Biden, Trump, and Washington’s Wishful Thinking

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The stakes of a second Trump term are very clear to Ben Rhodes, who served for eight years as one of Barack Obama’s closest advisers on national security. “Trump’s blend of strongman nationalism and isolationism could create a permission structure for aggression,” Rhodes writes in a new piece for Foreign Affairs. But being clear about the threat posed by Trump does not mean avoiding criticism of Biden’s foreign policy. If Biden does win a second term, Rhodes argues, he should set out a new strategy—one that takes the world as it is, not as Washington wishes it would be.

Ben, thanks so much for the powerful piece in our new issue—it’s called “A Foreign Policy for the World As It Is”—and for joining me today.

BEN RHODES

Thanks, Dan.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s a lot to get to in the piece and on the state of the world, but I want to start a bit atypically, at least for us. You served at very senior levels of the National Security Council for eight years as one of President Obama’s closest advisers on foreign policy. You saw a lot in those eight years. But you’re still, I think, widely seen—and justifiably, even with those eight years at the pinnacle of the U.S. national security establishment—as somewhat of a skeptic, or even a critic, of what you once famously called “the blob.” If there is a blob, Foreign Affairs is certainly a part of it.

BEN RHODES

Adjacent.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s right, that’s right. And we are sitting right now in the Council on Foreign Relations, so you have come, in some sense, to the belly of the blob—bravely, of course.

BEN RHODES

Yes.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

But on a more serious note, when you look at the national security establishment as it exists in the United States—you’ve been a part of it, you’ve observed it for a long time—what are the deficiencies and blind spots that you were trying to get at in that critique and that you’ve in some ways been pushing against for much of your career?

BEN RHODES

I guess one way to put this, right, is—the very quick summary of my trajectory would be that I was here in New York on 9/11 on a different career trajectory. I was working in local politics, I was getting an MFA in fiction writing, which is a whole other story. But I witnessed the 9/11 attacks and that propelled me down to D.C. I wanted to just be involved in the next chapter. And I actually ended up getting a job as a speechwriter and multipurpose aide to a guy named Lee Hamilton, who ran the Wilson Center (the Woodrow Wilson Center) and had been a member of Congress for 34 years. And I really learned a lot in the kind of six years I worked for him. He co-chaired the 9/11 Commission. He co-chaired the Iraq Study Group with Jim Baker. And the Wilson Center is, you know, a hub for think tank activity in D.C. And I learned about, like, the good. You know, actually, I’m not all against the national security establishment. Lee Hamilton to me reflects the kind of wisdom and experiential-based pragmatism of people who work in national security. He’s an internationalist.

Yet at that time during those years, you saw the catastrophe of the Iraq War unfolding, right. And so I began to develop some real grievance, if not anger, at the sense that the people who were supposed to know better misled people like me. Not Lee Hamilton, by the way, who was a critic of the decision to go to war in Iraq, but people like Colin Powell, who I saw as a hero. And I say that because what got me into politics was that sense that the politics of this all had gone wrong—that we sat in think tanks and wrote papers and the politicians like George Bush ignored them. And so I went to work for Obama at the beginning of 2007 precisely because he was kind of an insurgent challenger to the thinking that had gotten us into Iraq.

And you’re right that I sat at the heart of this whole enterprise for eight years in the White House. But as strange as it sounds, I still felt like an outsider. And actually I truly believe that Obama in a lot of ways was a bit of an outsider, and, you know, he was willing to do things—whether it was an Iran deal or whether it was a Cuba opening—that tested the boundaries of, I think, what the normal guardrails are around how much American foreign policy can change.

So what I was talking about with the blob toward the end of the Obama administration when there was a lot of criticism of things that Obama was doing—to me it is essentially just a reflexive groupthink that has two core characteristics that I was challenging. One was a default belief in America’s capacity to shape events, a kind of permanent late-90s view of American primacy that if you just pulled this lever, you’ll fix this situation in the Middle East, right. And then related to that was a reflexive interventionism. The test of America caring about something is entirely about whether we’re willing to use military force or deploy troops or impose ever more sanctions, you know.

And those two things are very connected, right—that we can solve all these problems through action because of our primacy, and that using force or sanctions is ultimately the test of whether you’re serious or not. And I think that mindset unfortunately continues. So I say this from a perspective not of like a “burn it down” person, but as someone who thinks American leadership is really important, and therefore would like to see course corrections that are bigger than the ones that have been made.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s a good segue to the piece. The piece is in some ways a sympathetic critique of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. It tries to weigh the records, recommend some steps for the months ahead—and for a second term, should there be one. Let’s start with what you see Biden doing right. You write in the piece, and I’m quoting you here, that “Navigating the rough currents of the world, the Biden administration has often seemed to embody the contradictions of this dynamic, with one foot in the past, yearning nostalgically for American primacy, and one foot in the future, adjusting to the emerging world as it is.” So if you look at the positive side of that ledger, looking at three and a half years of a Biden foreign policy, what do you think it’s done right?

BEN RHODES

Yeah, I mean, I think I kind of arrived, Dan, with your help—I mean, you were really good in nudging in this direction or testing this assumption—but I arrived at that vision of two feet walking in different directions, essentially. And the one that I wanted to praise—and actually lay out for people, because I actually think sometimes it’s hard to kind of pierce the noise of the politics of foreign policy—is when they have adjusted to and absorbed the changed reality, right. And so the examples I’d give of this, for instance, are I think they understood coming in that particularly after Trump—and also, kind of, the longer-term trajectory of geopolitics—that they weren’t going to be able to dominate these big multilateral institutions, and they weren’t going to be able to kind of muscle major initiatives through. That what they needed to do is kind of rebuild the different islands of American alliances, right.

