Ben Rhodes is the Barack Obama speechwriter and national security staffer who helped drive the Iran deal and negotiated the thaw between the US and Cuba. Over time, he earned his fair share of enemies. Indeed, he has the tire marks on his back to prove it.

Last month, days before Donald Trump’s decision to junk the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Observer and Ronan Farrow reported on the efforts of Black Cube, an Israeli intelligence-gathering firm, to discredit Rhodes and other Obama administration officials – just as Black Cube abetted Harvey Weinstein in his attempt to silence his victims. Five years ago, voices from the Pentagon derided Rhodes and others as jihadis in the White House after they opposed continued aid to Egypt in the aftermath of the military takeover.

In The World As It Is, Rhodes tells his side of the story. As to be expected, he gives a full-throated defense of the JCPOA and seeks to extricate himself from the Benghazi debacle. What makes the book truly illuminating, however, are its quotes, barbs and reflexive disdain for flyover country.

Right off the bat, Rhodes homes in on the Clintons’ mistaken belief that the 2008 Democratic nomination was theirs as a matter of right. He writes of how the late Richard Holbrooke, a former United Nations ambassador and Clinton confidant, reportedly kept “a list of everyone” who went to work for Obama, in the mistaken belief Hillary Clinton would have the opportunity to settle scores and Holbrooke would be named secretary of state.

As for former vice-president Joe Biden, the one Democrat who could have defeated Trump, Rhodes tags him as an “unguided missile”, prone to press the flesh of those he met while walking the West Wing’s hallways. Imagine, someone who is human. And likable.

What makes the book truly illuminating are its quotes, barbs and reflexive disdain for flyover country

Oppositional foreign leaders likewise get zinged. Boris Johnson caught Rhodes’ wrath after hypothesizing that Obama swapped out an Oval Office bust of Winston Churchill for Martin Luther King on account of the “part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender”. Obama labels the foreign secretary as Britain’s Trump. “With better hair,” Rhodes adds.

Rhodes quotes Obama complaining that negotiating with Benjamin Netanyahu was like dealing with the Republicans. Rhodes tweaks Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s former president, as “spotlight loving” for initiating discussions of a no-fly zone in Libya.

The book also takes a swing at Vladimir Putin, and the affinity in some conservative circles for the Russian strongman. Think Alabama’s Roy Moore, California’s Dana Rohrabacher and Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan. Obama rightly opines that “some of these folks … have more in common with Putin than with me”. Rhodes labels Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, “unpatriotic” for refusing to unequivocally condemn Russian electoral interference in 2016.

Rhodes does his best to sell the Iran deal while hoping to give the administration cover. To blunt criticisms that the JCPOA represented a sudden policy reversal, he offers a chronology of sorts.



He recounts how even during Obama’s battle for the Democratic nomination, the then senator expressed a willingness to meet with Iran and Cuba, without preconditions. Rhodes then ascribes the June 2013 election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s president as a catalyst for negotiations later that year in Oman. In Rhodes’ telling, the Iran deal is an organic culmination of Obama’s promises.

But that’s not the whole story. Rhodes glosses over the fact that Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at state, met the Iranians in 2012 when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in office. Rhodes also omits that Israel discovered the 2013 meetings after monitoring American aircraft in Oman – before Obama had told Netanyahu. Suffice to say, that did not improve an already toxic relationship.

Obama and Rhodes aboard Air Force One. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Understandably, Obama and Rhodes are alarmed by Brexit, Trump and the erosion of the existing order. Rhodes recounts how Obama was disturbed by a New York Times column which posited that tribalism undergirds our politics and that the Democrats’ message sounded awfully like John Lennon’s Imagine, a pastiche of gauzy cosmopolitan bromides. Obama remarked: “Maybe we pushed too far … Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” Left unsaid by Rhodes was that the Obamans’ upstairs-downstairs coalition was tribal in its own way, an alliance that grew further divorced from Middle America as time passed.

In describing the Republicans’ 2010 takeover of the House, Rhodes expresses his surprise at the magnitude of the loss, adding: “Our people stayed home, and [Sarah] Palin’s had turned out.” He lacks a serious discussion of the nexus between Obamacare and the Democrats’ rout.



Rhodes stands on firmer ground when he examines the contradictions within American foreign policy, or, as he puts it, how “reality contributes to occasional schizophrenia”. As one example, Rhodes observes how the anti-communist Afghan freedom fighters of the 1980s morphed into 21st-century jihadists.

To Rhodes’ credit, he also acknowledges that Obama’s “reset” with Russia did not work. Looming on the horizon is the 2021 expiration date of the Start Treaty, which limits each country’s nuclear arsenal. Right now, no talks are ongoing. A renewed arms race may be imminent.

Like a doctor taught to do no harm, Rhodes repeats Obama’s aphorism, “don’t do stupid shit”. That is easier said than done.

Obama may have won a Nobel peace prize for simply succeeding George W Bush, but he left his infamous “red line” promise in Syria in tatters and the once vaunted Arab spring as a bloody memory. Trump believes he too is entitled to a prize for merely marketing as a success his summit with North Korea while doing his best to undo Obama’s legacy. Meanwhile, American influence continues to erode.