Ben Rhodes on Hypocrisy, Hubris, and Humiliation

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made (Ben Rhodes, 2021)

Archival audio:

How authoritarianism has spread since the coronavirus pandemic began (PBS NewsHour, August 4, 2020)
News Wrap: Putin condemns supporting jailed opposition leader (PBS NewsHour, January 25, 2021)
SPECIAL REPORT: Inside China’s surveillance state (Sky News Australia, August 25, 2020)
How NBC Covered Tiananmen Square in 1989 | NBC News Now (NBC News, June 4, 2019)
President George H.W. Bush holds morning news conference and comments on demonstrations in Tiananmen (AP Archive, July 31, 2015)
China Joins WTO - 2001 | Today in History | 10 Nov 17 (AP Archive, November 10, 2017)
USA: BILL CLINTON ON TRADE AGREEMENT WITH CHINA (AP Archive, July 28, 2015)
China’s Race to the Top: A History of Economic Growth (Foreign Policy Association, February 5, 2018)
Human Rights Watch issues scathing report on China | DW News (DW News, January 15, 2020)
On first overseas trip, Biden to assure European allies and meet Putin (France 24 English, January 9, 2021)
Biden Aims To Show Superiority of U.S. Democracy on Trip to Europe (MSNBC, June 8, 2021)

Transcript:

June 22, 2021

BEN RHODES: The world is very different than the ‘90s or the ‘00s or even the Obama years in terms of the receptivity to American leadership. Biden cannot assume “America is back” means we're back to playing the same role we used to. Not only is the world changed, but the world is also not really signed onto that.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Today, I'm very glad to be joined by Ben Rhodes. You all know Ben as President Obama's deputy national security adviser and foreign policy speechwriter. He's also the co-host of the popular podcast Pod Save the World. What you might not know is Ben has spent the past several years trying to make sense of the ascent of authoritarianism and right-wing nationalism across the globe, including to some extent here in the United States.

How could Barack Obama's presidency, in which Ben invested so much of his energy and aspiration, lead to a successor who challenged so many democratic norms? How, after the Cold War victory and consolidation of international influence, did America find itself losing its very identity as an exemplary, if imperfect, democracy? What he discovered might surprise you.

Now, Ben, before we dig into your excellent new book, reflect for a minute on this term you coined so many years ago—“the Blob.” You might have christened this term “the Blob” unwittingly, but it's become a kind of common critique of the foreign policy establishment. Has the term been overused, or do you think it continues to be a useful characterization of status quo thinking in Washington?

RHODES: Whenever something like that takes off, then it clearly touched a nerve. And it wouldn't touch a nerve if people didn't think there was something to it. What I've been fascinated by is that I was speaking about a very specific thing, which is the fact that there's a groupthink in Washington, particularly around issues of the Middle East and the use of military force—this was in the context of the Iran debate. What I was really criticizing is the momentum of post-9/11 foreign policy that has gotten us into a whole bunch of overreach, particularly in the Middle East, particularly through military interventions. In people's interrogation of this term, they've kind of repurposed it. The people who felt like they were in the Blob were like, “Well, actually, no. He was criticizing people who believe in the liberal international order.”

And I'm like, “No, I'm not. I totally believe in the liberal international order.” Some people redefine what the Blob is to make it sound better—like, anybody who is for America playing a role in the world and the liberal order is in the Blob. Well, no. I mean, the Blob is a very specific thing, which is the excesses and overreach of American foreign policy in the post-9/11 era. I do think, though, it created—in a strange way and out of my hands, because this phrase has traveled—a permission structure to question some core assumptions. As someone who's on the progressive end of the spectrum on things, although not on everything, I think it helped contribute to a sense of progressives who’ve been shut out of certain foreign policy debates to be like, “Hey, wait a second. What? Why? We may not know the secret handshake here, but why can't we have an opinion on everything from Iran to Israel/Palestine to climate change?” And I do think you see a healthier debate in the at least in the Democratic Party, in part because there's been a reckoning that, again, I don't take credit for. You coin a phrase, and then it spawns a million articles and debates.