And so a lot of focus on making the transatlantic institutions relevant again—that they were doing before Ukraine—but I think that work that they did on NATO and on key European relationships paid off when they needed to rally everybody around the invasion of Ukraine. I think probably even more interestingly, their approach to Asia has been to kind of thread together different groups of countries. They’ve really tried to create, depending on the issue, different groups of countries that could cooperate, you know, on security issues in northeast Asia, on defense issues across this whole region, on issues around energy and investment and technology. And then importantly on technology, they have I think a more coherent competitive approach to China, which is they’re prioritizing things.

You know, Trump kind of threw the book at China with a bunch of tariffs. And Biden’s kept some of that in place, but he’s also focused more relentlessly on high-tech sector issues, using a combination of export controls and investment restrictions to try to create a bit of a lead for American artificial intelligence. And so there’s a method to the trade war and regime of export controls. That’s an administration kind of looking out into the future and seeing, where do we want a comparative advantage.

And the last thing I’d say is that I think what they’ve done well—and Jake Sullivan is a friend of both of ours—done a lot of work with Brian Deese, who is on the National Economic Council, too, and thinking about how does domestic policy interact with foreign policy. And I think the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act—the kind of dubiously named Inflation Reduction Act— there’s your tech and climate change foreign policy in domestic legislation, because the CHIPS Act kind of works hand in glove with the China policy. We’re trying to build advanced manufacturing and semiconductors here in the United States at the same time they’re trying to compete with China. The IRA here is our approach to meeting our Paris Agreement climate targets. So those are examples on alliances and tech and domestic legislation working with foreign policy where I see them—again, seeing the world as it is and trying to figure out how to reposition the United States for that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And what about the other side of the ledger? You’ve been critical in other pieces and other things you said, and you are fairly critical in this piece, of the ways in which Biden seems to be kind of stuck in the past. “America is back,” as you noted, is the kind of initial slogan for his foreign policy; but that, in some ways, has let him just make some missteps in key ways.

BEN RHODES

The overall critique I’d make is that there’s a certain muscle memory. Obama used to tell me something that always stuck with me because it’s a pretty good guide to politicians: that every politician’s strength is usually also his weakness. And again, just to be fair, and not just applying it to Joe Biden, that was true of Obama. Part of his strength was how calm he was and how he never got rattled, but sometimes you needed to kind of get his juices flowing, right.

Biden’s strength is his experience—but it’s also his weakness, because there’s so much muscle memory in that. And the muscle memory was formed in the kind of politics and foreign policy of the 90s and aughts when the United States did have this kind of primacy, and there were these kind of baked-in assumptions about U.S. foreign policy.

And to me, Gaza is—it’s not the only area where I’ve been critical, but to me, it embodies a lot of the problems in the sense that after October 7, there was understandably going to be a need for solidarity with Israel. There’s understandably going to be an Israeli response to such a horrific terrorist attack. But you saw a kind of reflexive complete embrace of Israel despite immediate warning signs. This is the most far-right government in Israel’s history; they were immediately making statements that foreshadowed, I think, how brutal this military campaign would be. And the administration has just not been able to adjust to that, and we’re eight months into it.

And what’s interesting to watch is that their policy feels very conventional. It’s: “We give Israel whatever military support it wants, there’s kind of a pipeline, it flows. We don’t mess with that. We try to work behind the scenes to get them to listen to us.” And they’re not, because it’s Bibi Netanyahu. And that was eminently predictable, because for eight years in the Obama administration, he didn’t listen to us. And I was trying to figure out, well, what is that about? Why does that happen? And to me, I kind of boiled it down to three ways. I know it’s important to think about grand strategy, but to me, actually, politics enters into foreign policy more than people would like to admit. And so to me, there are kind of three areas where I see their actions on Gaza, and some other things, being guided by that kind of muscle memory of American primacy—of an era that maybe actually never even really existed.

One is the kind of default: the politics of national security are, “Don’t pick a fight with the Israeli prime minister,” you know. And anybody who’s worked in American foreign policy and the nexus of that in politics kind of knows what that’s about, that—we’re in New York, there’s a primary I think today, right, where AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] is spending $14 million to defeat a single member of the House, right. That’s a piece of what I’m talking about, it’s not the only one, but—so I think Biden, and I made a point in the article, it’s not just Israel. I negotiated the Cuba normalization. He did nothing to return to the Obama Cuba policy, despite the fact that that entire administration was there for that opening. I think that was largely because he didn’t want to pick a fight with Bob Menendez, Chair of the [Senate] Foreign Relations Committee at the time; Marco Rubio. His Venezuela policy, which was inherited from Trump and was a complete disaster; you know, Maduro was getting stronger because of all these sanctions that we put on Venezuela. He was very slow to change that. So it wasn’t just Israel. I think there’s a kind of congressional view of foreign policy that Biden sometimes subscribes to that limits your options for, say, pressuring Israel to change its tactics.

Second is maximalist objectives, right. And the shorthand here is, the United States gets in trouble, I think, when it bites off more than it can chew or it sets a goal that cannot be achieved. Because then you’re stuck between trying to pour resources into pursuing an unachievable goal or you get embarrassed because you can’t achieve your objectives. The War on Terror is that, writ large. And again, Gaza—the Israeli objective of destroying Hamas is self-evidently unachievable. And not because of them, but I think on Ukraine, in a weird way—and I mention this in the piece—because of their supporters, there was so much triumphalism that, basically, Putin’s going to be defeated totally and humiliated in Ukraine, and all of Ukrainian territories are going to be retaken—a goal that I would love to see achieved, but I don’t think is achievable. That’s kind of gotten them into some trouble, too. Again, not so much of their own creation, but because of, I think, the expectations imposed on them.

And then the third one, which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about since the Obama years, and it’s a bit different, is this inability to look from the outside in—particularly from a global South perspective—at the United States And if the global South is increasingly kind of the swing region of the world between these different blocs—the China-led bloc, us, the Russians—if we’re not able to see ourselves from their perspective, we’re going to fail in a lot of very important areas, including areas like climate and technology that are emerging.

