Ben Rhodes Oral History, interview 2

Hello, Ben.

Hello.

Welcome back, and thanks so much for your time and information. We have you, I think, until 2:00 Eastern Time. Is that correct?

Yes, that’s correct.

OK. OK, great. This is our second session with Ben Rhodes for the [Barack] Obama Oral History Project at UVA’s [University of Virginia’s] Miller Center. We’re going to jump right in. My colleagues are Spencer Bakich, at VMI [Virginia Military Institute], and [Robert] Bob Strong from Washington and Lee [University], and both of them are now fellows with us at the Miller Center in addition to their other positions. They have a number of questions to follow up from our first conversation with you that was, I think, last August or so. I’m going to start with Spencer. Have at it, Spence.

Great. It’s good to see you again, Ben. Thanks so much for joining us. First, I’ve got several—a set of questions that take us around the horn in geographic and topical things, but I’d like to start, if we could, in Afghanistan. The question that I have is actually rather specific, but it gets to the relationship between the State Department, the White House, and the military. April of 2010, General [James L.] Jones, [Thomas] Donilon, meet with [Hillary Rodham] Clinton, [Robert] Gates, and [Mike] Mullen regarding the direction and the responsibilities for command and control of military forces in Afghanistan in conjunction with the political work that the embassy is doing.

In particular, Secretaries Gates and Clinton are particularly frustrated by General Lute, [Douglas] Doug Lute. There seems to be a significant amount of friction delineating the lines between the White House and folks who are actually in Afghanistan overseeing the war. I was wondering if you could speak to the nature of that friction, and then we could talk, perhaps, about Ambassador [Karl] Eikenberry as well.

Yes. Obviously, this was a while ago. I think there were two separate issues. The one with the military was—coming out of the Afghan review [Afghanistan and Pakistan Annual Review], I think there really was a kind of conceptual problem, in the sense that Obama had seen the June 2011 timeline as cabining a surge and also wanting to guard against mission creep. In Obama’s mind—and he communicated this repeatedly—part of the review, part of that outcome was determining more limited objectives in Afghanistan.

Very specifically, Obama said, I do not want to do a counterinsurgency strategy in the entire country of Afghanistan. I’m not signing up for that. I’m not persuaded that’s achievable. It’s certainly not achievable from a resource perspective. Therefore, I really want you to think of this as a short-term surge to achieve these objectives of facilitating the al-Qaeda campaign, and beginning to build up Afghan security forces, and preparing for this peak of U.S. forces to start to come down.

The military said all the right things about understanding that [laughs], but I think there was a sense that they had not internalized it. Lute, who was where Obama was, was often the bad cop, I think, in dealing with the military. I don’t know what the personality dynamics were. I can’t really speak to that. I always liked Doug Lute, but I guess some people didn’t. I honestly didn’t see that part of it. So the issue with the military, I think, was just this core—and Gates was quite critical of Obama after the fact, I remember, in his book and other places: He wasn’t fully committed to the mission, et cetera. I don’t think that was the case. I think Obama just saw this as a more limited mission than folks in the military did, certainly [Stanley] McChrystal and [David] Petraeus. Lute was squeezed in that dynamic.

I think State Department was a different issue because that was the [Richard] Holbrooke issue. I think Lute and Holbrooke didn’t get along very well. To be honest, it was not always clear to the White House what Holbrooke was doing. He had this whole team, this massive team at State that he built. In the mind of Tom Donilon, he was basically supposed to be doing the civilian side of the strategy—What is the plan to both improve governance and to strengthen development?—whereas Holbrooke had grander ambitions, but it wasn’t always clear what they were. After the fact with him, it became that he—I think a lot of people around him have said it was about making a deal with the Taliban. That felt like more of a post facto emphasis to me. He raised that, but it wasn’t front and center, certainly in the review—so we never quite—

The weird thing about the Holbrooke challenge is that I never quite knew what he was so upset about because you’d hear different things. You’d hear, He wants to meet with Obama. It wasn’t clear why. It just had to do with he was probably too big for that role. I say that with sympathy. This was a role that, in the org [organization] chart, was a midlevel supplementary role to a lot of giant personalities in Afghanistan—General Petraeus, General McChrystal, Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama—and he wasn’t at a certain level in the org chart. I think that ultimately was the thing that was difficult—and here’s Doug Lute, who Holbrooke probably sees as not of his standing. That was the issue at State.

