The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

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  ON A CAMPAIGN, EVERYTHING you do is focused on one objective: getting elected. Every utterance is part of one argument: Vote for this person. The actual presidency floats somewhere beyond Election Day—a blank slate to be filled in by the power of your candidate’s ideals, the rightness of his proposals. My first foreign trip drove home the extent to which the state of the world would shape the Obama presidency as much as our own ideas did.

  A foreign trip begins in a series of black vans that take you the ten miles from the entrance of the West Wing to Andrews Air Force Base and drop you off at the staircase to Air Force One. Your name is checked off a list held by a uniformed airman as you board the plane, and then you have a while to get settled before the president arrives by helicopter. The plane is both unlike any other you will ever be on and not as nice as you think. It’s nearly thirty years old, and the interior has the feeling of 1980s luxury: large light brown leather seats; wood paneling; beige carpeting. Bowls of fruit and M&M’s line the shelves that run along the side of the plane. The president’s office is up front, a spare room with a desk and a couch that runs along the wall; adjacent to it are a bedroom and a shower. A senior staff cabin holds four people in large chairs that swivel around, with a phone at each seat so that you can place calls that require you to push a button to be heard while you talk. A long hallway takes you past a conference room where Obama would spend so much of his time over the next eight years, sitting at a table playing spades with a handful of aides while ESPN played on a muted television. Past the conference room, there is a larger staff cabin with a couple of four-tops and a workspace where two enormous old computers are bolted to a table. When I turned one on for the first time, it coughed and moaned and took a while to boot; when it finally did come to, the emergency remarks that George W. Bush delivered when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 were still on the desktop—a reminder that we are all temporary employees and have to respond to whatever cards the world deals us. Beyond that, there’s a guest cabin, seating for the Secret Service, and then—in the very back—a cluster of seats for the traveling White House press pool, a select group of print and television reporters who are with a president wherever he goes.

  After taking my seat, a voice piped in over a speaker with updates: “The president is fifteen minutes out”; “The president is five minutes out”; “The president has arrived”; “The president is on board the aircraft.” Not “President Obama.” In the machinery that moves the president around, he is described as more of an object than a human being. As I sat in my large beige chair reading printed drafts of the many sets of remarks he’d give over the course of the next several days, I felt myself sinking into the comfortable embrace of a machinery that would feed me, fly me, carry my bags, and move me around cities so that I could perform my function for “the president.”

  Our first stop was in London for the G20—a gathering of the leaders of the world’s largest economies—who were meeting to coordinate a response to the financial crisis. The awkward fact for us is that we were asking other countries to spend money to stimulate the global economy in order to fix a crisis that the United States created.

  In London, we managed to secure commitments that tallied up to over $1 trillion, which would bring comfort to the markets while putting enough people back to work to stimulate demand. But the American pressure grated on the Europeans, touching off a multiyear debate about whether Europe should go along with the kind of spending we were pursuing. Obama knew that he had leaned hard on other countries to follow our lead, so he expressed some humility in his closing press conference when he was asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism. “I believe,” he said, “in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” It was a quote that would be used for the next eight years to cast Obama as less than sufficiently adamant in his belief in America’s primacy among nations.

  At our next stop—a NATO summit in Strasbourg, France—Obama found himself asking countries to increase their troop commitments in Afghanistan. Almost none of the leaders wanted to do this—the Afghan war had become increasingly unpopular. It seemed that we were squandering his popularity to address the circumstances we’d inherited instead of being able to invest it in the new initiatives we envisioned. Obama echoed this frustration when I saw him the first night in France. “I’m spending all of my political capital,” he said, “just to keep things going.”

  In Prague, we aimed to break out of simply reacting to our inheritance, with a speech that called for a new arms control agreement with Russia; an effort to secure nuclear materials around the world; and diplomacy with Iran to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The words spoken by a U.S. president, I knew, can prompt action in a way that a candidate’s words never could. As with the speech in Berlin, Obama spent little time on the draft, given all of the other things he had to do, so I found myself alone in a hotel room the night before the speech, staring at the words on the computer screen and wondering if we were setting the bar too high: “We will seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

  In the middle of the night, a ringing phone woke me up and I was asked to come to an urgent meeting in the traveling National Security office. The North Koreans, who had tested a nuclear weapon a couple of years earlier, had just tested a ballistic missile. Temporary NSC offices on the road are unpleasant places. Blue tarp is put up along the walls of a hotel room to prevent video surveillance; a constant mind-scrambling mix of pop songs plays to block efforts to eavesdrop. Obama came into the middle of the cramped room, surrounded by a handful of aides, and said, “Being president isn’t as glamorous as they make it sound.”