And I just, you know, would ask anybody in Washington to think about how our rhetoric about the rules-based international order looks to a global South audience when we’re trashing the International Criminal Court because they’re going after Israeli leadership, or we’re continuing to provide weapons to Israel over the objections of our own laws that would suggest that we should be at least pausing those shipments. So those are three categories that I created to try to understand where I had disagreements with Biden.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There was a theory of U.S. influence over Israel that people in the administration laid out in those first weeks after October 7, which was essentially, “If we show this solidarity now, if we hug Bibi close, we will be able to influence decisions later on.” As you point out, these were all people who had been burned by Netanyahu many times over the course of the Obama years and earlier in their career. I think it was Biden himself who was in Israel when they announced, against the wishes and recommendations and urging of the Obama White House, that they were permitting more settlements in 2010 or something, so it had been very personal for him.

It’s somewhat surprising they weren’t prepared for that kind of turn in the months after October 7. But as you try to play out the counterfactual, if you could recommend going back and finding some alternate theory of the case for those months, what might that have been, and do you think it would have gotten us to a dramatically different outcome? Or is this a case where the limits of American power, for reasons that you lay out, are just much greater than they might have been 20 years ago?

BEN RHODES

Yeah. I mean, first of all, I do think this kind of—I mean, they literally called it the “hug Bibi” strategy, that’s not a—it seems like that would be something that people imposed on them, but that was actually their theory. And you heard this a lot in private; Dan, I’m sure you heard this. And look, I don’t claim that these things are easy, but I do think—I’ll be candid, I think Biden believed that Obama let himself get at odds with Netanyahu too much. And there was a bit of a, ”I’m going to show you that this is a better way.”

And again, I—this can sound like “the Obama guy,” so take it with a grain of salt—but I do think that oftentimes we can overlearn lessons of previous administrations. We did this, I’m sure, in the Obama years, too. And so I think he was almost committed to this theory beyond normal, in some ways, because it was like, “I kind of thought we got too at odds with the Israelis. That’s not how you deal with them. I know how to deal with them. You get further with them by embracing them than by being critical.” Clearly, that has not worked, because I think part of what is missing is an accounting for just how extreme Netanyahu and his government have become. When I have friends, as you might imagine, and they’re like, “Ben, why are you so critical of Israel?” I’m always like, “I just make them—I understand your concerns about some things I say, but I need you to reckon with this government, you know, with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich basically having a veto over anything the government does,” right. Because if you think of it that way and not as, kind of, the Israeli government we would like to see—I mean, a lot of American policy is designed with an ideal Israeli government in mind, and that’s just not who’s running things.

Now, I do think things would be different; I truly believe that if the United States had signaled much earlier—and look, I probably would have signaled even earlier than some people would want that things like military assistance were conditional on the conduct of the Israeli military operation, that the United States would be willing to vote with the UN Security Council on behalf of a ceasefire, the various tools like that that you could use. I think that if the United States had kind of gotten there, let’s say, by the end of the calendar year, when it was already apparent the scale of destruction in Gaza, and also frankly already apparent that there was not a theory behind the military operation—I mean, Bibi still can’t articulate what Gaza is going to look like in three months, six months, or a year, you know. I think it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, for the Israeli government to continue at the scale that it was at.

And so I don’t know that it would have led to—it certainly wouldn’t have led to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but I think it would have mitigated the kind of extremes of this military operation and probably hastened its end by this spring. And that’s a guess, so I don’t presume that this is easy. But I will say that what Bibi thrives upon is the sense that there’s an open spigot from the Americans, and that, “I can do anything, including fighting with the American president, while maintaining that open spigot.” And if that is turned off, that’s a big problem for them. It’s a big problem in their politics. Because Bibi relies politically on his capacity to say, “See, I can do both. I can pick a fight with this guy and make my right wing happy, and I can keep the relationship sound, keep the assistance flowing, which makes the center happy.”

I would say that the lesson I learned from the Obama years was different than hugging Bibi. It was that when you are going to differ with Bibi, you have to go all the way. And that’s what we did on the Iran deal. And look, obviously Donald Trump got elected, so that ended up hitting that buzzsaw, so I—that’s always looming. But I think that the lesson there is that you can’t get caught in no man’s land with Netanyahu. You either are hugging him or you’re just willing to accept the full break and say, “We have a different view. Our policy is going to be driven by our judgments, not yours.” Because even now you see the administration trying to kind of fit its own policy into a framework that it doesn’t agree with. Because I think they would like to see this war end. But because Bibi needs this room to maneuver to say that he’s destroying Hamas, we have to say, “Well, there’s an Israeli proposal for a cease-fire.” Bibi himself doesn’t support the Israeli proposal. Hamas somehow gets a vote; precisely because I don’t like or trust Hamas, I don’t think they should get a vote in when the war ends.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The thing that strikes me is that for all of the warranted focus on cease-fire, there’s been much less on the humanitarian access dimension. And for all the reasons that you lay out, a cease-fire is complicated. It depends on negotiations with—in very complicated circumstances—with a counter-party that has its own interests and probably wants the war to go on for various reasons. The humanitarian access seems much more straightforward, and I don’t totally understand why, you know, Samantha Power isn’t sitting at the border of Gaza just kind of waving trucks through and insisting that the Israelis get serious about expanding access. I mean, that to me is the part that I can’t understand, even given those constraints.

BEN RHODES

I don’t understand that either, Dan, and I’ll give you an example that I think makes the point that pressure works, which is there have been one or two times in recent months where there has been an uptick at least in humanitarian access. One was you had the strike that killed the World Central Kitchen workers, and you had all this outrage in Washington because it was aid workers—strangely, because people knew José Andrés. And Biden called Bibi and said, “You better give humanitarian access or else,” and they put out a readout to that effect. And the next day, the Israelis announced a bunch of crossings, and for a time, stuff started to go across in greater numbers, right. Well, that wasn’t hugging him. That was showing if you call the guy and say, “We’re cutting you off if you don’t allow humanitarian access,” they allowed humanitarian access. I think there was also a bit of an uptick around, frankly, the ICC and the ICJ week, you know, because I do think the Israelis can say they don’t care, but they do care that the two kind of highest courts in the world are looking at a war crime that is expressly starvation used as a weapon of war.

