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

by Ben Rhodes

But the experience of Obama’s own family showed that liberation without mature institutions is its own form of oppression, as corruption and tribalism can overwhelm the individual.

Obama wanted to show his government how he went about making decisions, so we needed to understand what was happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan, define our interests, test what resources were necessary, weigh those needs against all of our other priorities at home and around the world, and then make a decision.

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Part of me wanted to ignore this side of my job—I wanted to read intelligence reports, go to policy meetings, write speeches that I hoped the world understood. But that wasn’t an option.

I became increasingly conscious of a divide between those issues where we were reacting to events and those where we were acting to shape them. This divide had always existed—the tension between what a president wants to get done and what the world forces him to respond to—but