scared right now,” he said. “It’d be easy for me as president to get on that wave and do whatever I want.”

Early in the administration, we decided to move away from the phrase “Global War on Terror,” believing that you can’t wage war against a tactic, nor could you ever defeat it. We also generally avoided using the word “Islam” in describing the enemy because terrorist groups like al Qaeda wanted to cast themselves as a religious movement. After bin Laden was killed, communications were found in his compound in which he lamented that the absence of a religious name for al Qaeda allowed the West to “claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.”

Speaker Boehner put out a press release announcing that Netanyahu would be traveling to the United States at his invitation to address a joint session of Congress. We received no advance notice of this visit from either Boehner or the Israeli government. This type of interference in American foreign policy—a foreign leader invited to lobby the U.S. Congress against the policy of a sitting president—would have been unthinkable in 2009. But by 2015, Netanyahu had become almost a de facto member of the Republican caucus, and Republicans had abandoned any norms about working with a foreign government to undermine the policies of a sitting president.

On June 16, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency. I watched as he rode down an escalator in the gold-plated lobby at Trump Tower, waving to an assembled crowd.

The next day, June 17, a young white supremacist named Dylann Roof walked into a black church in Charleston, joined a Bible study group, and then opened fire—killing nine people in a matter of minutes. At that time, Roof had killed more Americans than ISIL and added a particularly vile act of terror to the long list of mass shootings that had taken place during the Obama presidency—shootings

A label would forever be attached to me: “Ben Rhodes, who boasted of creating an echo chamber to sell the Iran deal…” The right-wing critics now had fresh meat for the balance of the Obama years and beyond. All the dots in their drawing of me had been connected—fiction writer, leaker, liar, Benghazi, Iran deal. People tell you those things pass, but they don’t. You live your life knowing that the story out there about who you are is different from the person you think you are, and want to be.

“The notion that there’s something wrong with storytelling—I mean, that’s our job. To tell a really good story about who we are.” For a moment, we all just stared out the window at the crowds. “I’m reading a good book now,” Obama said. “It reminds you, the ability to tell stories about who we are is what makes us different from animals. We’re just chimps without it.” He described how all civilization, religion, nations were rooted in stories, which could be harnessed for good or bad. Obama’s tendency to take the long view was getting even more pronounced in his last year in office. But in his own way, he was also telling me that everything was okay,

When Obama took office, no U.S. ambassador had even traveled to Hiroshima for the annual commemoration of the bomb dropping. Obama was going to break an enormous taboo in our relationship with Japan and our own history; he was going to become the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima.

Going from Hanoi to Saigon to Hiroshima on a single trip was something that I couldn’t entirely get my mind around, as was the fact that in these places, we’d been greeted by some of the largest crowds of Obama’s presidency. The whole scene put the unpleasantness of the last few weeks into some perspective, but it also fed a sense of anger at the story I was caught up in back in Washington. The notion that there is no room for complexity:

The faces of the people lining these streets told a different story. Surely what made America great to them was not the fact that we’d dropped the bomb; it was the ideal associated with who we were, the fact that we had a president who was willing to acknowledge difficult histories and show respect for different people. Our constant struggle to improve ourselves and our country while seeking guidance from the story of our founding values—that is what makes America great.

we are not meant to be done...

Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats. But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. The plane had been flying over territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists, armed by Russia, where Russian advisors were present.

A little over a week after MH-17, we got the intelligence community to declassify overhead imagery that showed Russian military equipment pouring over the Ukrainian border,

many of the arguments for Brexit were built on lies: about how much the UK paid into the European Union; about how Brexit wouldn’t hurt the British economy. Another problem was that the Brexit campaign was tapping into the same sense of nationalism and nostalgia that the Trump campaign was promoting back home: the days of Churchill, the absence of immigrants and intrusive international institutions. The arguments for staying in the EU were grounded in facts, not emotion: The EU was Britain’s largest market. The EU offered Britain a stronger voice in global affairs.

Most of the folks in these places have been watching Fox News and think I’m the Antichrist. But if you show up, shake their hand, and look them in the eye, it’s harder for them to turn you into a caricature.

effort to secure a strong, bipartisan statement against Russian meddling from the congressional leadership met resistance from the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who pointedly refused to sign on.

McConnell’s refusal was staggeringly partisan and unpatriotic in its disregard for a foreign adversary undermining our democracy. But the sad truth is that it wasn’t surprising in the context of the Republican Party of 2016,

Referring to the release of hacked documents, the statement said that the “thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process…only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

The statement went out from the DNI. Ned was prepared to respond to incoming inquiries, working from talking points that hewed closely to the text of the statement.

breaking news clip that there was a new Access Hollywood tape of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women. Our statement wouldn’t be the biggest news story of the day after all.

the acknowledgment that there might also be limits to our capacity to solve all of the world’s problems could be easily cast aside by someone like Trump, who simply asserted that he alone could do so.

“We have to remember—history doesn’t move in a straight line, it zigs and zags.”

very true

There was the letter from Comey shortly before the election, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server. There was the steady release of Podesta emails from Wikileaks through October. There was a rabid right-wing propaganda machine and a mainstream press that gorged on the story of Hillary’s emails, feeding Trump’s narrative of corruption.

At the height of Merkel’s political vulnerability over the refugee issue, there would be stories about crimes committed by Syrian refugees. A rape, for instance, caused a huge outcry in a community. For days, there were protests, political fallout. “And then?” I asked. “And then we investigate this story and learn that it never happened,” he said. “And we trace the story, and it started with a social media user with a German-sounding name, but something is not exactly right. The name is a little off. And the server, it is not German.” “It’s probably in eastern Ukraine or Moldova,” I said. “Yes, this is right,” he answered. “Russians.” I

“What were we supposed to do?” he asked. “We warned people.” “But people will say, why didn’t we do more, why didn’t you speak about it more.” “When?” he asked. “In the fall? Trump was already saying that the election was rigged.” I told him that I worried about the scale of the fake news effort, the disinformation that went beyond hacking. “And do you think,” he asked me, “that the type of people reading that stuff were going to listen to me?”