And so, you’re right. I think instead—and this is another microcosm, I think—instead of trying to fix the humanitarian access issue where it matters, which is at border crossings, trucks getting in, they tried to build this pier, right. Which, it’s kind of in miniature why this policy is—why build a several hundred million dollar pier in some complicated logistics operation to kind of suit the Israeli government’s desire to have all these restrictions, when you could just roll a bunch of trucks across the border for a fraction of the cost and get more aid in anyway? So I do think if the objective is on saving lives, averting famine, avoiding the war crime of starvation as a weapon of war, you would expect to see a lot more focus, diplomatically and politically, on those crossings.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The theory behind the Iran deal—or one of the theories behind the Iran deal—is that it could precipitate a real shift in regional order in the Middle East. That you would have, instead of Iran as this kind of force of chaos, an Iran that was much more—had better relations with its neighbors, was less of a threat to Israel, was less of a threat to the United States. You can certainly blame the Trump administration for withdrawing from JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] and ending limits on Iran’s nuclear activity. But the reality we’re in today just seems so, so far from the hopes of that moment in 2015 when the Iran deal was completed. We’re dealing with a very different reality. When you look at the—stepping back from just Israel, and looking at that regional picture, do you see any path forward given where we are with Iran, given the focus on Saudi normalization, which seems to be the kind of thrust of both Biden and Trump regional policy right now?

BEN RHODES

Yeah. I mean, I think one way to think about the Iran deal that’s very much in line with this piece is, I think Obama was someone who saw that we were moving from one chapter to another. The period of American dominance of global affairs was ending for a lot of reasons. That’s an entire other podcast. And that we wanted to kind of manage that process, to preserve as much American influence as possible, and to shape the next version of the world order; particularly on issues that we really cared about, right, like the rise of China, climate change, new technologies, et cetera.

And so it was less about the Iran deal being a totally new order as it was, like, we’re going to kind of start trying to close some accounts here, you know. What could derail us from actually doing the things we want in the world? Well, if Iran gets a nuclear weapon or if there’s a war with Iran that upends our capacity to do other things, and it could be catastrophic for the region. So let’s try to close this account, and then, you know, yes, hopefully that can evolve into a more stable regional dynamic. If you remove the most destabilizing factor—a potential Iranian nuclear weapon—it creates some space for negotiation; not just between us and the countries in the Middle East but also amongst each other. We would have supported, as the Biden administration did, say, the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement.

And I will add, by the way, Cuba was the same thing. It was not just—the benefit of the Cuba deal wasn’t just that now things can improve for the people of Cuba. It was this is a huge open sore in our Latin America policy, and it affects everything from the Venezuela policy to the border to our ability to work with center-left governments down there. Let’s close this account because we need Latin America for other things now. We don’t want to have our whole Latin America policy be a fight about Cuba.

I make that point because it wasn’t that these were idealized outcomes. They were like, why are these taking up so much of our time when they’re not working; these approaches, these sanctions approaches, these kind of endless conflicts, that I think are rooted in—we want to talk about blob—the psychology of Iran and Cuba. Any country that embarrasses the United States, it’s like we have a vendetta against that country for the rest of time. There’s an incredibly outsized amount of time that has been spent on Cuba and Iran since 1959, 1979 that I think says something interesting about the psychology of the blob. But put that aside. I think right now I do believe we are on the precipice of this whole thing being on fire, right. You’ve got Gaza. We’re constantly trying to avoid the escalation with Hezbollah and Israel. You’ve got a naval battle in the Red Sea with the Houthis. You’ve got the Iranians really further along in their nuclear program—people don’t talk about this—than they’ve ever been before.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Like a week or two away from breakout, essentially.

BEN RHODES

If that had happened, by the way, in the Obama years, people would have been losing their minds. But that seems less dramatic than the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine. So in that context, I think just in Abraham Accords-ish foreign policy, it’s not going to work. You can’t just make peace with people who are already your friends, you know, which is—I mean, that’s what’s so strange to me, and I’ve been a pretty lonely critic of the Abraham Accords, but it’s not because I don’t support normalization with Israel. It’s because if part of what you’re trying to do is close some accounts in the Middle East and move on, which I think they want to do—Jake wrote about that in his piece for you last fall—you have to deal with your adversaries, too.

And so I still think that the best course is beginning that process with the nuclear program with the Iranians. And then if you can essentially freeze things where they are and kind of create some space for diplomacy, to try to build some more durable framework around limiting the Iranian nuclear program, and then focus the Abraham Accords less on deals with the Saudis around the future of the Palestinian issue—and probably, candidly, a U.S. recognition strategy for a Palestinian state that doesn’t rely entirely on a negotiation with an Israeli government that’s not interested in that. It’s going to be messy. But to me you have to try to limit America’s overextension in this region by sometimes—and this is, I think, a lesson in Israeli-Palestinian conflict—sometimes trying and failing is better than not trying at all, because you’re at least kind of managing things and you’re demilitarizing things. And so I’d like to see us, you know, get off the Abraham Accords–alone track and try to bring in issues related to Iran and the Palestinians in that conversation.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you see—this will be the last question on the Middle East because we are exemplifying the problem . . .

