In this episode, we talk with Ben Rhodes, a former national security advisor to President Barack Obama and current host of Pod Save the World, about the ways that everyday citizens can understand and engage with our complex global system. Drawing on his eight years in the White House and his work since, Rhodes identifies pivotal moments that have shaped our current international landscape and offers a surprisingly human perspective on diplomacy, while reminding us that individuals have more agency in shaping history than we might believe.
Show Notes
About our guest
Ben Rhodes is a writer, political commentator, and national security analyst. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers “After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We've Made,” and “The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House.” He is currently co-host of Pod Save the World; a contributor for MSNBC; a senior advisor to former President Barack Obama; and chair of National Security Action, which he co-founded with Jake Sullivan in 2018. From 2009-2017, Ben served as a speechwriter and Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama. In that capacity, he participated in all of President Obama’s key decisions, oversaw the President’s national security communications and public diplomacy, and led the secret negotiations with the Cuban government that resulted in the effort to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba. His work has also been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Foreign Affairs. A native New Yorker, Ben has a B.A. from Rice University and an M.F.A from New York University.
Further detours
- Ben's most recent book, After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We've Made, explores how global events like the 2008 financial crisis shaped the current international landscape.
- Pod Save the World, co-hosted by Ben Rhodes, offers accessible discussions on complex international issues and America's role in global politics.
- In season 1 of The Detour, two writers with ties to Oregon—Omar El Akkad and Mitchell S. Jackson, joined us for conversations on the fictions, myths, and hopes that the United States of America produces and depends on.
Transcript
Adam Davis: This morning at my home in southeast Portland, I started the day by reading on my phone about Ukraine and Sudan and Gaza. It seems wrong not to be aware of what's happening in those places, yet I have no clearer or deeper an understanding of Ukraine or Sudan or Gaza than I do of where and how my phone is manufactured, or what global miracles and tragedies put it in my hands.
In some small way, I seem to be part of all of these global developments. And they all seem to shape both my private life and our public life. But all of it, the world and its interconnections, seems far too big and complex to navigate. This is one of the many odd things about life in this moment. We are hyper connected to, and dependent on, far off places and people.
And at the same time, we seem to be, or at least I certainly am, pretty much incapable of understanding, let alone affecting, all these global relationships or the structures behind them. But a few people do seem to understand this stuff, to have a rare window into the global system and where we, as individuals and as a nation, might fit in.
Ben Rhodes is one of these people. For eight years, he was a national security advisor, speechwriter, and sounding board to President Barack Obama. He's since written two really thoughtful books about that experience After The Fall and The World As It Is, and he hosts the appealingly accessible podcast “Pod Save the World.”
We talked with Ben at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland in late January 2025. As part of our “Consider This” series on the theme, “The People and the Public.” This episode of "The Detour” starts with a few questions for that night's audience about how they think about our place in the world. Ben picks up from there.
Adam Davis:If you think of yourself as a participant in the international community, could you make a little noise? [Moderate clapping and hooting]
When you think about the United States' role in the world, you think first about our safety. That will be the first option to clap. If, when you think about the United States’ role in the world, you think principally about global justice, that will be the second option to clap. So if you think, when you think about our role in the world, about the safety of the United States as the top goal–[light clapping]
Okay. If you think more about global justice–[Very loud clapping and hooting]
I don't know. I don't know. That's the room.
Ben Rhodes: I got it. I got it.
Adam Davis: Yeah, you got it. Okay. We'll come back to these questions. The way I want to invite you to start is, ask you can you point to a moment, maybe when you were younger, when you started to feel like, I'm a citizen, not just of New York or the United States, but of the world. Was there a moment when you started to feel like this is a community, the international community that I'm a part of?
Ben Rhodes: I remember when I was growing up, my parents had friends who were German, and I really liked them and they were kind of dramatically German. This guy used to like to blast Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the mornings and drink champagne. You know, he's exactly what you'd want a German to be.
One thing that was interesting is when I studied abroad, in university, I went to stay with them. I was 21 years old. And I noticed that they had a lot of books about the Nazi era. And I called my mom and I was like, I’m having a great time. But Peter's got a lot of Nazi books, you know?
And, she said, well, what you don't know about them is that both of their parents were Nazis. My mother is Jewish, and this was a kind of jarring thing to learn about these people that I saw as these avuncular aunt and uncle types. But then what I realized over the course of a couple days with them is that Peter devoted his whole life to this project of working for these institutions that were meant to prevent the reemergence of the Nazi party.
And America was fundamental to that. My father had met Peter through one of these civil society organizations that were part of that. It was the first time I was kind of truly conscious of the fact that all these institutions that constitute the quote unquote international community we're used to, are actually made up of human beings, who made choices to avoid history.
