This interview sounds very similar in many respects to the arguments that have raged on SI for the past 9 years.
theintercept.com
interview with Ben Rhodes
Barack Obama was one of the most polarizing presidents of the modern era. To the right, he was a weak, feckless leader who led from behind and went on apology tours while failing to crack down on radical Islamic terrorism and “illegal immigrants.” To his critics on the left, he was the deporter in chief, the drone president, bombing villages in Pakistan, assassinating Americans without trial in Yemen, arming rebels in Syria, launching a military intervention in Libya without congressional approval. While Obama did embrace the U.S. empire — killing civilians and selling weapons to awful regimes — he also pulled some of the biggest diplomatic breakthroughs of our time, negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, getting the U.S. to sign on to the Paris climate accord, and reopening ties with Cuba. With Trump now in office, is it time to recognize that Obama wasn’t as bad as we thought, or did Obama’s excesses, whether in the Middle East or at the Mexico border, lead the way to Trump’s? Ben Rhodes, who was Obama’s foreign policy speechwriter and later rose to become his deputy national security adviser, joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss Obama’s legacy and whether it has seeped into the Trump administration.
note, in it Rhodes affirms Obama backing of AQ. |