BEN RHODES

Yes, yes, of course.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

. . . of American foreign policy spending too much time in the Middle East here, but the administration still seems to have some sense that it can find a path forward with the Saudis, whether that’s a bilateral U.S.-Saudi deal or something that involves the Israelis as well. That could still, if you get a cease-fire, get you toward a two-state solution, kind of turn this into an opportunity for progress—this being the atrocities of October 7 and the war in Gaza. Do you see any prospect of that? Or, to you, are we going to return to some slightly worse version of the status quo that existed before October 7?

Ben Rhodes

It feels to me like we’re returning to a slightly worse version of the status quo. I will say, one on the Palestinians and then on Saudi, quickly. On the Palestinians, I believe that there needs to be a whole new paradigm in terms of how we think about our engagement with the Palestinians, which is, we kind of go to Ramallah, we talk to 87-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, and then try to get these Arab states to fund the Palestinian Authority. And the Arab states, by the way, understandably, are a bit tired of that because some of that money just disappears and these people don’t appear to have any credibility.

I think the United States needs to engage the Palestinian people—there is capable leadership there; there’s capable leadership in the Palestinian Authority; there’s capable leadership in Palestinian civil society—and actually get involved. The resources exist. There’s trillions of dollars in the Arab world, right. We need to help find the right people to build an alternative leadership to the PA or Hamas. And I actually think that’s a project where you really enlist the Arab states in design, not just in paying for it. And they may not want to do that, but I mean, that’s where you’ve got to stay on top of it, this issue, and it’s in their interest to have an alternative to a sclerotic PA or to Hamas.

I think with Saudi, [U.S. policymakers] have really been focused on the China dimension. I think that they have been scared by the Saudis and the Emiratis who play the field—and this might be a good transition to non–Middle East—that these guys are going to take their money, and they’re going to drift into the China orbit, and they’re joining the BRICS, and the Saudis are doing some transactions in renminbi (RMB), and they might buy Chinese artificial intelligence. I think that’s what they’re really focused on. And I’m not sure the deal is the best way to resolve that, because I don’t necessarily trust if the Saudis say, “We’ll use [the] dollar for transactions for 30 years,” there’s nothing enforcing that, you know. But I do get the—I have to acknowledge that that’s an understandable and worthy goal. But I think it’s like Turkey, right; these Gulf states are now not just Middle East powers, they’re global powers, medium powers, and there I do think there’s utility in separating out the issues instead of trying to shove everything into one normalization with Israel. What does your China RMB world transaction have to do with, you know, the Palestinians? We’re trying to shove too much into one deal, I think.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s take the opportunity for that transition to talking about China, which in some ways exemplifies a lot of the kind of pathologies that you were describing earlier when it comes to the way the national establishment approaches any problem. On the other hand, even in the Obama years, there was quite a change in views of China over the eight years of Obama’s time in power. Part of that was the failures of some of the initial ambitions when it came to cooperation with China—and I was there as a very junior State Department official at the first strategic and economic dialogue, which was supposed to be this example of how the United States and China could come together to manage global issues and cooperate on global issues.

By the time you left—and Xi Jinping had been in power for a few years at that point, and we had somewhat of a sense, not as clear as we do now, but somewhat of a sense of his ambitions and his views of governance in China—policy had shifted quite a bit. It’s now become the governing logic of our entire sense of the world and the strategic picture broadly. Do you share that view, that China should be at the center of the way we think about global challenges today, or is that going too far, overcorrecting too much?

BEN RHODES

I think it’s overcorrecting too much—and my own views on this have changed, and I think we have to take in new information. I remember Obama met with Xi Jinping after the Trump election; it was the last meeting they had. And he said to him, he’s like, “Look, even if Trump had not won, the person after me was going to pivot into a harsher direction.” And the biggest change in those eight years was Xi Jinping. We just had a different kind of Chinese leader who was much more assertive and much more willing to push boundaries and was backsliding on things that we would have liked to see the Chinese leadership do in their economy.

I will say, because I’m going to come back to this point, we also did some good stuff with him. The Paris Climate Accord was basically started as a bilateral climate agreement between the United State and China. I do believe they were sticking to their cyber agreement that we’d reached towards the end of the Obama administration. But I acknowledge that there had not been a reckoning with the fact that the Chines Communist Party (CCP) was far from moderating—was becoming more and more aggressive, if not extreme.

Now, where are we today? And I want to credit Foreign Affairs; you guys had a really good issue. It was really interesting to read all of these different perspectives and then also kind of challenge my own assumptions, and I work a lot on issues that interface with China. And I think we’re due for a correction to the overcorrection. Because here’s how I’d put it: I don’t think China should be the focus. I think issues that we care about should be the focus, and on some of those issues, we may have differences with China. But the objective should be driven by what we’re trying to achieve, not by what we’re trying to do vis-à-vis China alone.

I’ll give a couple of examples. On artificial intelligence I’ve been supportive of—and I write in my piece in support of—this effort to give U.S. companies a lead to restrain Chinese AI while we’re figuring out what this technology can do. Because part of it is, like, this is new terrain, and we want to be first movers in part because we have to understand the nature of AI and what it can do. That said, as I look at the technology, Dan—I don’t know if you follow this—the Chinese are beginning to figure out how to get by in a world of our export controls. They’re producing AI models on less computing power. They’re developing their own chips. They’re going to get there anyway. So my point is, the goal isn’t that we permanently beat China on AI. The goal is to make the best uses of AI while mitigating the harms of AI.

And that means, I think we’re about to—or should—be moving from a phase of, “We’re trying to punish them and give this little lead to U.S. companies on AI,” to, ”Okay, wait, we’re all going to have this technology. We had better start sitting down and figuring it out.” Because if we develop a bunch of norms around AI—whether it’s the existential risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the super smart intelligence; whether it’s nuclear and biological weapons production using AI; whether it’s just pure cyber criminality around AI—if China’s not involved in that, but they’re developing half the world’s supply chain of AI, what’s the point of the lead that we got ourselves? And same on climate change; that’s the inevitable one where it’s like, all right, at some point we can do our own IRA and all our own subsidies in our clean energy transition. But if basically the next 20 years is some kind of geopolitical fight over critical minerals so that who can build batteries and solar panels, that’s not a very efficient way of trying to save the planet.

