The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House ended up a very different read than what the subtitle led me to believe it would be. Ben Rhodes, who was a senior adviser to Obama for all eight years of the latter’s tenure, mostly as Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, does give numerous first-person anecdotes from his time in the White House. The point of this book, however, seems to be much more about the toxic political and media environment that started just before Obama’s election with the “birther” hoax movement, escalated during Obama’s first term thanks to the likes of Sen. Mitch McConnell and Fox News, and eventually triumphed with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. No one book could really answer the “how” of Trump’s election(although racism was certainly a big factor), but Rhodes attempts to show historical trends that led to this point, including the no-win situations they faced with tough foreign policy decisions in Libya, Syria, and Iran, as well as the rise of online disinformation efforts spearheaded by the Russian government.
The foreign-policy decisions drive much of the book, as that was Rhodes’ focus anyway and several of those choices ended up becoming massive political issues and headaches for the Administration. Rhodes details why we didn’t intercede in Syria earlier, and why we still did very little even when we chose to get involved after evidence that the Syrians had used chemical weapons on their own people. One such reason was the opposition from Republicans who, at the same time, were decrying the rise of ISIS (Daesh) in the region – a group that emerged in the vacuum created by our failure to establish a successor government after we invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam Hussein. The buildup to the coalition that conducted airstrikes on Libyan forces – including us, but with European allies agreeing to take the lead – also gets a detailed treatment.
The Iran deal, on which President Trump recently reneged (which calls our reliability in international negotiations into question), gives Rhodes a chance to show how much back-channel work had to be done to convince enough Senators to agree to the deal despite well-funded opposition, much of it from donors and PACs sympathetic to Israel, and the vocal disapproval of Israel’s long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (As I write this, Netanyahu is embroiled in a corruption scandal that is threatening his position and his legacy.)
Rhodes shows he has little respect remaining for the opposition after the obstructionist tactics they used to fight the Iran deal, to stymie the nomination of Merrick Garland, and to help defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016. He also details the rise of the disinformation industry during Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea and attempts to further infringe on Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, as well as the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 by Russian insurgents there, for which Russia managed to evade any responsibility or blame. There’s some self-reproach in here – should anyone in the Obama Administration have seen Russia’s use of troll farms to sway world opinion as a threat to our own democracy? – although it’s more based in opinion than hard research or evidence.
Rhodes also describes some of the public attacks made against him, his presumed faith, his degree in creative writing (as in, he would be good at spinning fiction in speeches he wrote), and more, an environment that only has deteriorated further in the last two years. When I posted a picture of a quote in the book to my Instagram, someone responded that he was “pretty sure Ben Rhodes is also the most incompetent senior level administration official in the last 100 years.” I really can’t speak to Rhodes’ competence – although, really, with Ringling Bros. staffing the current administration, I’m not sure how this could be true – but I think it speaks more to the incomplete and likely inaccurate public depiction of a man whose actual function and performance were mostly hidden from view. Rhodes’ version of events is his perspective, of course, and perhaps the truth is that he did some parts of his job well and others not so well. That message and the toxic political culture into which this book was published overshadow any memoir-ish aspects of Rhodes’ book.
Next up: Connie Willis’ Terra Incognita, a collection of three of her novellas, including the Hugo-nominated Remake.
