In baseball parlance, they consisted mainly of hitting ‘singles’ and ‘doubles’ – ending an unpopular war in Iraq, normalising US relations with Cuba, signing a nuclear deal with Iran. Yet, in office, Obama’s foreign policy achievements were neither particularly transformative nor inspiring. Bush’s presidency (2001–9) and its catastrophes an end to America’s moral transgressions in the War on Terror – torture, extrajudicial detention, abuse a less bellicose, more conciliatory approach to allies and enemies alike. Thus, Rhodes was privy to, and occasionally shaped, the president’s thinking on foreign policy across his eight years in office (2009–17).īarack Obama promised a new beginning in American foreign policy: thoughtful, idealistic, cosmopolitan a clean break from the neo-conservative adventurism of George W. Rhodes joined the fledgling Obama campaign in the spring of 2007 and quickly rose to Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications through an uncanny ability to anticipate what Obama would want to say or do on a particular issue – a kind of ‘mind meld’ with the president. The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House, by speechwriter Ben Rhodes, is a serious and observational account of working as a part of the president’s foreign policy team, but penned with an eye to history and the author’s place in it. Two recently released memoirs by former Obama staffers grapple with this reality in very different ways. For those who worked in the Obama administration, leaving the White House must have presented deeper maladies: the bewildering success of a reviled political opponent and a profound sense of missed opportunities. Gareth Evans diagnosed the affliction of leaving government as relevance deprivation syndrome. 2022 Calibre Essay Prize Winner and Shortlist.
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