196. How America Talks Itself Into Endless Wars

21:43Ben Rhodes:They had a syndrome that they didn't want to intervene militarily in other countries. I remember thinking that was a strange thing as if it was a disease. Maybe Americans were right. Maybe they learned something because actually it's not ordinary Americans that are like, let's get into some more wars. Like let's invade Iraq. It's a very top-down idea. But in 9-11, there's you as a guy who wants to write novels thinking this is a massive moment of the country of the world. I want to do something. But we also know there's Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Wolfowitz and these guys are thinking we now want to take out Iraq and Saddam and take on the Taliban.

22:22Ben Rhodes:What was so interesting to me about that moment is I honestly, if I'm honest about this, I got into it as much for my city as for my patriotism. I saw my city attack that I loved. I grew up in New York. And I remember moving to D.C. and the Afghan war made sense to me. You know, like we were trying to go get these guys that did this. I remember people starting to talk about Iraq and thinking, well, I remember that war from 10 years ago. But why are we doing that? And I remember being 24 and being truly confused about why are we shifting from Afghanistan to Iraq and being skeptical. My boss, Lee Hamilton, opposed it, but he'd opposed the Gulf War.

22:59Ben Rhodes:He was a skeptic of American military power. But then I remember the Colin Powell presentation and frankly, Tony Blair, too. Like, these are people I trusted, you know, and being like, well, those guys say we have to do this. Like, maybe they know something I don't, you know. And actually, part of what I've learned is that they didn't. Right. But but I think that I went to Iraq. That was such a form of experience for me in 2006. And it was at the height of the worst violence in Iraq. And we talked to every Iraqi politician and militia leader and it was with James Baker and we were there to do this kind of autopsy of what had happened and these recommendations about what to do.

23:34Ben Rhodes:And I remember just thinking, like, why are we going to understand this place better than these people? And so we kind of recommended like, well, here's how you get out. And then I think the surge happened. Americans took all the wrong lessons because they wanted to feel like they had done something militarily that had turned this tide. When in fact, if you looked underneath the hood of the surge, it was all the political dealings that had been made, including with the Shia militias that had produced violence. And so I think there's an every time the American national security establishment and political establishment of both parties can find some, oh, look, we figured it out.

24:11Ben Rhodes:You know, the problem in Iraq wasn't the war. It's just that we didn't have the right counterinsurgency strategy. So we can do it again and do it better. You know, or we did this wrong in the Obama administration. Like, well, maybe the lesson to apply to Libya is we just don't put boots on the ground. We'll just do it by air, you know. And yet the results continue to be the same everywhere. One of the problems, of course, is that when you write a speech like that, and it comes out of the president's mouth, the military now say the commander in chief has set these as our objectives. And one of the things I noticed in Afghanistan is you guys would be blaming General McChrystal and saying he leaked the commander's assessment.

24:45We didn't have any choice. We had to send it. The military's bullied us into it. And then when I sat down with General McChrystal, he's like, well, this is the commander in chief's intent, and this is what we're delivering. And he said, we've got to win in Afghanistan, and we've got to create good governance, and we've got to defeat the Taliban, and we've got to defeat the Taliban. got to stabilize Pakistan, so I'm going to deploy forced to catch you. So there's a terrible problem here, which is both sides echoing off each other, blaming each other. But the rhetorical inflation which you talk to is almost inevitable, isn't it?

25:11Because the truth of the matter is you would have had to say in Afghanistan or Iraq, listen, this is going to be really messy. If we spend 30, 40 years here, if we're lucky, Afghanistan might look a little bit more like Pakistan, a little bit less like the Congo. We might be able to create a little bit more prosperity in Kabul and maybe in Bamian, but Kandahar is still going to be a bit wild and woolly. Women's rights are not likely to transform across the country. We can contain some terrorist threats. I don't remember any of these in the talking points. And so part of the problem is you simply cannot be honest with the public about what's likely to happen.

25:47You have to keep saying, we're going to free Afghan women. We're going to create democracy. This is going to be completely safe.

25:54Ben Rhodes:So I think, Rory, if you look at the arc of how we talked about Afghanistan, because I originally thought about the December 2009 speech about the surge, that's when Obama started to demonstrably lower the rhetorical ambition. And the only defeat was applied to al-Qaeda. We actually had it in the process that produced a surge. Because I like General McChrystal, but I think, I'm not sure, we, in that process of that surge, decided that we were not going to set the objective of defeating the Taliban. And so if you look at the rhetoric of that speech in December of 2009, we talked about defeating Al Qaeda and we talked about like pushing back the Taliban.

26:30Ben Rhodes:And then in each subsequent year, like Obama's rhetoric about Afghanistan did get more narrow. Oftentimes the military will grab the most maximalist rhetoric they can find to justify the most maximalist resources. And, you know, they have a tough job. I don't blame them because politicians always – And they're also asking themselves, what do you want? What is the president doing here? What's he really doing here? And you're not able to say to him. I mean if that's really what you felt, you wouldn't have searched. Well, but it's what I felt certainly at the time. I think Obama was an ambivalent person around that surge.

