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

by Ben Rhodes

Lippert and I walked into the conference room, and I took a seat near the back end of the table farthest from Obama. From the moment I saw his speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, I had wanted him to run for president. He had been against the war when nearly everyone else went along with it. He used language that sounded authentic and moral at a time when our politics was anything but. There was also something else, something intangible. The events of my twenties felt historic, but the people involved did not. I wanted a hero—someone who could make sense of what was happening around me and in some way redeem it.

The Obama campaign needed more than foreign policy help—they needed a speechwriter, too, and asked me to move out to Chicago at the beginning of August to join a three-person speechwriting team while also being, essentially, the guy who knew something about foreign policy in the Chicago office.

One of the things that had drawn me to Obama was a speech he’d given at an antiwar rally in 2002, before the war in Iraq, when the people who knew better were saying it was bad politics and bad policy to oppose the war. “I know,” he said, “that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”

The effort to delegitimize Obama would get its first messenger when Sarah Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate a few weeks later. I learned of the announcement when I woke up the morning after Obama delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Who is that? I thought, staring at the television screen. But as much as she became a punch line, Palin’s ascendance broke a seal on a Pandora’s box: The innuendo and conspiracy theories that existed in forwarded emails and fringe right-wing websites now had a mainstream voice, and for the next eight years the trend would only grow. We had shown that Obama could fill the role of leader of the free world, and his success had only made a whole slice of the country that much angrier.

an unguided missile. Whereas Gates was stealthy in his bureaucratic maneuvering, Biden would go on long discourses about why it was foolish to think we could do anything more than kill terrorists in Afghanistan, and he solicited military advice outside the chain of command that prepared requests for more troops that would work their way up to Gates and, ultimately, Obama. He would pepper his comments with anecdotes from his long career in the Senate, repeatedly declaring that experience had taught him that “all foreign policy is an extension of personal relationships.” He learned the names of all the grandsons of the Iraqi Kurdish leader, Masoud Barzani. He detested Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, and thought the U.S. military was jamming Obama.

I kept reading anecdotes in the press about how much Gates hated leaks, when nearly all of them emanated from his department. I knew that Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Petraeus shared an independent communications advisor who seemed to spend much of the day in casual conversations, meals, and drinks with reporters—something that I didn’t have the time to do.

As the review ground on, the public pressure on Obama shifted from making the case for more troops to something more primal, a criticism that would persist for seven years: He was, Washington concluded, dithering. Nothing bothered Obama more than one column by David Brooks in The New York Times. Brooks, a temperamentally moderate guy, announced that he had spoken to the nation’s “smartest military experts,” people “who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan.” These people, according to Brooks, “are not worried about his policy choices. Their first concerns are more fundamental.

Years later, Gates—the most important advisor in the process—would say that Obama’s strategy was right, but he was not sufficiently committed to the mission (a convenient way for Gates to argue that he was right, and any problems in Afghanistan were Obama’s). But that was wrong. Obama was committed to taking out al Qaeda; that was just not as ambitious a mission as what the military had in mind.

at home, the Republican Party had embraced a strategy of virulent and brazen opposition that led healthy majorities of its own voters to believe that Obama was born in Kenya. Mitch McConnell, the Republicans’ leader in the Senate, abandoned any pretense of cooperation, saying that his top priority was to make Obama a one-term president. The decorum that usually shielded national security from politics was tossed aside. The hard truth was that Republicans had been rewarded for this behavior by winning the House of Representatives, aided in part by the constant echo chamber of Fox News and the flood of unregulated money released into American politics by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

Abroad, the forces of tribalism and nationalism were building, like tremors before an earthquake. As autocrats were threatened in the Arab world, they responded with escalating violence and sectarianism. Globalization had pushed up against people’s sense of their own unique identity. In Russia, Vladimir Putin was planning his own return to the presidency, watching warily as popular movements upended Mubarak and Gaddafi. In Europe, the undertow of the financial crisis had spread an economic malaise that was beginning to eat away at public confidence in the European Union. Conflict, a changing climate, and the spread of smartphones and smuggling networks were increasing the flow of refugees from South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Obama. Together, they had improved relations between the United States and Russia from the low point of 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia. We’d completed the New START treaty, reached an agreement to resupply U.S. troops in Afghanistan through Russia, and cooperated to enforce stronger sanctions on Iran. We assumed that Vladimir Putin, who was then serving as prime minister, supported this orientation, since he was widely seen as the real power in Moscow. But recently, it seemed that we had gone too far for Putin in pulling Medvedev toward an American position on the UN Security Council resolution on Libya. Russia was historically aligned with Libya and opposed to U.S.-led efforts to impose regime change on other countries, and Putin had publicly criticized Medvedev over Libya. Russia was heading into a presidential election, and it still was not clear whether Putin would run to reclaim the office that he had handed off to Medvedev.