And that the United States was in a complicated way, not a perfect way, kind of fundamental to that. And I just remember being at 21, when I had no idea I was going to go into this line of work that I did, just very aware of how that was both inspiring but also kind of scary. This is a human endeavor. It's not like a self executing endeavor.
Adam Davis: That is international work. That is human beings are doing this stuff
Ben Rhodes: Human beings decided to build these institutions. Human beings work at these institutions. And human beings could break these institutions. And, you know, the world suddenly became a more interesting, more interconnected, and yet also more dangerous place when I, when I kind of, the truth of that sunk in.
Adam Davis: And so it sounds like that awareness of the fact that it was human beings, some of whom you knew, were taking on the responsibility of shaping that international system, the international institutions. So at first there was awareness, but at some point, like, you became one of those people.
Ben Rhodes: Yes.
Adam Davis: Is that deliberate? Did you say, I want to be someone who shapes the global public, who shapes the international realm, or did you happen upon it? And let me just say, the reason I'm asking is because that feels… I think for most of us, quite far away.
Ben Rhodes: I did not set out to do that at first. The quick version is, I moved back home to New York City after college with every intention of becoming a writer.
I saw a future for myself living in Brooklyn and smoking pot and writing for magazines and trying to pass a manuscript to an agent and all the rest of that. And I was on that trajectory, and it was fun. But I had an interest in politics, and I was working local politics in New York on September 11th, 2001, which was Election Day.
And I was literally handing out flyers in front of a polling station for the City Council candidate I was working for in Brooklyn, right on the waterfront. And so I saw the entire 9/11 attacks. And I remember walking home that day to Queens, where I lived, and just thinking. Sitting in my small apartment, writing short stories about men sitting in small apartments writing short stories–it suddenly felt like an incredibly trivial thing to be doing to myself. And I just wanted to be involved in foreign policy, whatever that meant. I wanted to be involved in the American response to what I saw. And then I ended up in DC. I just wanted to go down there and write and learn about foreign policy.
And that led me to getting a job as a speechwriter for a guy named Lee Hamilton who ran a think tank there at the Wilson Center. And then, even then, I didn't think I was going to be a participant. I wanted to be a writer. But the Bush years kind of radicalized me to want to get involved in politics, because I was like, what's the point of writing about this stuff if the people in charge are going to lie to you and ignore whatever recommendations Blue Ribbon commissions and think tanks make?
So I kind of deliberately set out to enter politics, and that's when I went to work for Barack Obama.
Adam Davis: In a way, you have a window into the international world that a very small number of people have. Maybe you could give us three phenomena over the past couple decades that you think are the most important things we should think about or understand when we think about the current state of the international situation.
Ben Rhodes: It's a great question. I think 9/11 is one. I think there was a period from the end of the Cold War to 9/11. When America felt like it had kind of escaped history. We could assume that the world that we were living in was going to continue to be like it was for an indefinite period of time. And the United States’ position was going to be what it was for an indefinite period of time.
And then 9/11 happened. And to me that was like the giant shock to the American system: you don't get to step out of history. That frankly, in ways that Americans still don't want to reconcile, that was to some extent, blowback for the role that the United States played. It doesn't justify it, but we can't sit in our country and think that we can do whatever we want around the world and not have people get pissed off at us and try to hurt us.
That led to the creation of a multi trillion dollar enterprise of a national security state, of a Department of Homeland Security, of multiple wars, and also the kind of creation of a new form of American nationalism. If you watched, you know, Fox News in the years after 9/11, that was a kind of jingoism that actually I don't remember from the 90s, you know?
Like, suddenly there are flags on the screen and there are enemies and there's a kind of martial nationalism, right? That, I think, led ultimately to Trump. Let's put the Iraq war under that umbrella because I think that was a profoundly consequential event because that was the event in which a lot of the rest of the world was like, okay, we kind of trusted these guys there in the front seat and they have the car keys and we all kind of trust them to just drive.
And now it's like, where are these guys taking the car? It doesn't seem like maybe they're drunk. like why is this happening? And so I think the kind of implicit trust that superpower status relies on, was starting to fray. Second event, the fundamental event to understanding everything, I think, that we're living through today, is the financial crisis.
Because the basic premise of globalization was you're going to lose something of your identity, right? There's gonna be more movement of people, more movement of ideas, traditional identities are going to be encroached upon. But the bargain was your standard of living is going to keep getting better.
And, you know, it's going to be good for not just the people at the top, but working classes and that was a race with the financial crisis. And as bad as the financial crisis was in this country, it was worse almost everywhere else. Horban. I wrote about him a lot in this book. He was obviously a flavor of Trump in Hungary.