27:05Ben Rhodes:But to put a finer point on it because I'm agreeing with the premise of much of what you say, there's a policy issue and then there's the rhetorical issue. I mean, on the rhetorical issue, do you need to have objectives that go beyond just killing a set of terrorists? Like, I think you do. Like, I think there was a sincere interest in things like women's rights and access to education for girls in Afghanistan. However, I do believe that if we're being honest with Afghans, who are actually the people we should be most honest with, You know, it starts to feel like over time that the women's rights is like the public relations for the other things that you're doing.

27:47Ben Rhodes:And that leads to my substantive point, which is my bigger problem is all the meetings I was in. And I mean, Alistair, I don't know how you experienced this with The Rock, but like, and I remember feelings at the time, but I certainly feel it more in retrospect. there were no afghans in the room you know like we're sitting here you know a bunch of you know largely white guys uh in in washington making these decisions and then the afghans that we're talking to are people that are dependent on us you know they want the most resources they want the billions of dollars they want the contractors you know they want to sustain american military engagement because they're profiting off of it.

28:27And in many cases, they're not demonstrably better

28:31Ben Rhodes:actors than the Taliban in some cases, not all cases. Whereas if we actually had a capacity to systematically engage Afghans on the front end about both the rhetoric and the policy, I think you'd get different outcomes. So I totally, I agree with your premise. I do, I guess where I push back a little bit is I do think America needs a values proposition in these things. Because, I mean, to take the book, for instance, like, you know, FDR in the eve of World War II recognized, hey, we need a values proposition. And that's when he came up with the four freedoms. We've gone all the way from the four freedoms to open the effing straight and get rid of the nuclear dust.

29:07Ben Rhodes:And so I think there's got to be a medium between the kind of rhetorical approach to foreign policy that over promises and can justify all manner of resources and open the effing straight. I mean, at core, you do need to suggest that, hey, we are here. We want to try as best we can to make these places better. I would argue actually that American military involvement tends not to make places better at all. So we should think about, you know, being incredibly limited in our use of military force when it's only an absolute imperative. But I do think you need to infuse your foreign policy with some values proposition or else you know we're really no different than China or Russia.

29:50It's obvious from hearing you speak and also reading the stuff that you've written that you've done quite a lot of soul searching about then and what you think about it now and I've been through the same process and probably most most notably at a two-hour episode where Rory grilled me about Iraq and we don't need to kind of go over all that now but it's interesting. Yeah no I heard that yeah. But it's interesting has Barack Obama gone through the same process and I wonder if he does if I can ask you about Syria because I often look back at that as a point at which Vladimir Putin really felt emboldened and empowered because the leader of the free world says if you you know if Syria Assad uses chemical weapons that's a red line we're not going to let you cross it you cross it Putin senses weakness I just wonder whether and just more generally whether Obama has gone through as bigger process as you seem to have done of actually thinking really deeply about what you said and did at the time and what the consequences were?

30:45Ben Rhodes:Well, I'll talk about myself and then Obama. I mean, because on Syria, like I actually have a different view than I think most people, which is, I find it interesting that, you know, we can look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Iran and see American military involvement did not make the place better. And yet there's this belief of, well, if only you'd intervened in Syria, it would have been better. You know, I look at Syria and think it's an absolute human tragedy what happened there. But the idea that American missile strikes would have magically ended a civil war. So what did the red line mean?

31:22What was the red line?

31:23Ben Rhodes:Well, the red line was that there's going to be a consequence that there's use of chemical weapons. But then what happened in that instance, right, is Obama was going to use military force. But then he realized that if he did, this would be probably a long military engagement. And so unlike Trump in Iran, he said, well, if I'm going to get involved in a long military engagement in Syria, I want to get congressional authorization. And we went to Congress and nobody in Congress wanted to vote for that because they knew it was probably going to be a mess. Marco Rubio, for instance, who'd been chastising Obama for not bombing Syria, announced that he would vote against US strikes in Syria.

32:01Ben Rhodes:And so I actually think that if we think that things like the constitution and the war powers matter and you can't get congressional approval, and the same thing happened here, right? You guys couldn't get it. So then we shifted course and negotiated something with Putin to get a bunch of chemical weapons out. I'm not suggesting that was perfect, but that's what happened. To be self-critical. So when I look back on Syria, I don't think that there was like some military option that somehow would have worked. Because frankly, even if we killed Assad, like there still would have been a civil war.

32:32Ben Rhodes:There still would have been refugees. There still would have been all that calamity. I look at the rhetorical, you know, call for Assad to go when we didn't have any assurance that he would or a strategy we knew could remove him, right? That probably foreclosed certain diplomatic options. I look at the decision, which again, I didn't really like at the time, to start arming proxy groups in Syria. Which decisions did you like?

33:00Ben Rhodes:The things I worked on, the Iran nuclear agreement, I negotiated the normalizations of relations with Cuba, the Paris Climate Accord. I liked a lot of our foreign policy. But am I right? I'm ambivalent about America's use of military force, including the ones that I was a part of. No, I felt great about the Ebola response. What America can do in the world when it's not kind of military forward, I think is quite extraordinary. Because again, no US, no Iran nuclear deal, no Cuban normalization, no Paris climate accord, no Ebola response, right? Those are the effective uses of American foreign policy.