After the opening talking points had been delivered and the conversation became more casual, Medvedev surprised us when he said, Gaddafi has to go. He is messianic. It was a pattern that we’d seen—Medvedev breaking somewhat from the Russian hard line and saying what he seemed to truly believe. You got the sense that he was further out in front of Putin than we knew. Later in the meeting, when Obama explained to him that he couldn’t just demand that the WTO grant membership to Russia because he wasn’t all-powerful, Medvedev agreed and came back to Gaddafi. No one is all-powerful, he said, except the man with the little green book. It was a reference to the bizarre book of political propaganda that Gaddafi had published in 1975. Among other things, it instructed people on how to breast-feed, dress, and design sporting venues. Medvedev, it seemed, had a hard time feigning support for the more extreme thugs aligned with Russian interests.

That summer, a sense of crisis was escalating in Syria. It began with young people gathering in the streets, scrawling graffiti on the walls: THE PEOPLE WANT THE REGIME TO FALL. The forty-five-year-old dictator, Bashar al-Assad, responded with mass arrests and torture. We deployed the now familiar tools: public condemnation and targeted sanctions. But this was not Egypt—Syria was an adversary that could tune out the United States and count on the support of Iran and Russia, which were determined to prop Assad up. Over the summer, in response to attacks from the Syrian military, the protests turned violent, and members of the government and military started to defect. In July, the Free Syrian Army was formed to resist the Assad regime.

He was tweaking me—knowing that I was disappointed at where things had ended up, but also knowing that I had no better ideas. He was unable to push Israel to stop its settlement of Palestinian land, and despite Netanyahu’s intransigence, he would always side with Israel when push came to shove. It felt as though the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was something we had to manage, not solve—keep the two sides talking; persuade the Palestinians not to give up on the prospect of a state altogether; block the United Nations from piling on Israel. Reaction, not action.

I stood in my bedroom processing the words as waves of anger washed over me. For a moment, I couldn’t even understand which statement Romney meant; then I realized that he was referring to the statement that the embassy in Cairo put out earlier in the day, before anything had happened in Benghazi. I had grown accustomed to ugly Republican attacks, but this felt different. Some threshold had been crossed. They were slamming us in the crudest possible way in the middle of a crisis. They were attacking career Foreign Service people who had issued a statement while their embassy was under siege. They were ignoring the fact that the video was offensive. They were making it harder for us to say things that could help protect American lives abroad. They would say anything if it could cast Obama as somehow anti-American. It wasn’t just politics, it was sickening in its cynicism. We were now in some new, uglier reality. I could never have guessed just how ugly it would become: that for the next four years, “Benghazi” would be transformed from the name of a city in Libya where American intervention had saved tens of thousands of lives into something entirely different: a word that represented the sentiment in that statement of Romney’s, an expression of an ugly conspiracy theory to delegitimize Obama and Clinton, destroy any concern for facts that didn’t fit the theory, and dehumanize a small group of people, including me. Benghazi.

the schizophrenia in American foreign policy that we were simultaneously debating whether to designate the Syrian opposition as terrorists and whether to provide military support to the Syrian opposition. And it spoke to the hubris in American foreign policy to think that we could engineer the Syrian opposition whom we barely knew—and who were fighting for their lives—through terrorist designations and some modest military support.

“Given the regime’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, we will continue to make it clear to Assad and those around him that the world is watching, and that they will be held accountable by the international community and the United States should they make the tragic mistake of using those weapons.” At first, it seemed that the warnings worked. Weeks and months went by with no sign of chemical attacks. In August 2012, Obama was asked about what could lead him to use military force in Syria: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime,” he said, “that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

After deriding Obama’s response to Syria as weak, Republicans were now making the same warnings about action that we had used to publicly defend our inaction in the past. In doing so, they were signaling that Obama would be held accountable if these scenarios were realized, while seeking impossible guarantees that they wouldn’t be. More ominously, a message was being delivered: Acting without going to Congress would be unconstitutional.