OK. Was there ever an attempt to get these disparate pieces—what the president wants, what the military is pushing for, what State Department wants, how it fits into the overall strategy—was there ever a time when there was a moment, perhaps, in the White House, saying, “We need to see if we can corral these disparate pieces together,” or did it limp along over the years?

No, I think there were two or three moments. One is when Obama did fire McChrystal. We had an NSC [National Security Council] meeting, and by NSC, I mean interagency too. He shared the decision. Obama was not one to get angry, but I’ve almost never seen him more angry because he liked McChrystal, and he wasn’t happy that he had to do that.

I think to him it was endemic of everybody being a free agent on this policy, and so he really laid into the team and was like, “I’m going to fire”—and Obama was not one to do this. But he was basically like, If I hear of any more leaks or backbiting against each other in the press, I’m just going to keep firing people. This has to stop. That was less about the policy and more about the personality dynamic and all the—because everything was—it wasn’t just that McChrystal story. Every Afghanistan thing was in the press. That helped a little bit.

The main thing—then Marja [Afghanistan; Operation Moshtarak] happened. I don’t have my timelines exactly right. Marja confirmed Obama’s fears because it was meant to be this test case of counterinsurgency, and it was a lot harder than it was previewed. When this really got sorted, though, was—there was a conscious decision in the White House to use the review that was going to lead into the June 2011 decision to, once and for all, get people on the same page. It was far more White House—the first review was very much driven by the military and McChrystal’s troop requests, et cetera. The review that culminated in the June 2011 set of decisions was very White House–centric. Tom Donilon was now national security advisor.

We had the conversation. Petraeus was like, “I want to do what we just did in the south and the east, and I think we just have to keep moving around this country,” and Obama was like, “I do not want to do that.” He’s like, “I understand why you want do that, and I’m not”—he wasn’t being facetious. He was just like, One, I’m not convinced it will work. Two, the resources that I think it would actually take based on what I saw in the south, I don’t think we can sustain that. I don’t think Petraeus liked that, but he definitely accepted it. Gates did, too, and Gates was leaving.

I do think things got on the same page in the first half of 2011. If you think about it, you have the Afghan review basically through the end of 2009. And 2010 is this year of, you have the McChrystal firing, you have Holbrooke passing away—I forget exactly when that was—you have Marja and the testing of the theory, you have some huge gains against al-Qaeda in Pakistan. The core objective is working, even if it’s tangential in some ways to what’s happening in Afghanistan. And then I think the first half of 2011, Obama finally gets the Afghan strategy that he thought he had signed up for.

Bob, did you want to jump in?

No, I’m listening carefully. Let me ask a question this way: Would Obama consider Afghanistan to have been a success? I made a determination there would be a brief surge. I put limits on it, and I held the limits. I wasn’t sure it was going to work from the outset. It worked in only limited fashion. I got the policy I wanted, and there’s fits and starts and problems along the way, but by and large, I would count that as accomplishing what I set out to do. Is that a fair summary of how he would think about Afghanistan?

Yes, I think so. It’s actually not quite how I think about Afghanistan. [laughs] I’m a little more—I’ve talked to him about this over the years. The thing we couldn’t fail to do is al-Qaeda, and we pretty much destroyed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was very worried about escalation. He would say, “You don’t get credit for the things that don’t happen,” but there were scenarios in which we could have gone into Pakistan, and this could have become a regional war. There were scenarios in which we’re far more bogged down with far higher casualty numbers and costs in Afghanistan. I do think he believes it was a success as measured against his objectives, which were very al-Qaeda–focused—trying to hold the place together, trying to give the Afghans a chance while limiting, to some extent, obviously, American resources.