33:40Ben Rhodes:I feel proud about the Bin Laden operation, right? There's a targeted use of military force to achieve a very specific objective to get this person that is both the leader of Al Qaeda and the guy who did 9-11. So I feel good about a lot of things. What I don't feel good about is the way in which the United States has continually not learned lessons in how it goes to war. And so in Syria, I do, You know, I think Obama, I don't think he is is haunted. I think he's haunted by the outcome more than that he didn't bomb Syria after the red line. And so I think you go back and you think like, was there a diplomatic approach that could have been more effective kind of on the front end of that conflict before it got out of control?

34:18Ben, one problem with the things that you mentioned, which obviously Alistair and I and most listeners are strongly supportive of, is that they don't last. The JCPOA collapses, the climate accords collapse. And why do they collapse? Because there isn't a consensus in American political life to underscore these things. And part of the problem is that whereas from probably 1945 through to, I don't know, 2014, it was pretty easy to imagine a continuous American foreign policy. You do a deal with the United States and it lasts because this foreign policy establishment that we're all a bit skeptical about had a set of views that went from administration to administration.

34:59now feels a bit dubious. You know, you sign a deal as an Iranian with one lot, next lot comes and it's kicked out. You make all these big decisions on your carbon emissions, next lot comes and it's all out the window. You sign up to get American, you know, AI frontier models embedded in your entire economy. Suddenly you wake up and those frontier models are not being released.

35:17Ben Rhodes:Well, this I agree with and also don't take responsibility for because, you know, I can't account for Donald Trump, you know, because frankly, I think even a Republican and that didn't like our foreign policy would probably not have pulled out of the JCPOA. Although Bush or someone like him might've pulled out of climate courts. Yeah, but the thing about, on that one, I'd say the Paris Agreement, the US comes in and out, but it does last. I mean, Paris is still the framework under which the world is dealing with climate change. Something that the US negotiated continues to exist. I would actually argue that the funny thing about the JCPOA is they're trying to negotiate another one.

35:51Ben Rhodes:I mean, so in a way it did last. Hey, it's the alternative approach. So I actually continue to have a lot of pride in the proof of concept that we have that, hey, now we tried it both ways in Iran, right? We tried the JCPOA way and that worked. Iran complied. We've tried the use of military force and it was a complete and utter disaster. And so now we're trying to get back into something like the JCPOA. I think the problem is American politics is kind of indistinguishable from American foreign policy. And I think there's been like oftentimes people who work in foreign policy are like, we're just sitting here in a lab designing these approaches.

36:26Ben Rhodes:No, like, you know, it's ultimately an extension of politics. And until America gets its politics in order, that's always going to haunt American foreign policy because it's not just the Iranians, it's the Europeans. It's the Asian allies who are like, is any agreement that we sign with the Americans durable here? That is not a foreign policy problem, though. That is a politics problem. Okay, Ben, really quick break and then back for more. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back.

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37:54The quote from the book that I mentioned in the introduction, where you said the transition from Obama to Trump seemed dizzying at the time, it sure did, but it's natural when viewed in the sweep of American history. Why? Why wasn't the sort of the sense of Obama as a progressive, taking the country in a progressive direction? Why couldn't that be kept going?

38:12Ben Rhodes:Well, first of all, I mean, part of what I'm wrestling with in the book is that they're at core, in my view, like two stories about American identity that have always been in conflict. There's a kind of exclusionary identity. You know, we are essentially a white Christian nation, the inheritors of Western civilization and supremacy, really. And other people can be here, but they have to kind of subordinate themselves to that identity. And frankly, J.D. Vance makes versions of that case in his own words. Trump does in his actions. Whereas then there's a progressive story of American identity, which is we are a nation committed to the creed that all men are created equal and women.

38:46Ben Rhodes:And American history has been an effort to close the gap between reality and that ambition. And that's the tradition of abolitionism and the suffrage movement and civil rights movement, you know, all manner of movements for change. And I think if you look at the suit of American history, when we take leaps forward, there's always a backlash after. We could start the clock at the Civil War. You have Reconstruction and all these victories, you know, emancipation and black suffrage, and then we get segregation. You know, there's a civil rights movement followed by Nixon, right? There's an Obama followed by Trump.

39:19Ben Rhodes:So where I think it's not an aberration is that when America kind of pushes forward in the direction of a more progressive identity that is multiracial democracy, there's usually a pullback, almost like an undertow. I will say that, to extend the analogy, each time the wave goes further before the undertow. So you get slavery abolished, then you get segregation abolished, then you get a black president. So America continues to become more diverse despite efforts to undo or block immigration. So I actually think that the sweep of American history is one that moves in a progressive direction. And yet it doesn't mean there's not like an effort to kind of claw back that core, more exclusionary identity.

40:07And I was very interested in the – you obviously felt you've got to put Donald Trump in there because whether we like it or not, he's a very consequential political figure. And you chose his second inaugural speech, which I think is the right choice because I think it was a very, very consequential speech. But are you saying then that you think actually there will now be a backlash to that and it will take us –

40:29Ben Rhodes:Oh, yes. I truly do. It's interesting. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is I wanted to understand what's happening now by going back through history, right? I want to understand what are the forces that could create someone like a Trump and where is he different? And first of all, I found that, you know, Trump, there's a lot that feeds into him from American history. Like there's always been a strain of America first isolationism. I read about that. There's been a populism of the white working class. It has been about not just smashing establishments, but about making sure that political rights are still kind of privileged for us.