I acutely sense that the populist backlash to the financial crisis will not inevitably come from the left. It could actually come from the right. Because I could basically say, I'm going to embrace the oldest form of politics there is, which is kind of national tribal identity politics. And I'm going to connect that to a critique of an establishment, of globalization that people are really angry at. But instead of my answer being a kind of Bernie Sanders economics, my answer is going to be we have to return to a traditional sense of national identity. The “them" to the “us” is the immigrants and the globalists and the liberal elites and the Muslims. The fact that the backlash to the financial crisis and the failure of globalization was captured by the right has done a lot to shape global politics since and all eight years in Obama I could feel us kind of running in the opposite direction or swimming in the opposite direction of the currents, you know?
Then very quickly, the last one. I'm deliberately kind of predating even Obama because I think we've been living through the aftermath of these structural forces.
I'd say the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Because that was an event in which China, which had been kind of biding its time and kind of drafting behind the United States to develop their economy, shifting towards this kind of state controlled capitalism out of communism, embracing technology– all of a sudden they're like, here we are, we can put on a better opening ceremony than any of you people, we're rich, we're powerful, we're not going to stay in the shadows anymore.
And we have an entirely different system. If you're in the developing world, if you're in the global South, you're like, well, wait a second. Maybe the Americans don't have the only model. And frankly, Americans are kind of jerks to us and we could be like these people instead, and we can shop around and we can work with the Americans on some things and the Chinese on others.
So those three things were all obviously hugely destabilizing to the world I came of age in the 90’s. They rattled American confidence and created American nationalism, upended the assumptions of globalization and created competitors to the United States, which puts us into a period of both political instability in our own country, but also global instability and conflict.
Adam Davis: Thank you for that really cogent response to a probably unanswerable question. And thank you also for the surprising, to me, number three. I mean, it was, it was cool. In any list, it was cool. It was cool, but it sounds to me like in all three of those, that in a way, some of what's happening is perception of a threat which might have been less detectable before.
And so I want to ask a question about the idea of threats. and the international system. As you were working on national security, were you sorting between friends and enemies? Is there another country that can be considered simply a friend, or is it all threats?
Ben Rhodes: I'm a fairly unconventional person, to have been, you know, a deputy national security advisor for eight years, so I acknowledge that.I thought less in those terms probably than other people did. They're definitely friends, I mean, and it's very striking. There are three kinds of countries if I had to generalize, right? If we met with the British, the meaning was, Hey, we all agree on what we're trying to do everywhere.
Like, what's the play we're running? You're starting from a place of agreement. Then there are countries that you have a relationship with where there's things you're working together on, there are things you disagree on, there are things that they want the United States to be doing and you're trying to figure out whether you can do it.
And they are a lot of the medium-sized, Latin American, Asian and African nations. Russia, you know, is an adversary. And every meeting is basically, you're going through a list of things where you don't agree. And you're just trying to either manage that or be confrontational or try to find some opening to do something.
What's interesting is I spent eight years just looking at power from the ultimate inside-out place, from in the Situation Room in the Oval Office or out the window of a motorcade or inside some other government building. I went on every single foreign trip Obama took as president.
I've spent eight years working really hard to reprogram myself to look at power from the outside in. And what I've come to see is that it's not countries that interest me as much as people. That there are people in countries that are friends of ours that I disagree with, and people in countries that are adversaries of ours that I am very like-minded with. Not that I've figured everything out, but I think that's kind of what's missing–that capacity to not oversimplify things, but to try to find solidarity with people who are like-minded about certain things in different places and build from that.
Adam Davis: When you talked about, for example, a difficult meeting with your Russian counterparts and trying to figure out what you want to get out of it–I think I want to ask you a question about how clear you had to be around goals in the international system. Sort of like that very oversimplified question about safety or justice that people responded to very much on the justice side. I imagine and maybe I'm wrong–I imagine that the role of anyone in government is really to focus first on the safety side
Ben Rhodes: Yeah well, if you take the Russians in particular. In the first Obama term you had a leader in Dmitry Medvedev. He saw a pathway to Russian prestige. A lot of Russian psychology is just about wanting to have the stature of a great power.
He saw that pathway as connected to working with Americans and kind of being in the room with Barack Obama and making deals. And so we did a whole range of things. An example I give of a goal that is in safety and justice space, right, is that we negotiated a nuclear arms treaty. And inherently that is in our safety interest.
But importantly what we try to do with that is say, hey, we're doing this because it's in service of the more global effort to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons, right? The core of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, which, you know, most people don't think a lot about, is that the countries with nuclear weapons agree to give up their nuclear weapons.
And they may not do it overnight, but, you know, we want to see them working in that direction. And then that's the basis under which you can tell all the other countries who don't have nuclear weapons, you can't have them. We're strengthening a norm so that we can go to other countries and say, let's pressure the Iranians to not develop their nuclear weapons.