And so the objective has to shift a bit. I think the objective became “beat China” and everything. No, the objective has to be, we have certain goals on technology, on climate, on obviously security issues, and those are more zero-sum in some cases. But I’d like to see the relationship become one of negotiation again. We don’t even have to call it engagement, because that sounds too soft to people. But if there’s engagement and confrontation, I’d like to see us introduce negotiation back.

And to be fair, the Biden people are doing this. I think they saw the same thing. Last year they were like, ”This is getting unstable.” And so if Biden is reelected I think there’s a huge opportunity to use that reelection as—I’m not even going to say the word reset because every word from the Obama years has multiple meanings—but to explore, is there something we can do together on some of these areas even as we’re going to continue to be at odds on a bunch of stuff?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I think a smarter hawkish response—obviously there are a lot of crude hawkish responses to those kinds of arguments—but the smarter one is that, look, it takes two sides to have a real diplomatic negotiation; or to have real, even just serious discussion of these issues, leaving aside cooperation or a shared view with the Chinese. Lots of Americans have laid out frameworks of managed competition and competing hard, but still leaving space for talks and avoiding the worst downsides of that; Jake Sullivan and Kurt Campbell wrote that for us shortly before they went into government. Often the Chinese say, “We’re going to link these issues and [if] you don’t handle Taiwan policy in the way that we would like we’re going to cut off talks over climate change or we’re going to cut off mil-mil ties.” And getting that balance right seems really hard. And there are places where I think U.S. policy has to either accept that you’re not going to have negotiations and talks that you’d like to have, or you’re going to have to give ground on certain things.

BEN RHODES

First of all, I want to say on this—I understand the hawkish view. Mike Gallagher, I think, has been a thoughtful hawk on China; and I don’t disagree with, say, a Mike Gallagher’s assessment of Xi Jinping and the CCP. I wrote a book that was largely—had a huge China section that was reckoning with the degree to which we had to see them for what they are in places like Hong Kong and Xinjiang province. So the first point is, I have no illusions about the kind of character of Xi Jinping or the CCP. The second thing is, however, I do believe that we risk being in a place where we’re beginning to do to China what we’ve done to Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and now Russia, which is just—there’s this ever-increasing set of sanctions and pressures, and I think that is incredibly dangerous.

I think the lesson—and this is where this all comes together—the lesson of quote unquote “maximum pressure” policies is they don’t work in bringing about regime change. They’re more likely in bringing about conflict, as we’ve seen with Russia and Iran and others. And you’re talking about China; you’re talking about a country of over a billion people. They’re going to be really powerful. They’re going to be more powerful than I would like them to be—I’d distribute power to the Scandinavians if I could. But the point is that just because you don’t like what they’re doing doesn’t mean you don’t have to accept the reality that they’re going to be there. They’re going to have a claim on Taiwan. They’re going to want to have a certain amount of influence in the world.

And so I’d be willing to explore different frameworks for how you negotiate. I used to be, as a conventional American foreign policy person, keep everything in their own tracks, and we do— well, you know what? I don’t know. If we can get a lot out of the Chinese on climate change in exchange for some export controls on certain things, in exchange for some tariff adjustments, why wouldn’t we do that? In other words, linkages. And I’m not suggesting this is easy, but I would be exploring the full breadth of the relationship through kind of negotiated processes with the Chinese. I think because of the good work the Biden administration has done with allies on some of these issues, you want to try to multilateralize discussions too, so it’s not just some U.S.-Chinese thing where we feel like it’s a test of strength. I think you can play with different formulations for when you multilateralize conversations. AI is certainly one of them, where I think it would be like the G7 talking to China, and not just the United States.

So I think we should be open to new approaches to negotiation, to linkages, to new formulations of countries, because the stakes are so high and because I just—I look at the current trajectory and I don’t see that ending well. It’s kind of the main point of my piece, is like, all right, we can all go into our corners and build our blocs and we do our sanctions. We’re two-thirds of the way to world war, though. It’s time to kind of do a bit of a pause, I think.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One thing that seems particularly challenging in this context is how you think about the kind of values questions as they apply to China internally, especially—you’ve spent a lot of time with activists in Hong Kong and civil society and lots of places that are affected by the trajectory of China, including in China itself. People in the Biden administration essentially say there’s not a lot we can do to shape outcomes in Hong Kong or with Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and we need to, for the sake of stability in the relationship, and for focusing on the arenas of competition where we do think we can make some difference, essentially put less pressure on some of those internal issues. Not they’ve stopped talking about them; but an acceptance that you do need to trade that off in order to achieve some stability and competitive edge in other areas. I mean, how do you—there’s obviously not a clean answer to this—but how do you grapple with that balance?

BEN RHODES

I have spent a good chunk of the last eight years really building relationships with people in civil society around the world through various different things I do, and that’s been incredibly important. And I think it informs a lot of my worldview that’s reflected in that article kind of looking at the United States from the outside in. But on the core question of democracy, I think after Biden’s election I was one of those people that was very optimistic that there was to be this capacity to begin to push back against the global autocratic trend, and they were going to have the summits on democracy, that all to the good. But part of what I’ve realized is, I kind of have to wrestle with the depths of the dysfunction within democracies—not just the United States. We’re seeing this in Europe with their elections. We’re seeing it in Japan with their dissatisfaction with their government. We see it—obviously saw it in Brazil in Bolsonaro. Unfortunately, I could go on.

