The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru

Instead of adjusting his policies to the reality, and adjusting his perception of reality to the changing realities on the ground, the conclusions Obama draws are exactly the same, no matter what the costs have been to our strategic interests. In an odd way, Obama reminds me of Bush.

— Anonymous, nytimes.com

Barack Obama International Relations

When we sit in Washington and debate foreign policy, it’s like a Risk game, or it’s all about us, or the human beings disappear from the decisions. But Obama lived in a place where he was surrounded by people who had either perpetrated those acts — and by the way, may not have felt great about that…

— Ben Rhodes, nytimes.com

Barack Obama Power

All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of…

— Ben Rhodes, nytimes.com

Digital media The Media Journalism In The Digital Age

Don DeLillo is the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy appara…

— Ben Rhodes, nytimes.com

Foreign Policy Obama Administration

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