By the time we left, it was obviously sufficiently messy, and the Taliban were sufficiently resilient that he didn’t—he had an option to remove the final 10,000 to 15,000 troops that we had there, and he didn’t take it. He was like, It’s not responsible. I think this place would collapse. Just in terms of the Obama presidency, I think he would see it as we achieved the core objective. We did limit the risk of escalation beyond what he was comfortable with. And while we left, we still had an Afghan central government.

I’ve done my own reflection. I just think we failed to sufficiently understand the country where we were operating. And we created, unintentionally, a lot of structures that were not sustainable and that had corrupt elements, whether it was the Afghans that we were choosing to work with or whether it was the contractor footprint that both created dependencies in the Afghan [National] Security Forces and probably created some corruption on our own side. So I’m a little more skeptical.

This ties back—I’m not trying to assign blame because we all share it. This was the frustration with the State Department. It’s like, Where is the governance strategy? There was a lot of good critiques, and Eikenberry had great ones, [Hamid] Karzai and—but it never led into a—part of what Obama had to do is if there was an election, he had to mediate between [Ashraf] Ghani and [Abdullah] Abdullah, so it was very tenuous politically. That’s where I think, on the political side of the strategy and the engagement with the Afghans side of the strategy, it never felt like it was working as it should.

Ben, just a follow-up—two things. One is I remember when President [Joseph R.] Biden [Jr.] threw the switch to get us out, I think it was 66 percent of Americans in polls wanted us to get out. I presume that meant fully, not leave 10,000 to 15,000 military personnel there. I don’t know what it was in this time period that we’re talking about, but we do know that it’s coming up to the 2012 reelect. Did you talk with your colleagues, did you talk with the president, about what polls were showing about the American people and what they wanted or didn’t want in Afghanistan?

Yes. I had this strange job—not so strange anymore, I guess, [laughs] with [Donald J.] Trump. I had a—I was in the NSC. I lived in national security. But I had a foot in the White House as a speechwriter and as a communications staffer, and as someone who had been with Obama on his campaign. I had a foot in both worlds.

We talked a lot about the public exhaustion with the War in Afghanistan, with the war on terror more generally, and the disconnect between the conversations in the Situation Room, which assumed a somewhat open-ended American commitment, and the lack of public support for that commitment—particularly after we killed [Osama] bin Laden, because to most Americans, it was like, All right, let’s go home. We had a lot of conversations after the bin Laden raid—because bin Laden also happened right before the June drawdown began. What we decided to do is give people a sense that this was winding down. Obviously, we were going to be in Afghanistan, but the number of Americans there was going to start to fall, and it was going to continue to fall—we could see a light at the end of the tunnel.

I remember he went—I wrote a speech. I think we had a line in a speech that I wrote, that he delivered in Afghanistan, that said something like, “The tide of war is receding.” There was this effort to thread the needle between a public that just wanted to be done with this whole period and a military and U.S. government that felt like there was a lot more work to be done in Afghanistan. The way we tried to manage that was through this messaging of reduced commitment over time.

We also were going to lose the allies. I dealt with a lot of the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] allies, including some of their people that did messaging or prime ministers who had political challenges. I remember at the NATO Lisbon [Portugal] summit, it was the allies that were like, We have to say that 2014 is the end of this mission. Politically, David Cameron and others were quite insistent on that. They had even less support for this mission because they just weren’t—obviously, they didn’t have the 9/11 [September 11th, 2001, attacks] origin story for it in the same way we did. And so we also had to make 2014 a real deadline to keep NATO together, or ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] together. That’s how we managed it, a messaging of a diminution of commitment over time.

Then one other point. You mentioned about the State Department and hoping, wishing, that they would have a clearer plan for what they were attempting to do or should have been attempting to do. The Miller Center did a much briefer separate project, oral history, on women, peace, and security and talked to a lot of people who worked with Secretary Clinton, and to some extent, we talked to Secretary Clinton. They’re very proud of that. Was that something that you were aware of in a major sort of way that would have at least fallen into one aspect of, Well, they are trying to help women in Afghanistan, and this, we hope, will lead to peace and security?