  He sat listening to a series of advisors brief him about this missile test. In a few hours he would speak to tens of thousands of Czechs. As I sat there listening, I realized that our speeches had many different audiences now, among them the leadership of North Korea. “I’m going to get a little sleep,” Obama told me. “You better add something on this.”

  I had barely slept myself for the last several days. I sat at my computer inserting a strongly worded warning to the North Koreans about the isolation they’d face for continued nuclear and missile tests. It was sobering to think that our decision to schedule a speech on nuclear weapons could have set in motion a series of decisions in Pyongyang that led to a missile being fired into the sea. I felt worn down by days spent in traveling staff offices, offstage from the action. When we got back to the plane, I fell into a deep sleep, only to be awoken by Obama shaking me. For a moment I had no idea where I was, until I came to the realization that the president of the United States was standing over me. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “Ben Rhodes!” Everyone broke into a round of applause, as the speech had created the most affirmative moment of the trip. Obama rarely gave positive feedback, but—like a coach who knows how to get the most out of his players—he chose the right moments.

  He brought me up to his office at the front of the plane. Turkey was up next, and he’d be speaking to the parliament there. I could see circles under his eyes and a heaviness in his face—he had been working a lot harder than I had. “I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to put into this one,” he said.

  “It’s in good shape,” I replied. “There’s just this question of how far to lean in on the genocide.” During the campaign, we had promised to recognize the fact of the 1915 Armenian genocide, and Samantha Power had been emailing me steadily to argue for some reference to it in the speech. All of the other advisors, less invested in the purity of our campaign positions and more focused on the need for Turkish cooperation, wanted to avoid it altogether.

  “I don’t think I should stand there and do that in their parliament,” Obama said.

  “You’ll have another chance when you make a statement on the anniversary
in April,” I said.

  There was also the matter of Turkey’s treatment of minority religious and ethnic groups. Obama thought for a moment. “Let’s get into it,” he said, “by talking about how we’ve been able to overcome similar issues. It’s not like we’re without sin. I mean, what happened to the Indians? Or black folks? Let’s make the point that democracy is the way we deal with those problems, all right?”

  Obama went to play cards and I walked back to my seat and typed up some language that set up the point Obama wanted to make, running through a list of areas where Turkey needed to improve its human rights record and ending with “I say this as the president of a country that not very long ago made it hard for somebody who looks like me to vote, much less be president of the United States. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries.” The references to America’s own historical sins—to people like Obama and me—reflected a positive, patriotic, and progressive view of American history; the capacity for self-correction is what makes us exceptional.

  This first, long journey ended with a visit to Iraq. As we landed we got word that sandstorms were going to make it impossible for our group to helicopter into the Green Zone. Instead, a heavily armored motorcade drove us from the tarmac to Camp Victory—a large sandstone palace close to the airport that was once one of Saddam Hussein’s preferred stomping grounds and now served as the headquarters for U.S. forces in Iraq. While Obama spoke with Iraq’s prime minister, I wandered around the palace, which still had on display gifts that Saddam had received from admirers like Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi. More than a thousand troops cheered when Obama said it was time to turn things over to the Iraqis and bring them home. I stood there watching, thinking that Obama would never have become president without the mistake America had made in Iraq, nor would I have ended up working for a president.

  When we got back on the plane, the crew served a dinner of steak and potatoes. Sealed in the white noise of an aircraft that already felt like a second home, I felt that I had proved myself, that I belonged, that what we were doing was not only interesting but important. In addition to working to stabilize the global economy, increase commitments to the Afghan war, and put forward an agenda to roll back the threat of nuclear weapons, Obama had told a different story about what America was and how we would engage other nations and peoples. But on-the-fly decisions we had made about the words Obama spoke inflamed the spreading attacks and innuendo, from Fox News to the halls of Congress: Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, he’s not patriotic, he’s not like Us, he might even be Muslim. I had become the coauthor of “Obama’s Apology Tour.”

  CHAPTER 5

  CAIRO

  What is American foreign policy?

  Day in and day out, it’s a trillion-dollar annual enterprise that plows forward like an ocean liner, shaping the lives of people in its wake whether they know it or not. The embassy in New Delhi tries to help U.S. businesses get into the Indian market. The USAID mission in Nairobi meets with the Kenyan Ministry of Health to help the fight against HIV/AIDS. A scholarship student from Indonesia boards a plane bound for an American university. The U.S. military conducts a joint exercise with the South Koreans to deter North Korea. Our intelligence community shares information about a terrorist plot with Europeans. A Special Operator leaves a Baghdad trailer at dawn to capture or kill a terrorist. A taxpayer-funded F-16 fighter aircraft is delivered to the Egyptian military.