41:01Ben Rhodes:There's always been xenophobia and kind of spasms of anti-immigrant politics. Where Trump differentiates is, you know, he has a line in that second inaugural. He's referring to Butler where he was almost shot at. I was saved by God to make America great again. I, I, I. Where he differentiates is he removes himself from political competition within the rules. He enriches himself on a massive scale in a way that we've not seen before. The corruption and the illegality are different. If someone had those ideas that I don't like, but they did them within the agreed upon lines, I wouldn't like them.

41:38Ben Rhodes:But Trump is trying to obliterate the lines. Now, what I also found is the period in American history that felt most familiar to me vis-a-vis today is the Gilded Age, is the late 19th century, where actually a lot of commonalities, right? After Reconstruction, it was like, no, no, we're done with black political rights and there's been too much immigration. We're going to ban Chinese from coming in here. Then there's a rampant, unbridled capitalism where the inequality was kind of like it is today. You had robber baron, railroad magnates and Wall Street running out of control. Corruption in politics was endemic at not just a national level, but a local level.

42:14Ben Rhodes:That period was followed by the progressive era where not only did we have the beginnings of a social safety net, but we had the direct election of American senators. We had women's suffrage. We had the creation of the Federal Reserve so that the government could manage the economy, not just J.P. Morgan. Right. I think we're in for a similar period where the backlash is we have to change the functioning of our government as well as the kind of outcomes that we're seeking in policy. And I do think that the extremity of this second Trump term, if we survive it, and I think we're in for a pretty weird two and a half years.

42:50Ben Rhodes:But I do think that I'm actually pessimistic in the short term and pretty optimistic in the long term that there's going to be a pretty significant backlash to this that could allow for serious reforms, not just in, you know, I want better health care policy, but in the functioning of how government operates. One thing that is an impediment to any type of reform is your constitution. I mean, it is sort of staggering from any other country to imagine that you have a constitution that allows the president to pardon his own family members. In what possible world could that be a legitimate use of executive power?

43:23And what possible use could it be that he can direct the Department of Justice in the way that he can to persecute his enemies and protect his friends? But you worship this Constitution. And you have a Supreme Court that worships this Constitution and uses this Constitution to reinforce the two major drivers of corruption, which is the DOJ and the pardon system. So when are you going to change it?

43:45Ben Rhodes:So the first speech in my book is Ben Franklin, who gives a speech defending the Constitution. It's the last argument before people are asked to sign the Constitution. And what he says is this is not a perfect document. None of us think that this is the perfect document. This is the first draft. And we have to compromise to get this done. And then we'll fight it out and continue to build on it. And actually, Franklin modeled that behavior because the first thing he did, and it was actually his final public act before he died, is when the new government was set up, he petitioned it to abolish slavery.

44:16Ben Rhodes:And I say that, Rory, because I'm, you know, as you can see today, I'm more than willing to admit, I don't know everything. I've been wrong about things. I'm not wrong about this. This originalism, this idea that the Supreme Court has, that we have to just get in the heads of these collection of white guys in the 18th century and whatever they thought about abortion, we should do now. That's not what the founders intended. They were like, this is the beginning and we're going to have to fix things as we go. Now, this is the point about Trump. Somehow, in all American history, we managed to not have people.

44:47Ben Rhodes:But when people come along and show the weakness in the system. You got to change the system. And so I think going forward, the next Democrat or, you know, I'd be great if it was a Republican. I just don't think that's likely, is going to have to get in and change how the government is structured. Sorry, you're not saying you want a Republican to win. No, I want a Democrat to win. But I want whoever it is to, you know, we need to get money out of politics. How do you do that? You know what? If enough people want to do it, well, we can do it. Like, I think that there's there's a fatalism that has crept in.

45:19Ben Rhodes:And this is part of my argument about speeches and words. You have to paint a picture for people. Like right now, there's a tremendous amount of people with a lot of power and a lot of money who want to make Americans believe you'll never get money out of politics. You'll never be able to get rid of this crazy system of redrawing congressional districts that polarizes people. You never be able to regulate artificial intelligence or social media, right? These are probably 80, 20 issues in the public. You need to make the case that this is not separate from the fact that things cost too much. I mean, John Ossoff from Georgia is beginning to do this and it's resonating because Democrats have had this pain thing, Rory, to your point of like, do we talk about things like democracy and the corruption of DOJ and pardon and all this?

46:04Ben Rhodes:Or do we talk about kitchen table issues and prices are trying, in healthcare. And actually, the whole point is that they're not separate. Because if you're not fixing the money in politics, and the corruption of how government functions, you're not going to get better outcomes on things like healthcare. So the next person should be trying to amend the pardon power, should be trying to kind of take a look at the laws, not the norms that govern how the Department of Justice functions, try to nationalize rational congressional districts, try to do whatever you can possibly do to get money out of politics.

46:35I told you before we were recording, I did an event with Mick Mulvaney, Trump's former chief of staff. And I was putting all this stuff about, we cannot believe the corruption. We cannot believe this stuff. And he was like, he was almost saying, yeah, but the Democrats do it after they leave office. They, you know, do you think Obama flies economy? Do you think that Clinton's ever used a plane that wasn't private? They get all the money in for their libraries. And you've just had the, you were at the launch of the old. So, and then, you know, we interviewed Nancy Pelosi a while back. You know, and there's the, I mean, it's almost like a joke that Nancy Pelosi and the stock trades and all that stuff.