We’re just not in a position to frame the whole world as a democracy versus autocracy clash, because before you could even entertain that, we need to fix our own democracy. We are in the biggest glass house in the world. And this is not Joe Biden’s fault at all; this is Trump and a lot of other things that have happened where our ability to go around the world and kind of tell India or China or whomever what to do in terms of their internal politics—we just look like gigantic hypocrites. And we also, frankly—I become uncomfortable with a certain kind of democracy commentary that is relentlessly just about U.S. geopolitical adversaries. So not naming any names, and I’ve been one of them, but if your only concern about democracy is democracy in China, Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, are you really concerned about democracy?

So I think first and foremost, we have to see the democracy challenge as internal. And when I say internal, I don’t just mean the United States; I mean the democratic world. We kind of need to detoxify—and that involves a lot of work, by the way. There’s policies to that. There’s policies around disinformation, around corruption, around how politics functions and how governments function. And then that doesn’t mean shut up about other parts of the world. It means having reasonable expectations of what you can achieve.

I think the United States should speak out about individual cases or civil society issues in other countries, and it should do so in a kind of routinized way. With India for instance, I think it’s almost because we never do it, it's super dramatic if we do. Part of it has got to be like, “You know what? Every now and then we’re going to call this out or this case out. We’re going to be a lifeline for people that are on the other side of these things.” I’d also like to see the U.S. and other democracies do more to resource independent civil society, independent journalism, and some of that is going to have to be outside of governments, too. So I’m not suggesting walking away from that. I’m suggesting that before we kind of enter some cold war over values, the one we have to win is at home. And frankly, that’s the best thing we can do. You’ll hear this from activists. I mean, [Alexei] Navalny told me this when I talked to him for my last book, “I don’t need a bunch of sanctions from you. I need the United States to not make democracy look bad.”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m struck that as you have a president who talks about democracy versus autocracy in very grand terms and loves to give speeches about the free world—and you saw this in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, perhaps this was kind of muscle memory for Biden in going back to these kind of grand speeches about democracy—in fact, much of what we’re doing shows a much more kind of cold-blooded approach. India, which is a very important geostrategic partner when it comes to the competition with China, it wasn’t that in the previous administrations there was lots of really harsh criticism of India, but there’s certainly been less under this administration than before. We’re negotiating what may be a true security commitment with a Saudi government that Biden called a pariah, or he said he would make it a pariah during the campaign. So in some ways things seem to be going in the other direction. Rather, in a world of blocs and political tensions, we’re not seeing lots of careful focus on this, but in fact an acceptance that we need to forego some of this rhetoric just given the nature of competition.

BEN RHODES

Yeah. But I think it’s also kind of, what is the point of the rhetoric? What are you trying to achieve? And the Normandy ceremony just happened. There was a lot of—as someone who was in the White House I can see the spin when it shows up—and there was a lot of, “He’s going to echo Reagan,” which was exactly what you’re talking about. It’s like the apex of the free world, right, Ronald Reagan at Normandy. And yet if you dig into Ronald Reagan, right—I’ve been doing some reading for this project I’m working on now, and it was a great speech Reagan gave where he talked about freedom. And the three examples he used where the United States was standing for freedom—one of them was Angola, where we were supporting a right-wing dictator, basically fighting communists. One was the Mujahideen, basically the Taliban in Afghanistan fighting against the communists. And another one was a Latin—I can’t even remember which Latin American country, where it was like a right-wing—that wasn’t the value of freedom. It was what I was saying, it was geopolitical competition where the values argument suited us. I think there’s a more interesting model that I’ve also been reading about a lot, which is [John F.] Kennedy. Kennedy came in with all the rhetoric; he wrote the greatest hits, and he’s the Rolling Stones of values rhetoric for an American president. And what he realized with his brother pretty early on—it’s something that Dean Acheson had also realized, that Dean Rusk also realized, dropping these names because I’m at the Council on Foreign Relations and I’m excited be here—is that, “Wait a second, if we don’t get our act together on civil rights, I’m going to look like a freaking idiot who’s going around the world talking about freedom.”

And actually, if you look at the Kennedys’ evolution on civil rights, it was foreign policy that brought them to support the civil rights movement. I think one of the most fascinating things about John F. Kennedy is that he gave, I think, his greatest foreign policy speech at American University about rethinking the Cold War. The next day he gave his great civil rights speech embracing, essentially, the civil rights movement for the first time. I think he saw those things were connected—that essentially, “Wait a second, if I want to draw a contrast to the Soviets, it’s not just the speeches I give in Berlin. It’s whether or not I’m backing Martin Luther King [Jr.] here in this country.”

And this is what I’m talking about, getting our own house in order. And Obama at his best did this—and sometimes he also just painted by numbers, I wrote some speeches like that. But where he was at his best, it wasn’t just about America—is America the leader of the free world, and so here’s some rhetoric about democracy. It was, “Here’s what we’re working on. Here’s how we’re trying to get better here, and that’s therefore what we’re going to support around the world.” And I think there’s a lot that Biden or any American president could say about the need to detoxify the information environment, to battle political corruption, to extend equal rights to marginalized groups in ways that are actually universal. And that can then bleed into the criticisms you make of certain governments.

I mean, I think one thing that’s been lost on some people in foreign policy is that, yeah, some people who have been protesting the Israeli military operation, you get some antisemitic, certainly troubling echoes there. Then you get some people who have kind of traditionally been pro-Palestinian. But a lot of it is people that came of age in the Black Lives Matter movement, and they’re just looking at this and thinking, “Wait a second, these lives don’t matter as much as the Israeli lives. Why do we seem to put this kind of value on a single Israeli life that we don’t on 10,000 Palestinian children?” And so I think there’s a—it takes a lot of dexterity—but I think that the values point has to be about America from the inside out, not America going around the world and giving stirring speeches that seem disconnected from what’s happening here in this country.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You made the point earlier that people sitting in places like the Council on Foreign Relations tend to disregard the influence of politics and foreign policy in the way that politics and foreign policy interact, shaping both of them. People will be listening to this around the time of the first debate of the 2024 general election, which is a little bit earlier than most of us would expect or have liked, but here it is. What role do you expect foreign policy and national security concerns to play in the election? And how will that shape the conduct of American foreign policy?

