The World As It Is Quotes

“Progress doesn’t move in a straight line.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

“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. The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“People always say never again,” he said. “But they never want to do anything.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

“The lesson? “Don’t do stupid shit,”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

“My own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family—that is the story that we all must tell.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“In a way, he was just like the rest of us—trying out different theories for what had happened, trying to figure out what it meant, what it said about us as a country. But of course he was different. He’d seen the country, and the world, from a different perch. And the one thing he kept coming back to was the expanse of time, the fact that we were just “a blip” in human history. In giving advice on how to deal with Trump, he offered a simple maxim: “Find some high ground, and hunker down.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

“I talked to Llewellyn and got a thick briefing packet with the key arguments on both sides. The problem, for those who wanted to stay in the EU, was that 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. Even the name of the campaign—Remain—sounded like a concession that life wasn’t going to be all that you hoped it would be.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“Toward the end of the meeting, Xi asked about Trump. Again, Obama suggested that the Chinese wait and see what the new administration decided to do in office, but he noted that the president-elect had tapped into real concerns among Americans about the fairness of our economic relationship with China. Xi is a big man who moves slowly and deliberately, as if he wants people to notice his every motion. Sitting across the table from Obama, he pushed aside the binder of talking points that usually shape the words of a Chinese leader. We prefer to have a good relationship with the United States, he said, folding his hands in front of him. That is good for the world. But every action will have a reaction. And if an immature leader throws the world into chaos, then the world will know whom to blame.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

“Obama was the most powerful man in the world, but that didn’t mean he could control the forces at play in the Middle East. There was no Nelson Mandela who could lead a country to absolution for its sins and ours. Extremist forces were exploiting the Arab Spring. Reactionary forces—with deep reservoirs of political support in the United States—were intent on clinging to power. Bashar al-Assad was going to fight to the death, backed by his Russian and Iranian sponsors. Factions were going to fight it out in the streets of Libya. The Saudis and Emiratis were going to stamp out political dissent in Egypt before it could come to their kingdoms. A Likud prime minister was going to mouth words about peace while building settlements that made peace impossible. Meanwhile, innocent people were going to suffer, some of them were going to be killed, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. Obama had reached that conclusion before I had. History had opened up a doorway in 2011 that, by the middle of 2013, had been slammed shut. There would be more war, more conflict, and more suffering, until—someday—old men would make peace.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“I stood backstage watching the words roll on the teleprompter. In just two months, the world had turned upside down. We’d seen a regime fall in Tunisia, broken from a longtime U.S. ally in Egypt, and intervened in Libya. History, it seemed, was turning in the direction of young people in the streets, and we had placed the United States of America on their side. Where this drama would turn next was uncertain—protests were already rattling a monarch in Bahrain, a corrupt leader in Yemen, a strongman in Syria.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“It was far easier for me to see how the war in Syria was in part an unintended consequence of other American wars, no matter how well-meaning they might have been. The toppling of “Saddam Hussein had strengthened Iran, provoked Putin, opened up a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict that now raged in Iraq and Syria, and led to an insurgency that had given birth to ISIL. The toppling of Muammar Gaddafi had made plain to dictators that you either cling to power or end up dead in a sewer. Syria looked more and more like a moral morass—a place where our inaction was a tragedy, and our intervention would only compound the tragedy. Obama kept probing for options that could make a positive difference, finding none.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“In a meeting, the Estonian president, Toomas Ilves, insisted to Obama that we had to take Putin at his word if he said he would take Kiev. Ilves had an academic manner, and he described methodically how Russia was using fake news and disinformation to turn Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority against Europe. 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. I know those forces because my presidency has bumped up against them.” He paused. “It’s obviously manifest in different ways, but people always look to tear down an ‘other’ when they need legitimacy—immigrants, gays, minorities, other countries.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

“Racism was a constant presence and absence in the Obama White House. We didn’t talk about it much. We didn’t need to—it was always there, everywhere, like white noise. 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. It was there in the social media messages I got that called him a Kenyan monkey, a boy, a Muslim. And it 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. Obama didn’t talk about it much. Every now and then, he’d show flashes of dark humor in practicing the answer he could give on a particular topic. What do you think it will take for these protests to stop? “Cops need to stop shooting unarmed black folks.” Why do you think you have failed to bring the country together? “Because my being president appears to have literally driven some white people insane.” Do you think some of the opposition you face is about race? “Yes! Of course! Next question.” But he was guarded in public. When he was asked if racism informed the strident opposition to his presidency, he’d carefully ascribe it to other factors.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