HANNAH: Yeah, and speaking of questioning core assumptions, you yourself question some core assumptions about American foreign policy and about American hegemony and what it's led to in your new book published earlier this month—After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made. You dig into how America's international conduct sort of contributes to this rise of authoritarianism we're seeing play out across the globe.

RHODES: What I kind of came away with as I was interrogating the way in which authoritarianism has taken root in these different places—China, Russia, Hungary—each represents a different strain of the kind of megatrend of nationalist authoritarianism in the world.

Interlude featuring archival audio

RHODES: What I confronted that was more critical of America was the fact that we had not truly prioritized democracy in this thirty-year period, for all the rhetoric about democracy. I look at three areas where I'm critical. One is post-Cold War capitalism, the kind of unbridled—I'd say, unregulated—flavor of capitalism that came crashing down in the financial crisis and that really collapsed confidence that the American-led model was necessarily the best bet. That opened the door to a return to nationalist appeals that at least offer people a sense of identity.

The second is the post 9/11 hyper-focus on national security as something that could be repurposed by autocrats like Putin and GE to justify their own versions of the war on terror, which had to do with consolidating power at home. But also that turned into an “us versus them” xenophobia in this country that I think leads to some extent to Trump.

And lastly I look at technology—the explosion of American-made social media that we all thought was going to be empowering to people. And it was, but obviously it also became perfect tools of surveillance and disinformation. What I had to reckon with as someone who used to work in national security is that if you were looking at America these last three decades, would you think we prioritize democracy as much as we prioritize profit, national security, and technological advancement? I don't think so. I don't think we can honestly say that.

HANNAH: What you're saying is that the overemphasis on free markets, the militaristic kind of nationalism, and rapid technological advances in the post-Cold War era all sort of coalesced to fuel these problems we're now facing—authoritarianism gaining ground in some pretty unexpected places—and that these countries are in some ways taking cues from America as they backslide,

RHODES: I describe being in China and being in Shanghai and having a strange experience of being woken up in my hotel and being warned by Chinese officials to not have Obama meet with the Dalai Lama even though Obama is no longer president and being creeped out by that because we hadn't announced meeting with the Dalai Lama. So, clearly someone is in somebody's email. Walking out and looking at the Shanghai skyline, it looks like the future. There are futuristic skyscrapers and lights everywhere, and people are taking selfies. And I just remember looking at that and thinking, “You know, while there's something very unsettling about the surveillance I had just experienced, if you look at Shanghai, it's like the logical next step from America.” If you take American capitalism, national security mania, and technological advancement and strip out all the democracy, what you get is what China has built. And look, can anyone say that any president since the Cold War—just because that's where I start the clock on this book—has really prioritized democracy with China as much as making money? Absolutely not.

HANNAH: So, Ben, are you are you saying America is culpable here? That we ourselves created the China problem?

RHODES: It's not our creation, but I think we contributed to it in the sense that, again, I do think we can look back and say, “There are all kinds of forks in the road post-Tiananmen.” I go back in this book, and I go to that moment. We basically totally let them off the hook for that one, and negotiating their entry into things like the WTO…

Interlude featuring archival audio

RHODES: …and Bush obviously embracing them in the war on terror ally prison, and Obama—as I talk about—having a prioritization of the global economy and climate change. Again, all those things make good sense in the moment you're in, but I actually think that was probably more apparent. I mean, a lot of people in our field, myself included, had a moment of reconsideration in the post-Xi Jinping years of, “Well, maybe open markets are not going to bring improved political circumstances or cooperation. They may lead to a more totalitarian China at home and a more assertive China abroad.” I think in talking to people for this book, what is hard to ignore is that those signs were evident in the entire post-Tiananmen era. Bao Pu—who's a brilliant guy, who runs a publishing company in Hong Kong, who has been a thorn in the side of revealing the darker aspects of the CCP—walked me through how obvious the turn towards nationalism was by the Communist Party after Tiananmen. They were like, “We need a new form of legitimacy, and legitimacy can no longer be communism. It's going to have to be some blend of capitalism that delivers prosperity and really intense nationalism that was built in opposition to the West and to Japan.” And that was what was being increasingly propagated and taught in schools. That was all happening. And he made an interesting point that maybe the U.S. underestimated China because we just didn't think another nation, maybe a non-white nation, could surpass us. It's a provocative point. We confronted China much more forcefully over soybean purchases than we ever have on human rights. And that's just something we have to wrestle with as people in this field.