  These actions take place on their own momentum—rooted in a vast complex of deployments, alliances, international agreements, and budget decisions that could have been made a month, a year, or decades ago. This reality contributes to occasional schizophrenia, because our foreign policy represents a particular view of U.S. interests at the time that particular decisions were made. And so our Treasury Department enforces an embargo on trade with Cuba that was established in the 1960s even as USAID tries to deliver phones and printers to dissidents there that would be more readily available without an embargo. Our troops fight a war on terrorism in Afghanistan in the early 2000s against jihadists who in the 1980s were armed by the United States and praised as frontline fighters in the war on Communism. Our diplomats try to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement while our foreign assistance finances the Israeli military that enforces the occupation of an increasing amount of Palestinian land.

  We sustain these investments because, on balance, we believe the return is worth it even if we occasionally suffer losses, embarrassments, and moral compromises. Our network of military alliances has enabled the growth of prosperous democracies in Europe and Asia and averted another global war between major powers since the end of World War II, even as it antagonizes countries like Russia and China and causes them to align against us. Our foreign assistance and trade agreements have facilitated rapid improvements in how people live in many parts of the world, including the United States, even as globalization has also eliminated jobs and entire American industries and encroached on people’s sense of tribe, faith, and nation. Our military and intelligence services make it harder for dictators to acquire nuclear weapons or terrorist networks to maintain safe havens, even as our actions sometimes fuel the grievances that dictators and terrorists thrive upon. So for any president, the conduct of foreign policy represents a strange mix of managing the circumstances you’ve inherited, responding to the crises that take place on your watch, and being opportunistic about where you want to launch the new initiatives that will leave an imprint on the world.

  Obama was unique in that the mere fact of his own identity was going to leave an imprint on people abroad. In addition to being the American president, he was a symbol for the aspirations of billions of people—particularly ethnic minorities in the developed world and young people in the developing world. It’s why we carved out time for him to engage populations who wouldn’t normally meet an American president—playing soccer in a favela in Brazil, meeting Dalits in India, or visiting a refugee center in Malaysia. It’s why we established programs for him to engage young people, particularly in the two regions most associated with his background, Africa and Southeast Asia. And it’s one reason why he focused so much on the words that he spoke abroad. “We’re telling a story,” he told me early that first year, “about who we are.”

  Over the years, much of my authority within the White House was tied to the perception that Obama and I had some kind of “mind meld”—that I could anticipate what he would want to say or do on a particular issue, or that he trusted me to speak for him. There were, of course, enormous differences in our backgrounds, and there was a yawning gulf in our responsibilities. But I did come to see some similarities in our personalities. We both have large groups of friends but maintain a sense of privacy that can lead people to see us as aloof. We’re both trying to prove something to our fathers and were nurtured and encouraged by our mothers. We both think of ourselves as outsiders, even when we were in the White House. We’re both stubborn—a trait that allows us to take risks but can tip into arrogance. We both act as if we don’t care what other people think about us, but we do. Yet these similarities form only a small part of a broader picture—a reality in which I was a junior partner who worked hard to understand what my boss wanted to say and do in the world.

  Barack Obama came to office with a different worldview from those of his predecessors and the type of (largely white male) people who serve in elevated national security positions—one that encompasses the complexities of U.S. foreign policy. He was born in Hawaii, a former U.S. colony that hosts America’s Pacific fleet, nurtures a diverse citizenry, and serves as a bridge between the Americanized Pacific and East Asia. His grandfather served in Europe during World War II, and his great-uncle helped liberate the concentration camp at Buchenwald. He lived in Indonesia as a child, just years after a U.S.-supported coup initiated bloodletting that killed hundreds of thousands of people—the kind of event that barely registers in
the United States but shapes the psyche of a foreign country. His mother worked to help women make a living from weaving clothes or baskets beyond the borders of the developed world. His father came of age during Kenya’s liberation from British imperialism and was educated at some of America’s finest universities; when he returned to Nairobi, he ended up marginalized as a member of the minority Luo tribe, a technocrat whose Western ideas clashed with a culture of corruption and patronage—ultimately broken, unemployed, and alcoholic, he died in a car crash. And, of course, Obama became centered in his own identity as an African American, joining a continuum of those who had suffered oppression but managed to achieve change through nonviolent mobilization.

  So just about every aspect of American power and its role in people’s lives since World War II lurks somewhere in Obama’s background—our capacity to keep the peace abroad and to disrupt it; our capacity to transform individual lives through both our generosity and our callousness; the allure of our democratic values and our imperfection in realizing them. Yet the strangeness of this background to many Americans left plenty of space for people to misunderstand or misrepresent how it impacted his view of American foreign policy.

  To some on the right, it was a sign that he must nurture a reflexive opposition to American power—he must be a Kenyan anticolonialist, a fellow traveler of the likes of Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. 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. Yes, Obama believes in the liberation of peoples, but he is at his core an institutionalist, someone who believes progress is more sustainable if it is husbanded by laws, institutions, and—if need be—force.