“It foreshadowed a problem we’d confront going forward—we were winning without the people who were the arbiters of opinion in Washington, people who were going to withhold a measure of praise so long as they weren’t occupying the constellation of positions around Obama.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

“To understand what ended up happening in the 2016 presidential election, you have to understand this: When protests toppled the Ukrainian government, Putin interpreted that as the United States coming into Russia, akin to an act of war; when he launched his counterattack—annexing Crimea, creeping into eastern Ukraine—he weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie, using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus. Eventually, the Russians would come into America, as they believed we’d gone into Ukraine. They took advantage of the fact that we were worn down by decades of political polarization and the balkanization of our media. America’s antibodies to the sickness of Russian disinformation were weak, if they were there at all.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“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: Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, not a nationalist. We could not have dropped the atomic bomb on something other than a large city. There are no Iranian moderates. It was as if simply recognizing complexities and context was tantamount to pulling a thread that could cause some American narrative to unravel. 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.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“As we headed into the final year of the Obama presidency, we inhabited two distinct worlds. In one, we’d achieved a global climate change agreement, the Iran deal was being implemented, the economy was growing, twenty million people had signed up for healthcare, and Obama’s approval rating was rising. In another, Republican presidential candidates were painting a picture of a dystopian nightmare of crime, rampant immigration, ISIL terrorism, and wage stagnation in America. Because the two realities were so far removed from each other, and because Obama wasn’t running, it was hard to do anything but put our heads down and focus on what we could get done.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“Our case was straightforward: The deal prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Iranians had to remove two-thirds of their centrifuges, couldn’t use their more advanced centrifuges, and had to get rid of 98 percent of their stockpile. They had to convert a heavy water reactor so it couldn’t produce plutonium.
Inspectors would have 24/7 access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the ability to access Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain—from uranium mines and mills to centrifuge manufacturing and storage facilities. To cheat, Iran wouldn’t just need a nuclear facility like Natanz or Fordow—they’d have to run an entirely secret supply chain. If they cheated, sanctions would snap back into place.
Then there were the consequences of not having the deal. Without it, Iran could quickly advance its nuclear program to the point of having enough material for a bomb. That would leave us with a choice between bombing their facilities and acquiescing to a nuclear-armed Iran. Holding out for a better deal was not going to work. It was diplomacy or war.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“He said we had to find a way to reach Muslims who “didn’t think it was such a great thing to have a McDonald’s down the street and American pop culture on their television.” All people, he said, want to maintain their identity in the modern world. “We should acknowledge that not everything we see is positive—there’s a mindless violence, a crude sexuality, a lack of reverence for life, a glorification of materialism.” That said, he wanted to make several statements of belief in human progress—that countries succeed when they are tolerant of different religious beliefs; that governments that give voice to their people and respect the rule of law are more stable and satisfying; and that countries where women are empowered are more successful. “When I was a kid in Indonesia,” he said, “I remember seeing girls swimming outside all the time. No one covered their hair. That was before the Saudis started building madrassas.” This was a theme he’d come back to again and again.
He told a story about how his mother once worked in Pakistan. She was riding on an elevator. Her hair was uncovered and her ankles were showing. Yet even though she was older, “this guy in the elevator with her couldn’t stand to be in that type of space with a woman who was uncovered. By the time the door opened he was sweating.” He paused for effect. “When men are that repressed, they do some crazy shit.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“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 Asia Pacific and manage China’s rise. To open up places like Cuba and expand American influence in Africa and Latin America. To mobilize the world to deal with truly existential threats such as climate change, which is almost never discussed in debates about American national security.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“I came to realize that this was about more than not offering up what some of his opponents craved—the picture of the angry black man, or the lectures on race that fuel a sense of grievance among white voters. Obama also didn’t want to offer up gauzy words to make well-meaning white people feel better. The fact that he was a black president wasn’t going to bring life back to an unarmed black kid who was shot, or alter structural inequities in housing, education, and incarceration in our states and cities. It wasn’t going to change the investment of powerful interests in a system that sought to deny voting rights, or to cast people on food stamps working minimum wage jobs as “takers,” incapable of making it on their own. The “last person who ever thought that Barack Obama’s election was going to bring racial reconciliation and some “end of race” in America was Barack Obama. That was a white person’s concept imposed upon his campaign. I know because I was once one of them, taking delight in writing words about American progress, concluding in the applause line “And that is why I can stand before you as president of the United States.” But he couldn’t offer up absolution for America’s racial sins, or transform American society in four or eight years.