HANNAH: Another thing we have to wrestle with—and I think a lot of people in our field have been wrestling with this in recent years, yourself included—are the consequences of America's wars in the Middle East. You write at length about this in your book, and I want to pull out one quote I think is really powerful. You write, and I quote, “The unintended consequences of our forever war go far beyond the creation of more terrorists and perpetuation of more war. This enterprise has also set a particular kind of example while defining America anew in the eyes of the world, an example that has been a gift to the forces of authoritarianism and nationalism and an albatross around the neck of values that America is supposed to represent.” End quote. What are the consequences, Ben, of America's forever wars?

RHODES: The consequences are extraordinary. In the book, I trace back to George W. Bush, who basically made this our entire national purpose. Our national identity was fighting terrorism and if you stack them up, that's trillions of dollars we've spent in organizing the whole government around this task of fighting a few thousand terrorists, relative to the prioritization put on climate change or pandemic preparedness. There's an insanity to that.

Secondly, I heard from people, in all these different places, the extent to which the language of the forever war was weaponized and utilized to justify repression. That doesn't mean we're entirely responsible for it, but it does mean that if the biggest and most important powerful country in the world is launching a multitrillion dollar war in multiple countries—that includes, by the way, invading and occupying a country on a false pretense in Iraq—that's going to have some negative ripples in the world. And you see what China does—the Uyghurs, they call the people's war on terror. Putin has consistently used terrorism-related purposes to justify his more authoritarian terms. I think, though, there's something more fundamental. In the book I tell the story of a guy, Mohammed Sultan, who is an Egyptian American, and he goes from Ohio over to Tahrir Square. He's there when Mubarak is toppled, and he feels like this is great. My American and Egyptian identities are now both brought together in this pursuit of democracy. Two years later, when Morsi is ousted in a coup, he is shot in the protests. He's imprisoned. He's tortured in the worst possible ways. They lead people to die in his cell. They tell him his father is being tortured in the next cell over. And then in this extraordinary moment, he's on a hunger strike, and they put an ISIS recruiter in his cell. And he's debating an ISIS recruiter who is about the relative merits of violent versus nonviolent resistance. And here is a government the United States supports to the tune of billions of dollars that is intentionally radicalizing its own opposition because that radicalization will then justify their own suppression and the billions of dollars we give them. This is money we give them in part because of a peace treaty with Israel, but in part because that's billions of dollars for runs through defense contractors. That's insane. So, it's not just taking troops out of Afghanistan. It's just this mentality—when you come to look at individual human beings as such threats that you think you have no recourse other than to back people like Mohammed bin Salman or Sisi in Egypt. And then you expect to be able to go to the rest of the world and talk to them about democracy, which you then also utilize to justify the war in Iraq, which was clearly not about democracy, at least not in the lived experience of Iraqis. No wonder we're in this hole. To me, the forever war is about resource allocation and shifting government prioritization and removing troops from certain places. But it's more about this mindset—this uber-securitize mindset—that leads us to think we have no choice. We're the most powerful country in the world, but we have no choice but to support Mohammed bin Salman and Assisi? That's the more fundamental questioning I think we're probably not prepared to do as a government, but I feel compelled to do it as a writer and someone who wants to push the government in different directions.