Medvedev brought that mentality to a lot of things, even though we couldn't get to yes on everything with him. What was interesting is when Putin came back to power, to put a human element on it, we'd heard rumblings that Medvedev wanted to stick around in the presidency, and I think those were true.
But ultimately Putin yanked the rug out from under him and said, I'm coming back. And I'll never forget the first G8 summit. The first one after Putin was elected. Putin didn't show up, which is, you know, typical Putin. It was kind of a message. And these Medvedev people, this is their last turn on the global stage.
And Medvedev was watching a European soccer game on his iPad the whole time. He's checked out. But the point is, what they knew is what was coming. Because when Putin came back, he had no interest. And what I just described, it was like, I'm coming back, I'm just not going to work with you guys on anything.
And you're just going to have to adjust to a reality in which there's no more arms control, there's no more global cooperation. And it just shifted very quickly. And it was just like one of those pivot points in history. Russia, the country, has its own interests and the human element, right, like sometimes there's a Vladimir Putin and that just changes what you can do in the room.
Adam Davis: So, that last comment you just made, sometimes there's Vladimir Putin and you need to respond to that, and what you said about norms a moment ago–I want to keep both of those out, but I also–when you talked about Medvedev watching European soccer, like sometimes it feels like for me, and I think for many people I know, that's about as close as we're going to get. It can feel like this world out there is very distant from the, even the public world that many of us find ourselves in all the time.
So the question I want to ask is, how do most of us, if at all, bring what we have to bear on that world?
Ben Rhodes:You know, at the end of the day, these people wake up and get dressed in the morning. They're just like us, these politicians, these political leaders, even these strong men. And they ultimately are responsive to public opinion in their countries and the world.
If you doubt that, then just consider the amount of effort that is made every day in all parts of the world to make you think that you have no agency in the world. It's a design and it stretches across social media, media, politics, money and politics, business. But ultimately all these things are a reflection of where societies are going.
And there are things that are beyond our control. Like I can't end the war in Ukraine, or the war in Gaza. but a lot of issues actually play out much closer to the ground. If you're interested in a country or an issue or a cause, it's actually much easier to get involved than you think.
Or, frankly, just understanding the world that you're living in. I think it's an act of resistance and of affirmation because a lot of effort is made to make you not understand the world. I think the ultimate international community is just people figuring it out for themselves in the spaces where they live and then acting in ways that will affect the culture over time.
And I think the clearest manifestation of that has been on the American right for the 15 years where there's been a lot of civil society and organization and solidarity with like-minded, you know, right wing or far right, parties around the world. Look at what they did, so yeah, there's more ways than you think to kind of plug in.
Adam Davis: Thank you. That, again, really provocative and helpful response. Understanding–you just made it sound like understanding alone has value. And as I was reading your books and reading the paper and thinking about our country and other countries these days, it's very hard for me to understand my own country.
I think I used to think I understood it some. Now I don't think I understand it barely at all. And that's the country that speaks my language, that I've grown up in. How much confidence, when you were going from place to place, did you have that you understood enough about what was going on in these different countries to develop policies, to, in some cases, put lives at risk? Like, how much did you have to understand? How confident could you be about understanding other countries and cultures?
Ben Rhodes: I mean, the U.S. government, first of all, has a massive amount of resources that are designed to help you understand. From a very capable diplomatic corps to aid workers to intelligence reporting, I had an interesting perspective because the national security guy that I was, you're not wired to try to understand the countries. You're just there to advance American interests. And if you can find a guy who's smart about that country to help you do that, that's great.
But as a speechwriter for Barack Obama who wanted to connect with people, I would have to start a habit of talking to people from those countries, people in civil society or just contacts or writers from those countries. And I would try to gather those perspectives to inform what Obama would say in those places. And you know, you're not gonna get to know a place entirely well. But you know you are gonna be smarter because you're going to know what to avoid and you're going to know what the grievances are.
And if I have a criticism of the entire enterprise that I was a part of, to shorthand it quickly, in the last eight years, I've gotten to know a lot of Afghans. I have an Afghan diaspora friend group. And it got me really thinking hard about the fact that I was in hundreds of meetings in the White House Situation Room about Afghanistan–military strategies in Afghanistan, economic strategies in Afghanistan, development strategies in Afghanistan.
And there was never a single Afghan in the room. And, you know, that's why you get the result that we got. Americans do this time and again., To also name another uncomfortable truth. The further you get from Europe, i. e. the further you get from other white people, the less America understands the mentality and worldview and interests and grievances and intellectual origins.
And if you look at American foreign policy since World War II, the further you get from Europe, the less successful American foreign policy tends to be.
Adam Davis: So, there's something about the argument that you're making there that is beautifully harmonious. Which is, that the more we understand other cultures, the more likely it is that we will achieve our interests.
Ben Rhodes: Yeah, I truly believe that. Yeah, and it's a radical idea in American foreign policy.