I was stunned. The Russians had almost certainly intercepted the phone call. That was hardly surprising—in these jobs, you have to assume that any number of governments could be listening in if you’re on a nonsecure phone. What was new was the act of releasing the intercepted call and doing it so brazenly, on social media—the Russian government had even tweeted out a link to the YouTube account. Doing so violated the unspoken understanding among major powers—we collect intelligence on one another, but we use it privately, for our own purposes. A Rubicon had been crossed—the Russians no longer stopped at hacking information; now, triggered by the threat of Ukraine sliding out of their sphere of influence, they were willing to hack information and put it into the public domain. “I don’t know what we can say about this,” I said. “What have we said so far?” “State hasn’t commented.” We ended up noting that the Russians were the ones who had published the video and calling it “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”

Putin, a man who runs Russia as a personal fiefdom, a source of his own wealth and prestige. In retrospect, 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. The first time Obama met with Putin after he became president again, Putin showed up forty-five minutes late. Putin rebuffed further discussions on arms control and missile defense. Russia continued its blank check of support for Assad. In August of 2013, Russia granted Edward Snowden asylum in Moscow.

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.”

Obama occasionally pointed out that the post–Cold War moment was always going to be transitory. The rest of the world will accede to American leadership, but not dominance. I remember a snippet from a column around 9/11: America bestrides the world like a colossus. Did we? It was a story we told ourselves. Shock and awe. Regime change. Freedom on the march. A trillion dollars later, we couldn’t keep the electricity running in Baghdad. The Iraq War disturbed other countries—including U.S. allies—in its illogic and destruction, and accelerated a realignment of power and influence that was further advanced by the global financial crisis. By the time Obama took office, a global correction had already taken place. Russia was resisting American influence. China was throwing its weight around. Europeans were untangling a crisis in the Eurozone. Obama didn’t want to disengage from the world; he wanted to engage more. By limiting our military involvement in the Middle East, we’d be in a better position to husband our own resources and assert ourselves in more places, on more issues. To rebuild our economy at home. To help shape the future of the

Obama complained about the recent negative coverage of his foreign policy, airing grievances that I’d heard him express privately—about how the press ignored the steady work of American leadership and legitimized every demand that he do more to escalate conflicts. He went on a long tangent about how the failures of American foreign policy were ones of overreach, complaining about the lack of accountability for Iraq War supporters who were still the tribunes of conventional wisdom. Finally, he reached the end of his lecture. “What’s the Obama doctrine?” he asked aloud. The silence was charged, as we’d always avoided that label. He answered his own question: “Don’t do stupid shit.” There were some chuckles. Then, to be sure that he got his point across, he asked the press to repeat after him: “Don’t do stupid shit.”

John Boehner announced a new select committee to investigate Benghazi, and my email was cited as a leading justification. There was a video that went along with the announcement. It resembled a slick but cheap movie trailer, with each Republican member of the committee announced like a professional wrestler. “Trey Gowdy…Mike Pompeo…” Republicans sent out fundraising appeals citing the new committee. It was clear that the goal was to extend this charade into the presidential election in order to damage Hillary. It was the most politically motivated rollout imaginable, all founded on a theory that we had been the ones to politicize the deaths of four Americans. I felt I was living in an alternate reality that was in some way insane, unable to recognize hypocrisy or to separate facts from politics. The world around me seemed to have come unmoored. The truth had become irrelevant.

A few days later, the Russian Foreign Ministry held a press conference in Moscow and put forward several different, and contradictory, theories for how the plane was shot down. A Ukrainian combat aircraft did it. Ukrainian surface-to-air missiles were in the area. The missile that shot down the plane was actually in territory controlled by the Ukrainian government. These theories were repeated by Russia’s major state-run news outlets—RT and Sputnik—and flooded social media feeds in Russia and Europe. It didn’t matter much that the shifting Russian explanations could be debunked. The investigation was going to take years; with their media capabilities and willingness to lie, the Russians could fill that space with all manner of false narratives.

Those of us who had to fight it out in the information space with the Russians on a daily basis started pressing our government to move faster in debunking Russian narratives and building our capabilities to counter disinformation. 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, but it was still framed by objective international media outlets as a “he said, she said” story, and Russia just issued more denials in response.

Obama’s popularity kept rising in the country and around the world, but the criticism being leveled at our foreign policy at home had reached a fever pitch that reinforced Trump’s dystopian vision of an America in free fall. Of course, the world was faced with a challenging moment. Everything we had tried had failed to stop the killing in Syria. Refugees were pouring into Europe. Russia was lashing out, from Ukraine to Syria. But Obama was the most respected leader in the world, and 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.