HANNAH: Yeah. It's interesting. The impetus behind so much of American foreign policy seems to be fear. America is still the world's sole superpower with an awesome deterrent capability and a well-loved by many, at least, political model. And yet it seems to be constantly petrified.

RHODES: I think the one thing I'd say about this is that people are made afraid of things in the sense that, Americans were ripped into a frenzy justifying these enormous national projects like Iraq and this enormous spending over something that in the worst cases of terrorism—certainly in the post-9/11 world where we take this a little more seriously—would not amount to a single emergency rooms toll in COVID-19. It would be a fraction of the lives lost to gun violence in this country each year. People were made afraid of terrorism. Some of this was real. I saw 9/11. It propelled me to go into this field. So, I don't want to overly diminish this. But Americans are able to live with risk on a lot of things. I mean, on COVID-19, the very same people who were the most adamant about fighting the war on terrorism were the most adamant about when we should wear masks. I think we have to remember that the leadership directs people to what they should be fearful about.

HANNAH: Do you think President Biden is going to be able to do anything different to lead the country in a new direction?

RHODES: I think the admirable quality of Biden I see is a mix of optimism and assertion of belief in what America is at home and the belief of this role we play abroad, laced with a degree of humility—that we have to take care of the basics here. For some of the things I would even want him to do, his best argument for not doing them is, “Hey, first things first. We've got to take care of this pandemic. We've got to get the economy moving. We've got to just get back in the room with our allies.” There's a pragmatism to Biden. But I hope that pragmatism doesn't allow for some of the sclerotic habits in foreign policy to work their way back into the muscle movements—or they're already there, I guess—because I don't think we can afford to keep doing the same thing over and over again, particularly on things like the forever war. I think that has not worked in any way, whether it's for our values or security at this point. So, I hope there's an increasing level of ambition here from the Biden team on these issues.

HANNAH: What's your assessment of his presidency so far? You spent eight years with Joe Biden in the Situation Room. You traveled with him when he was Barack Obama's vice president. You know him well. And so, what I'm hoping you can share with our listeners is your measure of the man and his foreign policy outlook.

RHODES: He's a very instinctive guy. I think he's someone who is basically of the view that he's been doing this for forty years and has—probably more so even on foreign policy than other issues—just kind of a gut he follows on stuff. And what I found impressive is that he was willing to go against the grain on some things. On Afghanistan, he was the only person in the Situation Room, at the principal level at least, who was kind of bucking the enormous momentum for a surge, which in retrospect, I think Biden's views from that lengthy process and debate age the best, because he was basically just speaking about the limits of what we could achieve with the military. What I liked about his instincts are that he also had learned. A lot of people working on foreign policy never adjust their views. He clearly had internalized the lessons of the post-9/11 years that tell us, “Wait a second. We have to rethink how much we can actually accomplish with our military or how much we should ask our military to do around the world.” And he ended up pretty much opposing just about every major military intervention that was either proposed or pursued in the Obama years. I also think he's fundamentally an internationalist. I think there's one challenge he may confront, which is that the world is very different than the ‘90s or the ‘00s or even the Obama years in terms of the receptivity to American leadership. That doesn't mean people don't want American leadership in different parts of the world. They do. But I think Biden cannot assume “America is back” means we're back to playing the same role we used to. Not only is the world changed, but the world is also not really signed onto that.

HANNAH: The world is quite different than the one Joe Biden grew up in. It's quite different than the one you and I grew up in, Ben. But we haven't really changed course as a country. America is still trying to lead in the way it used to. Take, for example, President Biden's trip to Europe last week.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: What do you think? Do you think America still has the credibility and the moral authority to go overseas and attempt to lead the world's democracies against authoritarianism?

RHODES: We clearly have not tended to our democracy as well as we could at home. And I would argue that is largely a Republican Party issue. I think we've kind of lost the tether on the answer to that question. What does it mean to be American? That is the starting point for everything from fixing our own democracy to trying to be a constructive force in the world. It begins with us settling this question of what we think it means to be American. I know what I think it means. I think it means that people from anywhere in the world can live in a multiracial, multiethnic democracy and do the work of trying to live up to that story we tell ourselves about multiracial, multiethnic democracy. But I don't think that's what the Republican Party stands for right now. And I think the intensity of the competition in our politics, which then filters out into our foreign policy, comes from this war over what it means to be American.