Adam Davis: Say a little more about that.
Ben Rhodes: I think that there's something about power that makes people feel like they have less reason to understand others’ interests, right? You know, power does corrupt in the sense that it makes you feel immune from having to think through what you're doing.
You would think that Russians would understand Ukrainians better than maybe anybody else outside of Russia, given the proximity, but clearly they didn't understand Ukrainians. You know, if you think of another country as another human being, you wouldn't think that the best way to achieve your objectives is to just tell that other human being exactly what you're going to do and expect them to be completely okay with it.
You know, you'd want to get to know that person, and, so think of countries like people, I mean, because that's what they are. Obama is imperfect, obviously. And I'm not here to suggest everything that was right, but I do think that he was unique as an American president. Because he was black, and so he'd been inherently on the other end of power in this country.
He'd lived in Indonesia as a boy, which is a country where the CIA just sponsored a coup that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. He had an intuitive understanding of how the world doesn't see America like we see the movie of ourselves, you know? Actually, good presidents have had that capacity too, in the past.
We have not had that recently. In both parties.
Adam Davis: You're listening to The Detour with Ben Rhodes, host of “Pod Save the World” and author of After the Fall.
So you just said, “Think of countries like people.” What's your read on human nature? What's your read on how nations interact? And should we assume that nations want primarily to understand each other or to compete as a version of…. is the international system even more cutthroat than it might be between people because it's agglomerations of people and getting back to national identity and borders?
Ben Rhodes: Yeah, I mean, if you think about countries like people, the overuse of power works really well… until it doesn’t.
What's amazing about human beings is their complete incapacity to learn that lesson. and if you just look at the cycles of history, if you start to ignore the interests of other countries, if you start to think that you have impunity from any kind of international–let's not even say a law– gravity, if you assume that people are not going to band together to resist the way in which you're overusing or abusing power–everybody's learned that lesson. Let's just take the West, but I could apply it elsewhere. The Athenians learned it, the Romans learned it, the British learned it, and we're learning it right now. And we are acting in a very obvious late stage empire way. You know, the short end of what a foreign policy person would give is that there's an enlightened self interest whereby by binding our own power and constraining our own power, we can trade that for a more stable world and more shared benefit. It's also that capacity to look at other human beings who are different from us and find that interesting instead of threatening. And I'll just wade into dangerous waters here too. I have friends who will look at the Palestinians in Gaza and all they see is Hamas.
In addition to that being a narrow mindset, it's actually a sad one because those are interesting people. Talk to them like me and you can guess what you'll figure out. They're exactly the same as you are They just live in a different place and look different. My experience globally is that everybody's pretty similar with a lot of different cultures layered on top of them. But that's what makes it interesting. Like wouldn't you like to meet the people?
They eat somewhat different food and listen to different music and have different heroes and different myths. That should be a good thing and I want to live in a world where that's a good thing and not something to be scared of. [Applause]
Adam Davis: Towards the end of that comment, you talked about the world you wanted to live in, which of course points back to the title of your memoir, The World As It Is, which is different from the world as it ought to be. The title of your more recent book, After the Fall, and even the name of the podcast you work on, “Pod Save the World,” which is a jokey title, but there's nothing jokey about the verb, ‘save,’ and as I was thinking about those three titles and the, the tenor of your books and the work you've done, there's like a spiritual and moral yearning in it, which feels very unusual to see in the international arena.
Ben Rhodes: Yeah, I had to deliberately make a journey the last eight years, away from a certain way of thinking that I had been wired to think.
I had to not just relinquish power, but I had to not want it anymore. So I did not self censor how I talked about certain things just because maybe eight years from now it’ll be read back to me in a confirmation hearing. I had to be willing to have people who are friends be annoyed, if not mad at me about what I was saying on my podcast. I don’t want to say the virtue signal because I'm the one who benefited.
It was like, I don't want to be suffocated by the machinery that I came out of eight years ago. I want to explore what it's like to be in the world in different ways. One thing I would say to people who are probably feeling, as I am, that it's not great, andto take it very seriously. There are people much more vulnerable than I who we need to be very serious about.
At the same time, you don't get to choose the times that you live in. It would be really nice to live in a time where I always felt like the government reflected who I was, where I didn't have to worry about some of these things, but looked at from another way, hey, like, we're in it, you know? We are in a period that matters.
And if we all just check out and tune out, we know how those periods end. And this is where I'll differ from how people were in the first Trump term. It's not going to be as simple as get out there and organize and try to win the next election. I actually think it's deeper than that.
It's like, how can we regenerate within ourselves and our own communities a shared sense of belonging? What does it mean to be an American? What does that even mean anymore? I think I could have answered that question easier in 1990 than I could today. And we all kind of need to do this work of thinking about why are we here. It's not enough to wish somebody else won an election. You have to think about why do I want that person to win the election or what kind of person would I like to see who's not running for office?
