Ben Rhodes — Democracy, Foreign Policy, and the American Retreat
Former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes on the collapse of the liberal international order and what comes after American global leadership recedes.
Why we picked this
Rhodes was in the room for some of the defining foreign policy decisions of the Obama era, and his willingness since then to publicly question the assumptions of that era makes him a more interesting interlocutor than most former officials who turn to the speaking circuit.
Ben Rhodes served as Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for eight years, shaping the administration’s messaging and strategy on everything from the Iran nuclear deal to the opening with Cuba. His memoir The World As It Is offered an unusually candid account of what it felt like to watch the liberal internationalist project that animated so much of that era come under sustained assault: first from internal contradictions, then from the 2016 election, and then from a second Trump administration.
At City Arts & Lectures, Rhodes speaks to the larger question his post-government work has circled: whether the framework of rules-based international order, American leadership, and democratic solidarity that the Obama administration believed in can be reconstructed, or whether the world has moved to something genuinely different. His podcast and ongoing journalism suggest he has continued thinking hard about these questions rather than simply defending the Obama record.
The conversation takes place as European security, trade relationships, and democratic backsliding in multiple countries have made foreign policy feel unusually immediate to American audiences.