47:07So how do you, Trump in a way is just. And Biden pardoned his family. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Trump's just being so much more open. I'll load the guy, I'll load everything he does and everything he stands for. But I think that's what's making it harder. Those two things are what's making it harder for the Democrats to make a case for this.

47:26Ben Rhodes:Look, there's elements that I disagree with and elements that I agree with. Because on the one hand, you know, Mick Mulvaney sounds, bear with me, there's a bit of a Putinism in there because I remember I talked to Alexei Navalny a bunch from my last book. And Navalny said something really interesting to me, which is, and I'll never forget, you know, we're like FaceTiming during the pandemic. And he's like, look, you know, Putin doesn't need to convince people that he's not corrupt or that he's telling the truth. He just needs to convince people that everybody's corrupt and everybody lies in politics.

47:56Ben Rhodes:And so you might as well have the strong man that hates the same people that you do. And so where I disagree with like a Mick Mulvaney is this is spare me. No, no Democrat has taken billions of dollars for his family's crypto business for the Emiratis and then waived the export controls on data centers there. Like no Democrat has taken a billion dollar plane from the Qataris. Like you have some Democrats become lobbyists when they love government. Is that unappealing? And do I disagree with that? Sure. But don't hide behind that. That's a way for Republicans to evade responsibility for a scale of corruption that we've just never seen in American politics.

48:34Ben Rhodes:However, I should say the Democratic Party has to change its approach to some of these issues. I've been supportive of this new crop of younger, almost all younger Democrats, by the way, who span the ideological spectrum, because you can have like a Zoran Mamdani in New York, a Graham Plattner in Maine, a James Tallarico in Texas, a John Ossoff in Georgia. What they have in common is it looks like they have views on Israel that are unaffected by AIPAC or it looks like they have views on how to reform Wall Street that are unaffected by contributions from big banks so that we're not taxing wealth or the carried interest loophole for hedge funds.

49:12Ben Rhodes:Right. Like people can see this. Like, I think sometimes politicians think people are dumber than they are. Like and they look at Democrats and they're like, there's slightly better version than these Republicans. But actually, the Republicans seem to like kind of hate some of the same people I do. And it's the Putin thing. So then I'll give them my vote. And I think Democrats have to hold themselves, expect more from their politicians. And if you model, I mean, Plattner has been I don't know if you guys covered this, but like and I spent hours talking to the guy like and look, he's got plenty of flaws.

49:42Ben Rhodes:But what he has is authenticity. Nobody thinks that that guy's bought and paid for, you know. And like, I would take that over, you know, some candidate who looked like they're designed in a laboratory by the Chuck Schumer and the DSCC, you know, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. I mean, if you look in Michigan right now, Haley Stevens is the Chuck Schumer back candidate there. And nobody knows what she stands for, you know. And Abdul Al-Sayed is outperforming her. And people are like, how's that guy winning? Well, because people, it's less even ideology today. And it's just like, who do I actually, who can actually trust?

50:15Ben Rhodes:Like, well, I mean, I always say this to people when people, you know, I'd have fights about Mamdani. I'd be like, what you guys miss about his positions on Israel is it's not just about Israel. It said they see him taking those positions. They seem getting killed for taking those positions, getting beat up by all these powerful people. They believe him. And then they believe that he'll fight to lower their prices because because he's willing to kind of take all this heat over here from very powerful people. They're like, well, maybe when he tells me that he's going to like get free child care, I actually believe he'll fight to do that.

50:48Ben Rhodes:And so that's what I mean about like you have to I think there's a higher bar for Democrats to kind of demonstrate like we get it. We get that you're sick of this feeling that they're all the same. Social media and populism. And you were right at the very beginning of this, weren't you? When you come in at Obama 1, this is all about mastering it and some of those elections. Hashtag guess we can. Hashtag guess we can. So tell us a little bit about that. I mean, what have you learned about the relationship between social media and populism? And how does that feed into how we think about politics today?

51:17Ben Rhodes:I'll say one thing about my experience in government and one thing about this book. My experience in government, Rory, and you were there, so you'll remember this, is I actually think that the turning point was the Arab Spring because you have the sense of social media as an organizing tool and a communications tool and a democratic tool and clearly played a role in the Arab Spring. And that scared the shit out of every autocrat. And it's almost like that if they'd had a meeting, like the Bond movie where like Putin and Arab autocrats and whoever gets together in room in 2011 is like, oh, wait a second, actually, this could work for us.

51:53Ben Rhodes:these are the perfect tools of both surveillance and disinformation, you know, and I could feel it turning at that time where all of a sudden, like the Egyptian revolution that was born on social media was killed by social media. There's massive amounts of disinformation flowing. Now, to take it to the populism, and one of the things I looked at in the book that was so interesting to me is in Ben Franklin's day, I start with him, right? A speech is only heard by the people in the room, and then it's reprinted in newspapers. So it's these kind of careful arguments. Then in the 19th century, there's like a circuit.