And so I don't know. I just think we have to be asking the bigger questions now. [applause]
Adam Davis: I have one last question before we open questions and it's related to what you just said. It's also related to what you said before about wanting to talk to people and that we're all the same. One of the stories we tell ourselves and declare in public regularly is that this is an exceptional nation, that there's something unusual about us. You’ve seen many countries, you've interacted with many people running many countries. Do you feel like we're an exceptional nation or are we one nation like all other nations?
Ben Rhodes: We are exceptional in the sense that we're weirdly large and diverse and people came from everywhere to be here. We weren't founded on a fixed ethnicity or religion, even though some people thought we were.
But in my experience in politics, there are two narratives of American exceptionalism. And one is that we're just exceptional, you know. What America does is kind of inherently right, because we're America. We're a city on a hill. You know, we're the heirs of the Greeks and the Romans. We are the Rome of today. And if we do something wrong, it's still right because we did it, I know I'm short ending it, but I actually think that's what a lot of people believe, that there's something inherently just in our actions. If there's an occasional Vietnam or Iraq, well, you know, better that we're out there in the world doing this stuff because we're America.
I come out of a political tradition that sees American exceptionalism as our capacity to fix what is wrong with America. Obviously Obama was a president who came out of the civil rights movement, which came out of the abolition and justice movements of the 19th century. This argument goes all the way back to the. founding fathers, right? You know, who's American, who gets to decide? Are we essentially that room where the constitution was written, which was a bunch of white male property owners? Or are we all the movements ever since that have just tried really hard to let more people be American, have the full rights of Americans, whether they be black, whether they be women, whether they be immigrants. Obama would talk about this internationally and it was interesting. Then I wrote all these speeches and the Republicans said he was on an apology tour.
And what used to drive me nuts about that is he never actually said, ‘sorry.’ He said, ‘America has all these problems, but what makes America great is our capacity to steadily try to fix them.’ And so I actually thought that what was being cast [by Republicans] as this un-American message, I thought was a patriotic message, you know?
And so you have this kind of duality of exceptionalism. Is our exceptionalism our capacity to change, or is our exceptionalism something in our past that we have to recapture? Make America great again. It's that kind of dueling exceptionalism that we've never resolved and speaks to the profound conflicts around identity that we're dealing with today.
But then when you travel around the world, I think, you also come to see every nation is exceptional and has its own narrative with its own wellsprings and its own currents and its own debates. And frankly, what makes America more interesting to me is that all those wellsprings and currents have fed into us.
Because people have come here from all those places. We're the only country that every other country kind of follows what happens here. And what do they say?
Adam Davis: So as we transition to questions, can we say an initial preliminary big thanks to Ben? [Applause]
Q1: My question is, with losing this much status on the global stage, how do we ever redeem that as a country that has integrity and cares for others? Like, what does that look like to you?
Ben Rhodes: Yeah to me, it means that we are, to take a home example, in need of a complete rebuild. Not a renovation. In the sense like Trump comes in, he's kind of like Trump lite. It's like MAGA lite because there really were all these guardrails that people worked for him who didn't really support what he's doing, and, you know, a lot of people stood up to him.
And then Biden comes in and the whole premise was, and I'm not being wholly negative, because it was an understandable premise, we just keep doing things the way that they seemed to be working before and that will get us past this and it clearly didn't. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the point is that there's no going back.
And this is why I made the point about not just winning one election. We have to be thinking about not what we want to restore or return to. This is like a hurricane coming through. How are we going to rebuild out of this? And maybe that's not the worst thing because America is not the same country that built those institutions in the forties and fifties or the nineties.
And so there’s opportunity in this. I don't wanna minimize the dangers. It's gonna have to be different than it was before, and I don't have the answer, but you know what, like we all have to acknowledge that. I have some ideas, but let's start by saying let's be curious about figuring that out together.
Q2: Earlier in your talk, you were talking about how even autocrats are vulnerable to peaceful, broad-based opposition to them. So the first question is, what's the mechanism that makes an autocrat vulnerable to widespread, peaceful opposition? The other part relates to just what you were saying about rethinking what it means to be American, and what America could be. Do some of us have to figure that out first, before we are in peaceful opposition? Or, can it be in parallel, or in some other sequence? Thank you.
Ben Rhodes: Yeah, so I'd say there are political movements, political protests, political assembly, political speech that matters. But also, there are cultural and socio and economic factors that autocrats are mindful of.
If you look at the Chinese Communist Party, it's interesting. They brook no dissent. But there came a point where they had this zero tolerance COVID policy that was incredibly draconian and incredibly intrusive and people had huge limitations. And at a certain point, a lot of people in China were just pissed off about that.
