Susan Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist and host of its weekly podcast, The Global POLITICO. Subscribe to The Global POLITICO on Apple Podcasts here. Subscribe via Stitcher here.



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A few months before President Barack Obama wrapped up his tenure in the Oval Office, he and his foreign policy team had a pointed argument over his final speech to the United Nations General Assembly, a fight that centered on just what kind of world he would be leaving behind when he stepped down.


On one side were the president and Ben Rhodes, his deputy national security adviser and the aide most frequently described as having a “mind meld” with Obama, both ready to boast of a globe they believed they had made better. On the other was Samantha Power, Obama’s activist, human rights-minded ambassador to the United Nations, concluding eight years in the White House and in Turtle Bay of often futile pushing for more action to take on the planet’s most intractable challenges.

It was a “huge fight,” Rhodes recounts, “a long debate about how bad this moment is.” Rhodes and Obama wanted an upbeat speech. Power, however, wanted to sound the alarm about a world in crisis.

“Our perspectives are just fundamentally different,” Power argues, a blunt acknowledgement of the gulf that separated Obama’s team on some basic questions by the end. “My world is a world where we have 65 million displaced, Yemen and Syria and Iraq, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, Burundi, South Sudan, Darfur, Afghanistan of course, Venezuela imploding. ... There are concerns about terrorism, there is a fear of the other, and all the trends on democracy, right now at least, are going in the wrong direction.”

Obama recognized the many afflictions still plaguing parts of the world that his successor would later dismissively call “shithole countries.” But to Obama, the world he would be leaving to his successor was, on the whole, more peaceful and less violent than it had ever been, and Power’s objections notwithstanding, that is exactly the speech he gave the day after their argument. “The president is saying ‘Right now, for all these problems, this is actually the best time to be alive in human history,’” Rhodes says. “I think she felt as if that was potentially discordant with the mood.”

The fight in September 2016 is disclosed for the first time in a new documentary on the Obama foreign policy team that is being released this week, and it reveals an administration that by its final days was deeply conflicted on how to address persistent challenges like the ongoing Syrian civil war and found itself profoundly shocked and unprepared for the upset victory of Donald Trump just a few weeks later. The HBO film, “The Final Year,” by documentarian Greg Barker, stars Rhodes and Power, who represented two opposing poles inside the Obama administration over the uses and limits of American power to shape events around the world—a running battle between idealism and pragmatism that is, in the end, subsumed by their shared horror and dismay over Trump’s election.

In Barker’s telling, Trump’s coming victory in the latter half of the film has something of a horror movie quality, as the blustery New York billionaire makes a few cameo appearances throughout a year of remarkable backstage access to the president and his top advisers, usually when Rhodes is dismissing any chance that Trump will win. The film’s denouement, of course, is that election—captured in a memorable scene at Power’s New York apartment when she throws a party for all 37 female ambassadors to the U.N. as well as feminist icon Gloria Steinem and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to celebrate what they all expected to be Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory. Instead, the night ended in tears, with Power’s sleeping 4-year-old daughter sprawled across her lap “like a pale, Irish statue.” Recalling the party more than a year later, Power ruefully tells me, “I’ve had a lot of bad ideas in my life, though none as immortalized as that one.”

The normally voluble Rhodes, meanwhile, left literally speechless by the outcome, is shown sitting alone outside in the night as he repeatedly tries to come up with something to say to the camera that had followed him all year, and failing, for once, to find the right words—or any words at all. When I asked him about it, he said that at the time it felt like he could offer nothing other than a “lame rationalization” for why Trump had won. “Sometimes,” he said when we talked, “things are just terrible.”

That surprise ending to 2016 is really the starting point to the debate we’re still having more than a year later: How do we evaluate Obama’s legacy in the world when he appears to have been so politically repudiated at home, and the ultimate fate of so many of his signature diplomatic achievements, from the Iran nuclear deal to the Paris climate accord and Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, is now cast into doubt? Did Obama’s missteps—or even the failure of Obama and his aides to understand the rise of Trump—somehow pave the way for a successor who has little in the way of fixed foreign policy principles except to emphasize how different they are from Obama’s?

After a year in office, in fact, perhaps the most reliable guide to Trump’s unpredictable presidency may well be his oft-stated preference for doing exactly what Obama would not or could not on foreign policy. Consistent with his campaign rhetoric, Trump has withdrawn from the TPP and the Paris agreement and, just last week, once again refused to certify Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal, giving Congress and U.S. allies in Europe a deadline of May to revise its terms or he will abandon it altogether. Whenever he talks publicly, Trump seems to delight in Obama-bashing, and his foreign policy speeches are replete with references to the terrible hand he was dealt by Obama and the many mistakes of the predecessor he has said will go down in history as “the worst president ever.”

Given all that, it’s fascinating and more than a bit awkward to listen to Power and Rhodes, in a joint interview for the new Global Politico, our weekly podcast on world affairs, try to come to terms with the explosive consequences of Trump’s presidency on all they spent eight years working for. Both are scathing when it comes to Trump’s turn away from specific Obama priorities like the TPP, the Iran deal and the opening with Cuba that Rhodes personally negotiated, as well as what they see as his administration’s broader attack on the international institutions, promotion of democratic values and Western alliances that have been at the heart of both parties’ foreign policies since the end of the Cold War.