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“I watched the speech backstage on the teleprompter. Obama paused for a moment, and I saw the text freeze. “I’m going off script here for a second,” he said, “but before I came here I met with a group of young Palestinians from the age of fifteen to twenty-two. And talking to them, they weren’t that different from my daughters. They weren’t that different from your daughters or sons. I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those kids, they’d say, I want these kids to succeed; I want them to prosper. I want them to have opportunities just like my kids do. I believe that’s what Israeli parents would want for these kids if they had a chance to listen to them and talk to them. I believe that.” His comments were met with rolling applause, and when he dived back into the prepared text it occurred to me that this tribute—this imploring of Israelis to see Palestinians as human beings no different from themselves—might be the most he would be able to do to keep a promise to those Palestinian kids.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“One after another, they offered an unvarnished view of the chaos engulfing the region, and Syria in particular. The trends were not good—opposition movements were becoming more extremist, Iran was doubling down on its support for Assad in Syria, Gulf countries were funding groups in Syria and Libya that were more militant than the United States wanted. Most of them argued that the United States was failing to shape events, though I noticed that the most senior correspondent lacked any hope that events could be shaped. Obama listened intently, asking questions as much as he offered his own opinions. When the session was over, I followed him into the Oval Office, where I quickly realized that the session had had the opposite of the effect I intended—where I heard a call to action, Obama had heard a cautionary tale. How could the United States fix a part of the world that was that broken, and that decades of U.S. foreign policy had helped to break?”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“One common criticism emerged from Congress and the media: Obama had not formally addressed the nation since authorizing military action. So, on March 28, two weeks after the Situation Room meeting that had set everything in motion, he gave a speech at the National Defense University in Washington. The television networks said they wouldn’t carry it in prime time, so it was scheduled for the second-tier window of 7:30 P.M., an apt metaphor for the Libyan operation—cable, not network; evening, not prime time; kinetic military operation, not war. The speech was on a Monday, and I spent a weekend writing it. Obama was defensive. Everything had gone as planned, and yet the public and political response kept shifting—from demanding action to second-guessing it, from saying he was dithering to saying he wasn’t doing enough. Even while he outlined the reasons for action in Libya, he stepped back to discuss the question that would continue to define his foreign policy: the choice of when to use military force. Unlike other wartime addresses, he went out of his way to stress the limits of what we were trying to achieve in Libya “—saving lives and giving Libyans a chance to determine their future, not installing a new regime or building a democracy. He said that we would use force “swiftly, decisively, and unilaterally” to defend the United States, but he emphasized that when confronted with other international crises, we should proceed with caution and not act alone.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“Many of the issues that motivated Obama—growing the American economy, combating climate change, forging new rules to govern trade and commerce among nations—depended upon cooperation in Asia. While the Middle East represented the past—its religious wars, American-backed autocrats, Iranian revolutionaries, terrorist threats—Asia seemed to represent the future. It helped that the people and governments in Asia wanted to deepen relations with “the United States, in part because of their concerns about the largest emerging power in their neighborhood: China”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world. From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail and try to stanch a Communist insurgency—more than was dropped on all of Germany and Japan during World War II. There were 580,000 bombing missions, which averages out to one every eight minutes for nine years. Sometimes, U.S. planes returning to Thailand from missions over Vietnam indiscriminately dropped their remaining bombs on Laos. More than 270 million cluster munitions—“bombies”—were used, and 80 million of them failed to detonate. In the four decades since the end of the war, only 1 percent have been cleared. More than fifty thousand people have been killed or injured in UXO accidents; over the last decade, nearly half of those casualties have been children.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“What does it mean to invade a country, topple its leader, face a raging insurgency, open a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict across a region, spend trillions of dollars, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and permanently alter hundreds of thousands of American lives? Something in the character of post-9/11 America seemed unable, or unwilling, to process the scale of the catastrophic decision, and the spillover effects it had—an emboldened Iran, embattled Gulf states, a Syrian dictator who didn’t want to be next, a Russian “strongman who resented American dominance, a terrorist organization that would turn itself into an Islamic State, and all the individual human beings caught in between.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“The days are long, the weeks are long, the months are long, but the years are short—one day you look up and realize you’re on the precipice of the final year of a presidential term. You see the world in a different way, as if you could open a window and catch a glimpse of anything that is touched by the reach of the United States government. You can be a part of actions that shape these events—your voice in a meeting, your intervention on a budget line item, your role in crafting the words that a president speaks. You are also a bystander to crises that elude intervention, buffeted by the constant and contradictory demands made on an American president—by other American politicians; by the media; by advocacy organizations; by people around the world. You never know what is the one meeting, the one decision, the one word or phrase that will matter.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“you can’t change things unless you change the people making the decisions.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

“the capacity for self-correction is what makes us exceptional.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House