Yes, I wasn’t involved. I mean I was quite aware of—my wife actually worked in the State Department’s Global Women’s Issues Office and works on gender equality, so I was very aware of the importance of those issues. Again, the hindsight benefit. I’ve become friendly with a lot of Afghans over the years and have done a lot of my own after-action with my Afghan friends, most of whom are women.

Their criticism, which I also was kind of aware of at the time—it just wasn’t as informed as it should have been by Afghan perspectives, which I’ll come back to in a second—is essentially that, OK, on the one hand, you’re doing this programming on women and you’re talking about it a lot. The harsh version of their criticism is, You were just doing that for public relations, that publics needed to feel like there was something good happening in this war, and so you guys would give all these awards to women, and you would talk about women and girls—

Now, I think that undersells it. I think we were doing some real programming, and USAID [United States Agency for International Development] was doing some real programming, and the State Department. But what my Afghan friends would say is, While you’re doing that programming, you’re working with these warlords who treat women like shit. [laughs] The main strategy is a kind of old-fashioned: Back different strongmen around the country, and then you have this appendage to the strategy where you try to help some women and girls. “If you had listened to us,” is what my friends say, “we could have told you that that’s not the guy you want to put your faith in. You’re building an Afghan intelligence service that’s pretty creepy and doesn’t have the support of the kinds of women that you’re helping.”

I’m not saying that they’re totally right either. I’m just saying that if I have a metacritique of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan, I’m harder on the White House than even the military and the State Department that is out, at least, in Kabul and across Afghanistan. It’s that our strategy was not sufficiently informed by Afghan voices. Insofar as—because I think about all the meetings I was in in Afghanistan. There were almost never Afghans in those meetings. Again, obviously, diplomats and military officers are engaging constantly with Afghans, but they’re engaging with the government and the security partners [who are dependent on the U.S. for resources].

It would have been interesting to have more of a constant feedback loop from smart Afghans being like, Here’s what you guys are getting wrong. You know? Because again, hindsight is 20/20, but a lot of the Afghans I know are like, “We could have told you at the time that it was a mistake to back this guy, or this was what was going on in the economy, or this thing that you were doing in Kandahar was alienating the public.” I think all the components of the U.S. government, including the White House, could have done a better job of incorporating feedback from people that knew.

Again, the women, peace, and security stuff was obviously important, and huge gains were made by women. There are metrics that show that in the time that we were there, things improved for women, particularly in places like Kabul. But it wasn’t integrated. It was a separate line of effort that didn’t feel like it was integrated into what we were doing generally in Afghanistan.

Spence or Bob?

Anybody have any other questions on Afghanistan? I’m just trying to be mindful of our time as we move through our two hours.

Bob?

I think we should move on and go to Arab Spring [antigovernment protests].

Sure, sure. Ben, I loved your chapters on the Arab Spring. They’re incredibly thoughtful and detailed in your memoir. I do have a question, though. If you could, reflect on the differences of opinion pertaining to whether or not Hosni Mubarak should have received White House support or if the White House should have taken the line that it did with respect to the types of reforms that needed to be made. In particular, one of the things that I think you emphasize is a generational divide among the older guard and the younger national security staffers. Is it more than the generational divide in the White House that is resulting in this tension, or are there other issues that are at play?

And then ultimately—I’ll get to the main question—how did Obama make his ultimate choice when it came to critical questions about Mubarak’s fate?

There was certainly a generational divide, and Obama was part of it. He was younger than [laughs] some of the people that worked for him. But what was interesting about that—and I alluded to this a bit in the chapters, I think—is that some of that was also just relationships, right? [William J.] Bill and Hillary Clinton had known Hosni Mubarak for decades. Bob Gates had known Hosni Mubarak for decades. The military obviously knew the Egyptian military well.