52:22Ben Rhodes:People are out speaking day after day and town after town. Performance starts to matter. Oratory. Then the radio comes along, and it's plain spoken explanation. Then FDR masters that. Then television, we get King and Kennedy in this charisma. What social media does is no longer do people consume whole speeches or listen to whole stories from politicians. They are fed by an algorithm, like clips that are designed in a lab to trigger them, like make you really, really hate the people that you disagree with or really, really sure that you're correct, you know. And Donald Trump has been the perfect person for that because he knows if he gets up at a rally and speaks for an hour, nobody's, he doesn't have to give a coherent speech, that the next day the algorithm will do all the work for him.

53:06Ben Rhodes:It will deliver, you know, as if perfectly designed for his politics and polarization, those clips in a way that really reinforces supporters and anger his opponents. And by the way, anger is not good for progressives. We don't do anger well. For the last decade, we've been kind of grim and pissed off. You need joy and optimism, I think, to win in progressive politics. And so actually, I think we need both. I mean, I would argue we need, you know, we still need regulatory approaches to algorithms because, you know, it's not, this is not happening by accident. It's happening by design. We are being algorithmically polarized.

53:41Ben Rhodes:and until we try to systemically disrupt that, we will be. But I also think we need to counter-program Trump. It's not like, I think sometimes Democrats, like we need to be more like that. We need to be on podcasts and we need to curse and we need to have clever social media and they forget what's the story. I mean, Alistair, you were a master of this. Like if you know your story, if you, and actually I would argue speech is where you figure out what the story is. Totally. All your other communications are better because like even if not everybody's listening to the whole speech if you work that out in american politics we call a stump speech if you know your core message the story you're telling but not just what you want to do but why you want to do it and where and how and make people believe that you can get there you make people believe the things that you know it's like can we get money out of politics all these things well then your social media is better then your podcast appearances are better then you know your interviews are better because you actually know what you're doing he's given a better explanation of the answer to your question you asked me recently about defining strategy yeah here had this problem here you know like i i watched this from afar and it was like what's the story that labor is telling you know i knew what they weren't i knew like the kind of they were like the democrats like here's the talking points we think are the safest to land on but what's the story you know but that being said And you're right about the way the landscape has changed.

55:05But if you think about, if you're going to write a follow-up to this book where you're allowed maybe a few non-Americans, Mark Carney's speech in Davos, big event, moved a dial. King Charles' speech in Congress, I think was one of the best subtle analysis of what's happening to American politics. So I think speeches still really, really matter. They do.

55:25Ben Rhodes:Well, Carney's a great example of why they matter, right? Right. Because because people can realize about speeches. But when someone comes along, part of what was affected about Carney, because there are different kinds of speeches that are effective. One is a speech that just tells everybody something that they kind of already know to be true. But nobody stood up. So what was so interesting about that Carney speech is, you know, we all know that the liberal order is broken and not coming back. But, you know, having the prime minister of Canada in a very smart, clear way, like just name all that and tell hard truths and not be afraid.

56:01Knowing that the guy who was destroying the liberal order was on the day. Was there, right?

56:06Ben Rhodes:That's what made that powerful. I think people actually – people are really – it's why they listen to our podcast. Like they're really confused about what the hell is going on. And it should not be a radical notion that we need politicians to stand up and not just tell us like their health care plan or but but to tell us like what the hell is going on, you know, and and and tell hard truths like people are ready to hear hard truths. And I actually would say I think speeches are where certainly in America we've adjudicated American identity and also had people at critical moments come along and tell us here's where we are and here's how we're going to get out of here.

56:41I think one of the things that strikes me with both of you is that there's also the question of the element of risk in the context. So I'm thinking, when Obama's standing up to speak in a black church, there is an element of context and risk when King Charles is standing up to speak in Congress, and you're aware that J.D. Vance is behind him.

57:00Ben Rhodes:There's this sense of potential opposition. And actually, I think one of the things I take from all these speeches, maybe this is your point about Carney and Trump, that a speech is really effective when you sense that there's somebody in that audience who might be really offended that you're having to persuade. Yeah. Yeah. We, you know, there's something Obama did in the 08 campaign that we would deliberately go and try to, you know, when he gave his speech on the need for fuel efficiency standards. I know this sounds kind of wonky, but he did it in Detroit in front of the automakers. And then we said, like, see, he'll go tell the people that need to hear this, you know.

57:39Ben Rhodes:And I think that that is there's something really powerful about the setting that you choose to give a speech. Like, I remember King Charles's speech was so interesting about that. And I say this with respect because I do think it was a really good speech. What he was saying should have been anodyne, right? Like, these should not be radical ideas. But because he's doing it in Congress and because J.D. Vance is standing there, it's like, oh, man, he's really like stirring the pot here. Right. And so I think politicians need to have that sense, recapture that sense of setting and theater. Because what people are most angry about, I think on the right as well as the left, is that it feels like they don't take back control.

58:19Ben Rhodes:Like this was the Brexit slogan that worked, right? There are these forces that we have no agency over that control our lives. These oligarchs or these tech companies or these politicians or if you're on the right, it's these globalist elites or whatever. And going to those settings and telling our truths and calling things out, man, I think people will react positively to that. Well, I think looking back over the thousands of speeches that Tony Blair made, I think the most significant political speech he made was the first Labour Party conference back in 1994. Well, because he was killing sacred cows, right?

