Since the beginning of the 21st century, the United States’ position as leader of the international order has been besieged by an array of challenges, including the war on terror and the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon, as well as widespread dissatisfaction at home with the direction of the country.
But other countries continue to look to the United States for guidance, former Obama administration speechwriter and deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes said Thursday evening.
“I still believe fundamentally that the U.S. has an incredibly positive role to play in the world. You travel around the world and meet people who say, ‘we want you to be a model for a multiracial democracy,’” Rhodes told an audience of 170 people at Filene Auditorium, with more than 50 also watching via livestream.
It was part of Dartmouth’s 2024 Election Speaker Series, co-sponsored by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and Dartmouth Dialogues. Rhodes is also the author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We Made and co-host of the foreign policy podcast Pod Save the World.
If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected president, Rhodes said, she will have to negotiate a maze of seemingly intractable but interrelated disputes, including the Ukraine war, an end to the war in Gaza, volatile relations with Russia, and perhaps most significant, “what comes next between the United States and the Chinese-led bloc,” which includes the future of Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory.
In response to a question from moderator and Professor of Government William Wohlforth about whether former president Donald Trump had made a case about foreign and domestic policy mistakes by previous administrations, Rhodes said that Trump had recognized in the national zeitgeist “a sense of dissatisfaction, resentment and grievance against what American elites have done in a whole range of American spaces.”
Whether talking about so-called “forever wars,” the disastrous effects of free trade on American industry and workers, or “the idea that you have to do things a certain way or you’re voted off the island, I’ve made those critiques myself,” Rhodes said.
“I think we have to take seriously that loss of confidence,” he added.
Rhodes worries that, since 2016, the Democratic Party has made itself “a party that exists in opposition to Trump more than a party with our own set of objectives.”
But he also warned that while the Democratic Party has its flaws, Trump’s critique of the federal government—the so-called deep state—“certainly doesn’t lead to the prescriptions I would choose, and a lot of the time it doesn’t even lead to a logical conclusion.”
As a member of the Obama inner circle, Rhodes was privy to decision-making in 2013 about whether to use weapons against Syria and the government of Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian president was alleged to have deployed chemical weapons against his own people, which Obama had previously declared a “red line.” The administration’s use of this term was widely interpreted to mean that if al-Assad used chemical weapons, then the United States reserved the option to attack Syria. Obama did not intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war, a decision for which he was criticized.
In hindsight, Rhodes said, he doesn’t believe “a cruise missile strike would have altered the situation.” The support of the American people for further involvement in a Mideast war, with the United States already mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, would have been minimal.
“We have to be honest about acknowledging the limitations of American power,” Rhodes said. Part of that recognition is that the U.S. government should listen to the people who live in the regions America wants to influence.
Those limitations are evident in the Biden administration’s relations with the Israeli government of Benjamin Nehtanyahu, where American policy appears to be at a dead end, Rhodes said.
“I don’t think the Israelis have any reason to take anything that this administration says seriously at all. Because there’s never been a single consequence to anything they’ve done. From the beginning of this conflict, every single time Biden says ‘don’t do this,’ they do it and nothing happens,” Rhodes said.
Should Harris win the election, she will be in “an incredibly challenging position,” Rhodes said, pointing out that within weeks of President Obama’s elections in 2008 and 2012, there was war in Gaza. The implicit message from Israel, Rhodes said, was that “we’re going to do what we’re going to do.”
Should Trump win, whether or not he fulfills his promises of an autocracy, it is “not going to be a good thing for democracy. We won the Cold War because people wanted to live on this side of the law, not the other side of the law,” Rhodes said.
After the event, which included a Q&A with the audience, Ashton Ragoowansi ’27, said he learned from Rhodes’ explanations of why the United States didn’t get more involved in Syria.
Rhodes was “so well spoken and knowledgeable. I appreciated how critical and self-critical he was,” said Zoe McGuirk, ’25.
Upcoming speakers in the Election Speaker Series include former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby on Tuesday, Oct. 22, and U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., on Wednesday, Oct. 23.