“What Trump has done is in some ways not surprising. He’s partially rolled back Cuba, he’s pulled out of Paris, he’s threatened to kill the Iran deal but not done it. But what’s been worse to watch, I think, is underneath that, the hollowing out of the State Department, the defunding of all the types of programs that Samantha and I fought to get money for … the kind of unseen elements of American foreign policy that underpin the liberal international order, that’s where the year has been much worse than I imagined,” Rhodes says. “I anticipated him taking aim at some of our legacy accomplishments, but it’s more this disavowal of an entire approach to the world.”

For her part, Power sees Trump as the antithesis of Obama when it comes to foreign policy: “holding our allies in contempt, ripping up international treaties, showing our word means nothing, and then demanding that people do what we say.” She says Trump is “just draining money from the bank, with needless insults and gratuitous steps away from things that really seem derived more from a formula of how can we do the opposite of what Barack Obama did, than even a considered, coherent approach.”

She also has a few tough words for Trump’s embattled secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. “Can anybody articulate what our current secretary of state is trying to achieve in the world, beyond the number of jobs he’s trying to cut at the State Department?” Power told me. “I have no idea.”

It is hard to disagree with any of this criticism, and yet I came away thinking they had still not fully come to terms with Trump’s win—and what their own “complacency,” as Power put it at one point, might have had to do with it.

Rhodes had memorably spent much of the Obama presidency casting himself and the president he served in the role of scourge of the Washington foreign policy establishment, blaming them for decades of pointless, unsuccessful interventions in the Middle East, including, but not limited to, the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a long New York Times Magazine profile of him released in 2016, Rhodes dismissively called them “The Blob,” and cast the Obama foreign policy challenge as one of repudiating their conventional wisdoms. But of course, Obama started out castigating Washington for many of the same policy failures that Trump would eventually blame on him, and the film ends with Obama acknowledging in a speech to veterans that he is the first U.S. president ever to serve two full terms in office with the country at war.

So did The Blob look any better to Rhodes now, I asked, with Trump seeking to blow up both parties’ settled beliefs about foreign policy? Perhaps he and Obama were closer than they thought to the Washington mainstream. And besides, I noted, many of the hawkish, national security-minded Republicans whom Rhodes once disdained have formed the core of the #NeverTrump resistance from within the president's own party.

Sure, he allows, “The Blob and I have more in common than some people might think”—even if he sticks to his view of the Iraq war as a foreign policy disaster that flowed from a Washington whose default setting is to advocate military intervention in response to foreign policy challenges. At least, as he put it to me, both the hawks of the George W. Bush administration and the doves of the Obama administration “were all for the liberal international order.”

***

If Trump’s looming victory—and the obliviousness of the protagonists to this impending catastrophe—is the haunting theme of the film, Syria is its agonized subplot.

Power made her name as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of an account of the Balkans genocide, “A Problem From Hell,” and she describes herself as tormented and sleepless over the Obama administration’s failure to stop the fighting in Syria. She fought and lost numerous battles inside the Obama White House over Syria, pushing efforts to arm Syrian rebels from early on and for more explicit U.S. military intervention—steps Obama resisted throughout. Instead, Secretary of State John Kerry, a Power ally in the internal disputes, is shown in the film fruitlessly meeting over and over again with the Russians, the outside power that did choose to intervene, in a pointless effort to negotiate a peace in Syria before time runs out on the Obama administration.

“There’s no issue that we’ve worked on where there’s such a divergence,” Power says at one point in the film. “Certainly what is happening in Syria is beyond frustrating. There’s no issue where my thoughts and ideas have made such a marginal impact on desperate people.”

Here her split with Obama and Rhodes was an enduring one. Rhodes had started out as an advocate of doing more in Syria as well, but by the end says he adopted Obama’s view that the U.S. could do little to influence the outcome of a conflict that, while tragic, was ultimately not in the American national interest to try to resolve by force of arms. Not only that, but Rhodes said in our interview he thought Obama had even made a mistake by this standard in continuing the ongoing war in Afghanistan—a conflict that is now in its 17th year to which President Trump has recently decided to send still more troops in essentially an open-ended commitment.

“I have to apply that lesson to everything,” Rhodes told me, “and I feel like there are diminishing returns about what we are accomplishing in Afghanistan.”

It can be hard even to have such a second-guessing conversation for the two Democrats amid the bigger disruptions of the Trump presidency. Their fights with each other were real and significant, reflecting enduring divides within their own party and the American public about the uses and abuses of American power. But Trump, with his crude portrayal of “American carnage” at home and a Darwinian world abroad abounding with bad deals, untrustworthy allies and scammers trying to take advantage of our generosity, has made that debate awfully hard to publicly surface.

When I asked Power and Rhodes about the September 2016 fight recounted in the film over how optimistic a final speech Obama should present to the United Nations, for example, they were both struggling to fit it into today’s context, the Trump context.

“How do you meet the reality—the negative reality in the world—without actually becoming Donald Trump?” Rhodes asked. “You can overstate the troubles in the world in a way that actually suits the Trumps of the world.”

Power had disagreed at the time, but now she and Rhodes did not seem so far apart after all.

Recalling their fight, she said, “How do we meet people where they are, with that fear that we know that has been generated, in part by lies, and by our politics, but in part by actual legitimate fear and events, and how do we meet them where they are without indulging that fear, and without giving in to that cynicism, and that darkness?”

It was a good question, even if it was clear that we do not yet know how to answer it.

