Our world - one in which Orbán, Putin, Xi Jinping, and, of course, Trump, can thrive - is the world America made. Surveying the global ascendance of nationalist authoritarianism and pondering its causes, Rhodes indicts Washington on account of three of its chief exports: unrestrained market capitalism, militarist aggression blending into a globalized war on terror, and the dark side of digital technologies. Indeed, After the Fall is structured by a surprisingly trenchant assessment of the impact of post-1989 American hegemony on the world. In time, Rhodes has come to see that there is nothing inexorable about the triumph of freedom, and that the big things America does can be big bad things. Even then, as a young child, he sensed that the famous structure “was tied up with the idea of America: We do big things.” This infantile American righteousness was compounded by one of his earliest political memories: seeing images of Boris Yeltsin stood atop a tank, “taking a stand for democracy.” Rhodes knew that “the world was full of good guys who would inexorably vanquish the bad guys on behalf of freedom.” In 1983, Rhodes tells us in the new book, he sat on his father’s shoulders and looked out at the Brooklyn Bridge.

He remains close to Obama, and rarely ventures the slightest criticism of his boss, mention of whom tends to be cringeworthily hagiographical.Īfter the Fall, Rhodes’s new auto-ethnographic memoir, is at once a chronicle of his post–White House travels and a deeply personal reckoning with the end of the American century. These days, Rhodes lives in Southern California, and cohosts the tellingly titled podcast Pod Save the World, part of a successful media company founded in 2017 by a trio of fellow Obama speechwriters and “strategic communications” cadres. Though he was formally a strategic communications adviser, Rhodes enjoyed a much wider political brief in practice, which included leading the administration’s negotiations with Cuba. Rhodes then spent eight years in the White House as Obama’s deputy national security advisor, a period chronicled in his 2018 memoir, The World as It Is (memorably nominated by Perry Anderson as an archetypal “spin-doctorate of the equerry”). Soon after, he became speechwriter for the vice chair of the 9/11 commission, and later found his way onto Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Review of After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, by Ben Rhodes (Penguin Random House, 2021).īen Rhodes graduated from New York University in 2002 with a master’s degree in creative writing, before moving to Washington, DC, “to be part of the nation’s response” to 9/11.

After the fall rhodes