And these were not political dissidents. And there was a mood in that country that the Chinese Communist Party changed their code policies in like a week. It was like on a dime. And that was not something that they had planned to do, you know? So the first point is that yes, you want vanguard activists and you need them. But there is, there's a broader sense of public opinion.
It's not, often the protests in the street. It's that kind of mood that can shift over time. And what you constantly find in American history is that there is a movement that has to start to redefine what America is, what it means to be American. And then there's a person that comes along and kind of captures it.
To take the Trump example, Trump is impossible without the movement of the Tea Party, and all the work even before that, to build a kind of right wing, civil society and energy and there's a lot to that, but then the charismatic figure comes along and there's an army that's already been built. I think that we need to remember that it's not just organizers waiting around to be led, it's organizers and people in communities building movements and making changes.
Look, the pendulum's gonna swing back. It always does in this country. It swings back and forth. And there'll be another person. And it doesn't have to be Michelle Obama. It shouldn't be. It should be someone that we're not thinking of, right? But it's that interplay between civil society and culture that will then make the next politician better. And that's what we need.
Q3: I want to go back to where we started the evening with the question, and I understand why you posed the question this way. It was like, do you want safety or do you want global justice? And my thought was, that's an asshole question. And so Mr. Rhodes, my question for you is, how much do you think those two overlap?
Adam Davis: Thank you for the kind question.
Ben Rhodes: Look, I'm somebody that believes that a world of justice is a safer world. And, I'll never forget, so I negotiated the normalization of relations with Cuba. And we've had this insane policy towards Cuba for, you know, 60 years, where we just punish the hell out of these people and expect them to embrace democracy.
So my whole premise of this was let's end that policy, open things up, and let the Cubans figure it out. Actually that will inherently be a safer, better thing. And I remember the last week of the Obama administration, I was in Havana and I had dinner with Raul Castro, and we drank a lot.
We had like many bottles of rum. I don't know how I managed to do this. He was telling all these stories, he's a Castro, you know, he talks a lot, even more than me, and when I raised [the subject of Trump], he's like, ‘There was once a Russian general here from Ossetia who had the ability to launch nuclear weapons from Cuba without even telling us. That would have led to the destruction of this island. So I've dealt with worse things than Trump,.’ So at the end of the dinner, I was like, ‘I just want to ask you, were you guys all Communists who wanted to be in the Soviet bloc or did we kind of, you know….’ and before I could finish the question, and I believe him… I'm sure the hardliners will think this is naive of Rhodes, but he was pretty drunk and he looks at me and he pounds on the table and says, ‘It was you! You gave us no option! We had nowhere to go but the Soviets. There was nobody else who would trade with us. There was nobody else who would give us…’I believe that.
And oftentimes we do things in the name of safety that make us less safe. And because by pushing them into the arms of the Soviets, we got nuclear weapons in Cuba. And so, look, my circle is very overlapping, it's not entirely… I might be wrong to some extent because the world is kind of a tough place too, and people do horrible things to each other.
And there's something to the fact that you can't assume good intentions and with everybody you can't. And so that circle, my circle may be too aligned, but I'm telling you, it's definitely more aligned. Then, sorry, the question, but you know, you're right to ask it because it actually surfaces the dynamic, right?
Adam Davis: It was the goal that was what I was after.
Ben Rhodes: So I just think I overlapped them, you know, 80%.
Adam Davis: And as we go to these last few questions, let's try to make them neither asshole questions, nor long questions.
Q4: I'll try, I swear. I feel like since 9/11 until now, the hate for South Asian and as well as like, Middle Eastern immigrants has increased overall, just because of the way we look.
And no administration, in my opinion, has done enough. So, do you see any hopes for these kinds of people in the U. S.?
Ben Rhodes: Yeah. I agree with you that not every administration has done nearly enough. I think that the negative version of the story is tied to 9/11. You know, when a superpower fails to win wars, they increasingly turn to enemies within.
So if you were consuming right wing media the last 20 years,[the message was] we're going to go off and conquer the Middle East and win great victories. And when that didn't happen is when you started to see the lens turn inward and suddenly we're mad at the people who are here, who are brown or from South Asia or they're Muslim. Then the border becomes a fixation.
And I think the way to build back from that, which is again a common thread of the conversation, is beginning in communities themselves. I don't think this kind of broken brain thing that you would see in certain parts of our politics and media is going to change soon, but communities can have different attitudes towards immigrants.
Universities can have different attitudes towards students. Frankly, universities can choose to not be bullied by Pete Hegseth and the anti-rape brigades, and be welcoming. Because in the end, it's much better. It's kind of boring just sitting around with a bunch of white people talking to each other in this country.
Q5: You mentioned this idea of feeling like you were swimming against a current during your eight years working at the Obama administration. I often also feel like a lot of the things that are going on in our world today were set in motion by things that I had no control over. Yeah. I wasn't born when 9/11 happened.