58:54Yeah. And also it was interesting when you said that you had eight large drafts. I think we had, I think we were draft 32 by 5am. And this is your cause for speech? Yeah. So for younger audiences, this is a moment where Tony Blair basically turns up at the Labour Party conference and gets rid of a fundamental part of the Constitution. Or starts a debate saying, I think this is something we should think about doing. Doesn't even use those words. One of my favourite lines in your whole book, maybe this is a great place to end. I love this. The ability to silence an audience is far more powerful than the capacity to excite them.

59:29I love that.

59:30Ben Rhodes:And that was, you know, in reference to Lincoln, because also because listening, listening is the most powerful thing you can get an audience to do more than anybody can get in the applaud. But Lincoln stands up at the end of the Civil War and he says the most radical thing any American presence ever said, he says, every drop of blood drawn by the lash must be paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword. Then the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous. In other words, if all of us have to die to pay for the sin of slavery, that would be justified. That is a hard effing truth, right? And yet people at the time understood, oh, actually, he's giving us a chance at redemption.

1:00:11Ben Rhodes:He's giving us a bigger meaning than saving a union. There's a moral purpose to this nation. And we just atone for our sin. And now we have this opportunity to start this nation fresh over again. And again, I think that nothing silences a crowd more than telling them a hard truth that they know deep down is true. Well, the best praise I can give any book is, I wish I'd written that. It's called All We Say, The Battle for American Identity. And thanks for talking to us. Thanks, guys. Thank you, Ben.

1:00:45one of the things i thought listen to that is how we're lacking in britain the ability to write that kind of book with that kind of impact and i need to encourage you to write it because one of the interesting things about america with all its troubles and all our grumbles about trump they can still construct a story about american identity which is i'm going to make you read a speech by Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King, JFK, Obama. Now imagine in Britain, I'd try to make you read a speech by Pitt the Younger, then a speech by Disraeli, then a speech by Ramsey MacDonald.

1:01:26Now we might do Churchill, but that's about it, isn't it, really? And so this might challenge you with the book. What is it about American confidence, sense of nationhood, sense of identity that they can so comfortably... I'm not sure about this. I'm not sure about this. I think you could, let's just go through, who would you do? See, what's interesting about his book, he hasn't got that, I mean, he's got several presidents, but he's got a couple of people I've never heard of. One of my favorite chapters was about a woman called Anna Dickinson, who was a kind of firebrand feminist. Really, really interesting.

1:01:58He's got several from people who are, he's got one from an indigenous American who just, you know, is taking on people who are, you know, this is our country kind of thing. So he's telling the whole history. But I think you'd go through. I mean, look, I'll tell you one, just when you said that, I think I'd put Neil Kinnock in there because I think he made some really consequential and extraordinarily oratorical speeches. You'd probably put, whether you like the content or not, Tony Blair's speech to Parliament on going to war in Iraq. I might say I'd prefer to have his 1994 Labour Party conference speech.

1:02:33Thatcher you'd have to put in. So I think, interestingly, you're still talking about very recent history. I mean, the interesting thing about the Americans is they stretch so comfortably back to 1776, 1860s. And you notice that even when he talks about American identity, when he says, you know, I've realised Trump's not new. You know, this is like what happened in the late 1800s with the Gilded Age. and then you have other Americans saying, of course, we've had populism before, we had with Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, right? Very oddly for a very new country, they're much more comfortable seeing themselves as having a sort of continuity with the late 1700s, 1800s.

1:03:10The examples you gave are all 80s and 90s. Yeah, that's because I'm trying to think of speech. You've said to me, do this book. I'm trying to think of current people that we know. I think the other thing that's really interesting about this book, and I'm not sure I agree with him when he said that, you know, I agree the speech has got to be authentic. That point you made that this can be something that only that person could say. I think sometimes you can write great thoughts for other people. But what I think is really interesting about, for example, his analysis there of Abraham Lincoln. I'm fascinated by this idea of none of us know what Abraham Lincoln sounded like.

1:03:49We've had fed down through the years. this is what he said and this is the reaction i'm always mesmerized when you read some of these speeches of pre sound systems how many people actually heard this he talks about them being put in newspapers how accurate was the reporting of these great speeches that he now does these kind of amazing textual analysis on but i think i read i'm not sure i'm going to do it but something like ian dale who writes these sorts of books all the time i think 15 speeches that tell the story in Britain, you could easily find those. Maybe because we do more plays and - Yeah, it wouldn't have the same impact that it has in America.

1:04:25So for example, in America, you can make a very, very good living writing biographies of 19th century presidents. I mean, every time the great blockbuster biography of often quite an obscure person comes out, every kind of well-read American feels this is something they've got to put on their bookshelf. And I think Ian will be the first to admit that it doesn't achieve that sense of kind of national pride and identity that America achieves effortlessly with this kind of stuff. He's got a very interesting passage in the book where he talks about, I think this is in the context of this woman, Anna Dickinson, that it was like a thing in America that people flocked to hear people speak.

1:05:03Whereas today it might be to watch an athlete or to watch a musician. People really, really took an interest in listening to articulate people speaking. So maybe they do have a deeper culture in that, but you've got me thinking now, Rory. I certainly think that, let's find out but first of all whether a book like this has been written in the uk i don't know none that springs to mind there's lots of compilations of speeches hansard do do that fairly regularly um and there's the whole sort of compendium of great speeches speeches that change the world but what he does really well is he takes the speech but then builds around it the story of the speaker and why it fits a particular period in american history it's also the american story of optimism and confidence is so striking.