BEN RHODES

You put that really well. I mean, unfortunately with—when Trump is in part of the picture, right, from his perspective, foreign policy is kind of about two things. One is, it’s an extension of identity politics. One of the things I started to realize late in the Obama years in the kind of right-wing critique of our policy is they would wrap together immigrants at the border, Iran, the Islamic State (ISIS) into some vast “other.” And it’s not like your average Fox News viewer knew anything about—and I don’t mean this in a condescending way, I truly don’t, because I wouldn’t expect anyone to know—but had strong views on centrifuge technology in Iran. But Iran was part of the vast “other,” and Barack Obama was not standing up to that.

And frankly, I think there are some racialized elements to this. Trump kind of casts a big umbrella over a bunch of scary things and says, “I’ll stop those scary things from happening,” or, “I’ll stand up to those people.” And they, by the way, tend to usually not be white people. Russia, for instance, is accepted, whereas China is not. So that may be an uncomfortable statement for some people to hear, but I think there’s an otherization that MAGA does that’s part of it.

And then the other thing is just chaos. I think Trump’s argument is going to be, “The world is chaotic, there’s a war in Gaza, there’s a war in Ukraine. There weren’t wars in those places when I was president”—which is not entirely true—”and I’ll end them.” And so it’s harder for Biden to defend a messy world than it is for Trump to just describe how messy that world is and to assert that he will be able to deal with it. That’s Trump’s strength.

I think Biden’s strength is the sense that—you know, I think Americans do care. And I’ve seen this in polling. They don’t like the throwing Ukraine under the bus; I think that’s why the Republicans folded on that supplemental. They don’t like Putin. So there is connecting the democracy message at home, why Trump’s scary at home for his kind of weird affinity for Putin and dictators. I think that’s going to be Biden’s message essentially, that “I stand for the things that Americans stand for, and we need to stand for those things because it’s important.” I think Biden will actually get in trouble if he starts trying to defend all pieces of his record, because that’s not what these debates have been about. Obama made the same mistake in his first debate in 2012. You’re president, you’re very defensive about things, and so you have to make big values propositions about, “Here’s what I stand for,” and, “Here’s where I’m trying to go.” And that’s the contrast I think he needs to make with Trump.

The last thing I’d say is that—and I try to introduce this in the article—is that the stakes really are high. We say this every election, but there are two active large-scale wars on fault lines that are like World War I and World War II fault lines. There’s a lot of autocrats out there that are getting more aggressive. And so in just an intangible sense, when Trump was elected in 2016, the stakes didn’t—they frankly didn’t feel that high relative to where they are now in terms of the international situation. There was an ISIS campaign ongoing; that’s not quite as complicated as what we’re talking about now. And so I do think people at least might be able to take a moment and realize, “Wait a second, do we really want to send this guy into that hornet’s nest?”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You watched for four years of Trump being in power his administration undo so many of the initiatives that you and your colleagues had spent countless hours on, and that seemed to really be coming together to mark a transformation of American foreign policy. You mentioned most of these—Paris climate accords, the Cuban and Iranian deals, lots of other things that we could dig into. Are there things that you wish you had done to Trump-proof some of those, looking back? And is there anything you’d recommend the Biden administration do to prepare for the possibility that Trump will be back in power in several months?

BEN RHODES

Yes. Paris was the most Trump-proofed in part because it was the most evolved in terms of the constituencies. So, like, U.S. states had their own emissions targets, and the private sector took the message of a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. The capital was flowing in that direction. So Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement—while it slowed a lot of diplomatic progress, it didn’t really do anything to upset the trajectory of a clean energy transition. So it was Trump-proof because there were other constituencies that were invested in it. But at the end of the day—like, on the Iran deal I’ve had people say to me, “Well, you guys made a mistake in not getting that to be a congressionally approved agreement.” I don’t know. I don’t think that was possible. I just don’t think a Republican—it was a Republican House of Representatives. Does anybody think there was any Iran deal that those guys were going to support? Sometimes you’ve kind of got to just deal, well, with the world as it is. You do what you can do.

So I think when they’re thinking about Trump-proofing, part of what you can do is just try to over-resource some of your policies to give them a lot of momentum. Like, can we get a bunch of pipelines going for Ukraine aid so that at least there’s a couple of years where that’s taken care of, right? I think they’ve done that on the IRA. One of the reasons they had the big spending bill is you can’t really—it’s going to be hard for Trump to come in and turn off clean energy spending, even if he said he would. But I don’t believe him, because why would he want to turn off semiconductors being built here and the CHIPS Act? So actually, spending money is something that is harder to undo, and I think that’s probably why Biden spent a lot of money.

And beyond that, you have to accept we should be mature enough as a superpower to not have these swings; and it’s almost useful as an accountability measure that not everything is Trump-proof because this is a ridiculous way of doing business. We didn’t do this in the Cold War. I think maybe it was the Council on Foreign Relations—but no, I think people took it seriously enough that there wouldn’t have been a Trump in the Cold War. And I actually, I mentioned this in the piece: nuclear war is back on the table, right, in a way that it wasn’t since probably the end of the Cold War. That should be disciplining around who our political leaders are. And somehow, some way, whether Trump wins this time or not, four years from now we’re going to be in a post-Trump era, and I do hope that there’s some capacity to kind of recenter American politics around basic propositions like: we need to think about existential risks when we elect these people, or select them in primary processes, or have political parties that acquiesce to certain things. Because I think everybody feels the same anxiety, whatever your political dynamic, even Republicans, that this is not a way to run a superpower.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Given the distressingly early start to this general election season, that’s probably the right note to end on. Ben, thanks for the great piece; it’s in our July/August issue, it’s called “A Foreign Policy for the World As It Is.” And thanks for joining me.

BEN RHODES

Thanks, Dan.