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

by Ben Rhodes

In late March, we set out for emergency summits on Ukraine. Working hand in glove with Merkel, Obama kept Europe together behind sanctions and secured a multi-billion-dollar IMF package that ended up saving the Ukrainian economy. Instead of sending weapons to Ukraine, he focused on deploying troops and military assets to the NATO members that bordered Russia. He started talking more and more about how he wanted to hand things off to the next president. “I don’t want to leave the next president in a position where there’s not some kind of trip wires in the Baltics and those NATO front line states,” he told us. “Putin needs to understand that even if we won’t go to war in Ukraine, we will if it’s NATO.”