I'm much more sympathetic to Ricks on this than to Rhodes. As a former Foreign Service Officer, Rhodes' description of 27 year olds who've never done anything but be around political campaigns was precisely accurate for White House "Assistants to the Presidents" but not so much for journalists. Sure things may have changed in the decades since but Ricks' description of Rhodes as "McGeorge Bundy meets Lee Atwater" sounds bang on the money to me.
The (very clear) fact that Obama, at some point, took a good hard look at the American foreign policy establishment and thought "Ohhh... you people are idiots." is one of the most charming features of his presidency, and also the bit responsible for an awful lot of his foreign policy successes. It's something I'm really going to miss.
See, I don't get why Obama's foreign policy is a success. In the Middle East and North Africa, the foreign policy successes are a) Iran, and b) nothing else. Every place else is spinning out of control. Iraq is fucked. Syria is fucked. Libya is fucked. Saudi Arabia is bombing the shit out of Yemen. Egypt returned to its status quo ante, but only after a violent crackdown. Israel is completely out of control in Palestine. The flood of refugees from Syria has the potential to destabilize Europe, and elect a bevy of right-wing extremists. Maybe there's nothing the administration could have done to prevent any of this, but it sure doesn't merit the label "success".
I didn't say everything he did was spectacular and magical or that the world is suddenly a paradise. But he has had successes, and often as a result of doing stuff that they hated.
(Also whenever that point happened it had to have been when he was already president, because some of that stuff absolutely reflects that establishment conventional wisdom. Which, I guess, is part of what you get when Clinton is the SoS, but still...)
What were his successes? Iran, arguably, as the verdict is not truly in yet. Not being as bad as Bush doesn't equal success.
Resisting pressure to make all those situations, and Ukraine, much worse does count for something. I agree that "success" is maybe a litle much, but avoiding the disasters that Villagers are pushing from every direction and in every part of the world, well, sometimes that's the best that can be done.
"Not utterly failing" is not success either. On the "did things get worse on my watch?" scale, Obama has not exactly been stellar.
Cuba and Iran are both pretty big deals, as is the climate deal (for all its flaws and probable futility). "The middle east is sort of a mess!" isn't a great criticism of his foreign policy in general, I'd say, and as bad as things are there he didn't really make it worse, and in a bunch of situations where I think it's pretty clear that he was not making it worse in direct opposition to the foreign policy establishment's "make it a whole lot worse right now!" expert advice.
He seems to have done a decent job preventing a bunch of bad situations (Ukraine) from continuing to get worse once they became a problem. Relationships with China have been strengthened a fair bit. The major successes seem to me to be low key diplomatic ones and heading off problems before they become genuine ones (or even just keeping the US less involved with problems that couldn't be headed off), rather than things that are dramatic or flashy. But that's both his style in general, and also a lot preferable when it comes to foreign policy.
I generally agree. This stuff is most of why I feel like he is a better President than I expected him to be, and probably better than America deserves.
More like pick one member of the FP elite who has ever in public written that the president should do something he's not doing that is a good idea.
FWIW Tom Ricks' The Generals is really good, and also makes the point that the current quality of our army officers is low and has been since WWII. He's definitely one of the good guys.
I was told there would be a curve.
This is a gem.
I tend to agree with Carp that not caving to the pressure to do something stupid counts for something.
Joshua Foust has an interesting reaction, with plenty of links worth visiting.
Joshua Foust has an interesting reaction,
That is a vicious and entertaining take-down (and convincing, though I haven't gotten around to reading the profile).
It's too late in the day to read the OP about this guy but I did appreciate the literary criticism in 15's link. Maybe it's too neat to assume that people susceptible to DeLillo's oracle act might be gullible in other ways; maybe it's all too true.
Rhodes presumably thinks of the article as a job advertisement for his next gig in California (the article helpfully mentions that his wife wants to move there).
The profile is strange in that it seems to both ridicule and fawn over its subject.
The link in 15 made me wonder in passing whether its author, like me, had not made it past White Noise to any other DeLillo novels. Also, big wince:
They write not to elucidate anything, or to convey meaning or emotion, but to fluff their own colleagues at other MFA programs who will lavish them with praise for being so florid. Nabokov could string together vicious, cutting clauses in his sentences that would make you re-read them several times just to marvel at their virtuosity.
Nabokov! There's a writer worth fluffing!
Is it okay to use "fluff" as an alternative to "puff"? Not sure it's okay.
The dysphemism treadmill in action.
Not having read the profile, did he really refer to himself as Holden C? That's hard to believe. Ben Rhodes is the Runner, except instead of getting into Princeton at 30, he got into the White House at 30. Good book, by the way.
"In recent years, few things have been as exhaustively debated or written about than the Iran deal."
That's boy wonder's opening sentence in his reply on Medium. As exhaustively: are there degrees of exhaustive?
I don't know enough about the Kremlinology of the foreign policy press to say, but Jeffrey Goldberg--who, despite being a hawkish, pro-Israel reporter, is friendly with the administration and feels like that article accused him of carrying water for the Obama administration--is livid:
In addition to my concerns about Samuels's deployment of unsubstantiated allegations in the piece, and about the obvious lack of fact-checking, I consider it a strange lapse on the part of the Times Magazine to keep from its readers the fact that Samuels was an ardent opponent of the Iran deal, and was advocating, as early as 2009, for the bombing of Iran. This doesn't disqualify him from writing about Rhodes--if anything, this disclosure would have made the article more interesting, if he had leveled with the readers about his actual views.
Laura Rozen, whose company I'd prefer to keep over Goldberg's, is also going apeshit.
Do all apes fling their poop or just chimpanzees and humans?
Shed a tear, passerby, for Beegle Beagle.