I thought the most interesting and self-aware thing Obama said is the day that Mubarak stepped down, he’s like, “I’m not sure I would have been able to do that if it was King Abdullah [II] of Jordan,” because he had actually built a good relationship with King Abdullah. Another component that was in part generational, because it was in part how long you’d been around, is that—I didn’t have a personal relationship with Hosni Mubarak, so probably easier for me to be like, This guy needs to go, than, say, Hillary Clinton.

There was another piece of it that I think was far more central than it got attributed to at the time, which is the [Persian] Gulf. The Saudis and Emiratis were absolutely—that’s when Obama lost the Gulf. People like to point to the Iran [nuclear] deal. It was not that. It was the Arab Spring. The people that had closer relationships with the Gulf Arabs, again, which was, like, Hillary Clinton, and Bob Gates, and Admiral Mullen, were more sympathetic to their view, which was, This is a huge mistake, and we need to just back the Egyptian military and Mubarak. I think that was an underappreciated factor to some extent.

I think Obama’s own feeling was—and this is not new, I said it in the chapter, so I won’t dwell on it too much—essentially, that Mubarak had just totally lost the legitimacy with his own people. There was a concerted effort, a real effort, to let him preside over a transition. Frank [G.] Wisner [II] delivered that message. All kinds of people delivered that. Obama, in his phone calls, would constantly try to get him—when Obama would talk to him, Obama was trying to say, Let’s put together a transition plan. It can be basically drawn out. But Mubarak was so defiant. He kept saying this was going to go away. He wouldn’t even acknowledge that there was a problem with his population beyond the Muslim Brotherhood, which was the Gulf view. That’s what the Gulf would say too. Obama just didn’t agree.

I think that in the Obama presidency, there was always a bit of a tension between Barack Obama, the global figure who represents a set of aspirations, and Barack Obama, the president of the United States, which is a nation-state with interests that sometimes do not align with those aspirations.

Those early days in the Arab Spring, Obama was like, “I can’t—it would just be too in contradiction with my own political identity to back a televised crackdown on Tahrir Square [Cairo, Egypt] to keep Hosni Mubarak in power.” He’s like, “I just can’t do that. I can do a lot of things—drones, and managing wars, obviously having relationships with more autocratic governments.” But that was just—he would be betraying the kind of politics that got him elected president if he did that.

Ben, that’s a fascinating way of framing it. As a political scientist, when I teach this type of event, I usually frame it as a tension between American interests, on the one hand, versus American values promotion, on the other. But you framed it in a very different way, and it’s a much, much more personal way for the president of the United States.

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds to me like Obama is acting quite consciously about who he is as a person in the world and what that means for leadership that extends potentially beyond the United States of America. Is that fair? Is that the way he framed it?

That’s right because it’s also about—he’s obviously different than most presidents in that there was higher expectation from him. One of the things I think about a lot is that at the height of the Arab Spring, there was such attention on what he was going to say. Every word of every statement was going to be parsed, not just by governments but by people in the street, and more so than a normal American president. If Joe Biden had been president, I’m not sure that the global public would have cared as much about what Joe Biden had to say about what was going on in Tahrir Square. I think Obama was aware of his own credibility globally, with global publics, which was one of his strong suits.

He was very popular in large parts of the world in ways that made it easier for the United States to do things or get support from governments to do things. If he was seen to be a completely conventional American president, following the Gates–Clinton playbook, he would lose that extra—it wasn’t just about his—I mean I had this argument with the Emiratis. They thought it was, Oh, he’s just trying to protect his political brand as the “hope and change” guy. I was like, “No, no, it’s bigger. It’s different than that. It’s that the identity of his presidency is tied up in movements”—literally, movements—the civil rights movement, and popular mobilization, and minority rights. Were he to cynically say, “Well, I didn’t really mean any of that,” it would have been—

It’s not that it would have been a domestic political problem. At home, domestically, I don’t think that people cared that much. Maybe a little bit, but—so it wasn’t about, We need to do this for our base, or something. It was more about Obama was telling a story about America and the world that would have been completely contradicted by not at least trying to support some of the forces that were in the street at the beginning of the Arab Spring.