1:05:45I mean, after all, we didn't have to do the same things on slavery because we didn't have that form of slavery. We didn't have to do the same things on civil rights because we didn't have that kind of segregation. I think Congress has only just managed to pass a federal law on lynching very, very recently. Gun laws haven't been changed. Abortion remains in a situation where, you know, as Europeans, we think Americans are living in a completely different century. And yet the narrative is, this is the most progressive go-getting end. The wave of history is going forward. And they put it back a bit, but the wave of history goes forward.

1:06:18And actually, we look at the United States, we think, has the wave of history really got that far ahead? No. I mean, I think Ben, even from the progressive left in the United States, has such a sense of national pride. I mean, you feel that what unites Obama, Trump, Ben and the rest of them, is that at some level, American exceptionalism, America is the greatest democracy on earth. And that's what it all follows from. The reason why you venerate a speech that Benjamin Franklin made and you don't venerate a speech that Pitt the younger made, a reason that you worry about what Andrew Jackson was doing in the 1830s is your story is, this is the greatest country on earth.

1:06:54And every one of these speeches and biographies leads up to this extraordinary thing. And maybe we had that with Gladstone was probably the last time And we really felt that. God, that's a very gloomy thought about the state of our speaking. Anyway, I thought it was a really good conversation. I hope our listeners and viewers enjoyed that. I think he's a very bright guy. Oh, and sorry, final thing. I know what you're going to say, Roy. Go on, final thing. What am I going to say? You're going to say, do you think he's been more reflective about his time there than you've been in yours? Well, that's an interesting question.

1:07:23That's a hell of a question. That's a really good question. That's a really good question. Go on. What is the answer? That's a really good question. Yeah. I got the feeling he was, I mean, that's why I said anything good he did, because he was like, everything we raised, he was like, well, that was a mistake and this was a mistake. I think he probably has reflected more. But I also think he's, look, he's still very close to Obama. He and all the team, Favreau and Tommy Vita, they were all there at the opening of the presidential library last week. So for example, I don't think I would ever come out, you know, when you said the speech on Afghanistan, he said, I wrote that.

1:07:56I don't think I'd ever do that. I think he's just been able to separate himself. No, I think he probably has gone through more, or put it this way, I think his soul searching has led to a settled position in himself, whereas I still soul search. A lot to develop there. But my final one that I really want to get you on is this question of the balance between rhetoric and reality and the way in which sometimes really grand speeches. I was trying to dig into it on Afghanistan, but you can make big statements It's about poverty or equality in Britain, and it would be the same. Work very well in the moment because they sound very grand.

1:08:32But in the long run, they cause two problems. One of them is they set up unrealistic policy expectations. The second thing is, in the end, they disappoint the public because you're setting up something that sounds very grand. A gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic, centralized state in Afghanistan based on democracy, human rights, and real law. What is that? That is both something that is a ridiculous guide on policy and something that's going to make the public cynical. So I'm just interested in this in political communication. How do you get the balance right between, and if you're Labour, you will say, Starmer's closing speech.

1:09:08We've made a much more equal society. We've made a much more just society. We've made a much fairer society. And I guess a lot of the public listening is saying, really? I mean, maybe a little bit, but we don't actually feel. I mean, this is the language of the Russian Revolution. And what have you actually done? Well, it doesn't feel very different from where we were two years ago. I think that balance is tough. And I think there's such a cynicism around politics that it's made it harder. But I think you do always have to have a sense of idealism. I think you otherwise, you know, what's the point of any of it?

1:09:41It's like when we were talking to Dan Jorgensen, the European climate guy. And, you know, he's got the facts sort of pouring out. And, you know, he's got all the facts to tell you this is really scary and this is really dangerous. But then he's also determined to say to you, we can do this. We can do this if. I think too often the promise that people make in a great piece of political oratory, the promise is not laden with the caveats and the what ifs. And I think sometimes you need a bit of that. And the way to have that is actually to say this is going to be tough. this is going to be difficult.

1:10:18This is going to require all of us to get engaged, to get involved. And I think that's what Obama did really. I think Obama, I mean, I didn't say this to Ben, but the truth is being a speechwriter for a guy with that voice and that lyricism and that ability to write himself as well, because he is a very good writer, Obama. but what he I felt was able to do in his his speaking style was to give you a sense of the big vision the big hope the big this this can happen but at the same time it was not under it was always underpinned by a sense of step by step we get there and I guess the other thing you'd have to say about Obama is because this you know we talk about legacy and of course these guys have got as you say there'll be books about these people till the end of time Obama's legacy in part is judged by the fact of what followed now ben's theory on that is that that's because we go forward and then we get pushed back and then you keep going forward i hope is right and i hope the next guy is so much better than what we've got now but i think that balance is one that people are driven i think by the way the media operates by the lack of ease of being heard even now making a political case is that people sometimes go over the top on the hope uh without too much focus, enough focus on the expectation.

1:11:38Great. Well, a lot to develop there. Thank you very much. But I thought that was beautiful. Good on rhetoric. Good on America. Good on speeches. Thank you. See you soon.