HANNAH: Ben finds a connection between the American story and the one that's playing out right now around the world, one in which strongmen leaders use ethnic identity to stoke feelings of humiliation and rage.

RHODES: It's ethno-nationalism. It was so interesting to me. The basic concept of this book started when I was talking to a Hungarian guy. He's a really admirable, democracy activist. And I'm like, “How did your country go from being a democracy to a single party, soft autocracy in about a decade?”

And he's like, “Well, that's simple. There was a right wing populist backlash to the financial crisis that propelled Orban into power. He redrew the parliamentary districts to favor his party. He packed the courts with far-right judges. He changed the voting laws to make it easier for his supporters to vote. He enriched some cronies who bought the media and turned it into a right-wing grievance populism machine. And then he wrapped it all up in his nationalist message ‘us versus them’—us, the true Hungarians, against the immigrants, the Muslims, George Soros, and liberal elites.”

When you hear basically the story of your own country repeated back to you from somebody in Hungary, you realize there's something going on out there that is not unique to us, that we have both contributed to and been impacted by. And I do think it is the sense of a return to ethno-nationalism that, again, never ends well. That story never ends well. Part of what I think happened—and this has shaped our field and our lives—is that World War Two was such a shock that it kind of created what someone in the book describes to me as an elongated, reason cycle. The horror of World War two and the Holocaust was such that it put ethno-nationalism aside and built a bunch of institutions within countries and internationally to curb those excesses. We're now moving beyond the period when that's in our historical memory. And suddenly we're succumbing to those impulses again.

HANNAH: There's a famous Robert Kennedy quote I want to ask you about. Kennedy said, “Some men see things as they are and ask why. And I dream of things that never were and ask why not.” If you had to pick one, which of those camps would you fit into? Are you a realist who sees the world the way it is, or are you an idealist who constantly wonders how to change it?

RHODES: I'm still an idealist in the sense that I hear that and want to ask, “why not?” I think realism has to be the starting point to idealism. You have to see the world for what it is. I think the mistake you can make as an idealist is to assume that's agreed upon, that it's going to happen, that there's an inevitability to things turning out well. I think you have to look pretty squarely at where things are dark in order to figure out how to change them. And look, the hope and the energy, I think, in the book is that I find so much to admire and root for in Hong Kong protesters and people like Alexei Navalny and Johna Nemtsov, who I talked to in Russia, in the democracy movement in opposition in Hungary—I want these people to win. And I know they're not winning. But I continue to believe that when it comes to movements, movements fail again and again and again until they succeed. And when they succeed, it is usually in a very big way.

So, I'm still an idealist in that when I look out at the world, it's the people who are out there on the front lines standing up to impossible odds that I gravitate towards. That's who I want to support. I think America, by the way, should be like—we used to have an underdog mentality. We were the new kid on the block. We were scrappy people from all over the world who came here because they were either kicked out of where they were, or they didn't like the way things were where they were. We kind of lost that. Once you become the top dog, once you become the top of the heap, you're going to lose that underdog mentality. I want us to get that back. We've been knocked down a peg. I think there's almost an opportunity in that to get back to basics here. We are for the small “d” democrats around the world. As a fallen country we've been through it ourselves. We want to come out of it, and we also want other people to succeed.

HANNAH: Well, on that, Ben, I want to thank you very much for coming on. It was a real pleasure having you.

If you haven't already, you can pick up a copy of Ben's latest book, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made.

I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Thank you to our producer, Caroline Gray, and our associate producer and editor, Luke Taylor. Our music and mixing was done by Zubin Hensler. EGF’s graduate research assistant is Lucas Robinson. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and catch you next time.

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