I wasn't alive when the Iraq war started. I think I was 3 in 2008. My question is to what extent are we victims of history? And to what extent are the thoughts of the people in our communities dictated by these events that we don't have control over?
Ben Rhodes: Great Question. How old are you?
Q5: Nineteen.
Ben Rhodes: Nineteen. So two things. When I was nineteen, it was 1997. Man, think of what's happened since then. The point is things are gonna change. A lot is gonna happen in the next 20 years. It's totally unpredictable. If things can swing the ways they have before, they can swing back, too.
And you have to remember that we keep thinking everything is permanent and inevitable, or all is lost, or all is one, and it's too much. Everything is more fluid than that. And then, my second piece of advice to you is: if there is something that is trying to make you think that you don't have control, that's the thing that you should ignore.
So, a social media platform that is trying to just feed you a steady diet of some information. Don't do that. Seek out other information. There's a lot of forces that are designed to make you feel like the individual doesn't have agency in history, but it does. Because it did for them. Look at how much Trump has changed things.
That was an individual in history, surfing the backs of a lot of other individuals. And so, seriously, everybody, think about your own interaction on a day to day basis with power. It's much more constant than you think it is. I mean, every time you look at your phone, you're interacting with power, you know?
And think of ways to kind of take control of your own thinking. Because you may not get to decide history, but you get to decide how you live in history.
Q6: You mentioned that America is following the same actions as crumbling empires of the past. Do you think that the decline of American empire is inevitable? If not, what might reverse or postpone that trend, and if it is, how will America have to adapt to that loss of status?
Ben Rhodes: I think what we're… it's a great question.
I read colleges, it's great .Look, I'll say we are dealing with it poorly. Part of why you get Trump is it's a nation sensing a loss of status. And that's a very ripe time for a strong man to come along and say, ‘We shouldn't lose status.’ And, I mean, it's very telling. Who is he picking on? Panama?
Colombia? Greenland? It's like a bully going out on the school yard being like, you know what? I've lost some status because I was embarrassed, so I'm going to find some small people to go beat up, and that's kind of what's happening, right? But at the same time, importantly, America's not going to go away, though, and America's going to always, for at least for the lifetime of anybody in this room, absent a complete collapse of American society, which is not totally out of the realm, but, we're gonna be a big, powerful country with huge influence in the world, and a military superpower, and an economic power, and a cultural power.
We have to get comfortable with that being enough. With not being able to tell everybody what to do and not being able to kind of pick the governments of smaller countries like we did. Let go a little bit, you know, and be okay with that. And I think that's what people are having a hard time with, but it's kind of, you know, we have to psychologically adjust to being in an international community that we aren't necessarily captain of, but we are important in it.
That's apparently going to take some time.
Q7: I wanted to ask you a question that I've struggled with a little bit and just thought about a lot, which is, why do people listen to us as a country? Is it because we have these advanced forms of government and fair elections and things like that?
Or is it because we can, like, bomb them and destroy their culture? Or is it both?
Ben Rhodes: It's all of the above and it's a really important question. It's a great question to end on because a lot of people listen to us because they have to. Because whether they like it or they don't, stuff we do is gonna matter in their lives.
We could bomb their country or their cousin wants to study here or they're undocumented cousin lives here and sends remittances home. Or they have a trading relationship with us and terrorists would affect them. Or, you know, there are very practical reasons why people follow what happens in America.
But I will tell you, as someone who's felt the tug of cynicism a lot over the years, I interact with a lot of people in global activism civil society a lot. And, I've never been anywhere where someone didn't point to something about America that they found motivating because it is, it's still a pretty radical notion that, there's some capacity for social mobility or that there might be minority figures who can rise to the top of politics or culture or athletics or whatever the thing is.
If you think about what people like the absolute most about America, [it] tends to be culture, right? Music, sports, movies. All of that culture is, or tends to be, the blended America, right? And sometimes it's like expropriation, but whatever you want to think of rock and roll being or, hip hop. It couldn't have emerged out of anywhere other than the kind of weird mix of people that live in America. People around the world see that and it has a kind of powerful psychological grip. One way to think about these identity issues is to kind of step back and be like, what do I love about American identity and culture? And how do I build out from that in trying to reconstruct an American identity that makes sense to me.
Adam Davis: You've been listening to The Detour from Oregon Humanities. Anna McClain is our new producer. Welcome, Anna. We're delighted you're here. Anna is succeeding The Detour's founding producer, Keiren Bond. Thank you, Keiren, for all you brought to the show and to everyone you've worked with. Alexandra Silvester, Karina Briski, and Ben Waterhouse are our assistant producers. Kyle Gilmer is our audio engineer. This is Adam Davis. Thank you for listening. See you next time.