Were there significant missed opportunities in the Arab Spring era, or was it likely to end in tragedy for all the reasons we know—weak economies, weak civil societies, decades or longer of authoritarian rule, all the other weaknesses?

When I look back, I always think of Egypt as the missed opportunity, which is not what people usually think. They usually think of Syria or Libya. I don’t think we ever really—after the very dramatic events of January and February in 2011, and then the initial optimism about Mubarak stepping aside, and there being this possibility of a more democratic Egypt, to me, the missed opportunity was—

First, basically, my cynical view of things is that the Egyptian military wanted to reduce the entire question of Egypt’s future to a binary choice between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military. We were getting a lot of advice from people who I think knew what they were talking about.

Just to give one example, don’t do the parliamentary election first in Egypt. Do the presidential election, because if you have a presidential election right away, you have a better chance of getting an Amr Moussa or a Mohamed ElBaradei—someone who’s not the military or the Muslim Brotherhood, who can be a national figure. If you do the parliamentary election first, that’s going to favor the Muslim Brotherhood because they’re the most organized party. In the absence of one leader, they’ll just overperform in that parliamentary election, thereby raising the stakes of their competition with the military, and that will then shape the presidential campaign.

That’s exactly what happened, and people were telling us this in the spring and summer of 2011 when these decisions were being made by Egyptians. I mean, we didn’t get to set the electoral calendar. But we also didn’t—we were a bit hands-off on it. That’s the first point.

The second point is after [Mohamed] Morsi won, tragically—perhaps not surprisingly—they did overplay their hand, not necessarily irrationally. [laughs] If I was those guys, I’m not sure I would have had a lot of trust in the military either. I do think—and we’re now, however many years later, seeing this in Syria. The main question is whether political Islam had a role to play in these countries. I was of the view that there is no small-d democratic—I didn’t expect any of these places to be full democracies, but you have to have room for the participation of nonviolent Islamist movements, or else you’re never going to have any democracy in this region.

I think the Gulf Arabs saw that as existential, that if there’s a successful—let’s say the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t overplay their hand. That actually would have been even more threatening to the Gulf Arabs because they don’t want political Islam to be an alternative. That coup or uprising in 2013 was pretty “Astroturfed” [getting fake support] by the Gulf. They were paying people to get out in the streets. They were funding not just anti-Morsi but anti-American propaganda campaigns. Ultimately, they cared more than we did. It’s their neighborhood. They were willing to break things to get [Abdel Fattah el-] Sisi back in power.

I don’t know. We could have done everything differently, and it’s still probably more likely than not that the same thing would have happened for the reasons you say—that these countries just weren’t quite ready for this kind of transition. It may be that the next time, maybe they’ll be more ready. Syria is a good test. How do these guys do?

I don’t think Sisi is going to be around for that much longer. I could be wrong about that, but I don’t think that’s a permanent solution to Egypt’s politics: to have a corrupt military economy and dictatorship. But I saw that moment in 2011 as the window in which maybe we could have tried to be a little bit more supportive of a democratic process in Egypt. We said all the right things, but I think our muscle movements were still—what the Egyptians saw was our military engaging their military, and the Gulf putting a lot of money in. Our words, I think, were probably a little ahead of our actions as a government.

By the time you get to 2012 and Syria is descending into civil war, geopolitics are entering into it via Syria, Libya has no center that can hold, Egypt—Morsi’s beginning to rattle things a bit. By then, you could see where this was going.

Was there ever a moment from January onward in 2011 when the United States government attempted to put a regional frame or a regional response to the Arab Spring? Or did it just happen so quickly in succession that there wasn’t sufficient time or bandwidth to think about a broader regional approach to this? Every conversation that I’ve had on the Arab Spring, it’s, This happened, then this happened, and this is the way we were—I don’t want to say “caught off guard,” but in many respects, surprising events are necessarily off-putting. Was there ever an effort to try to think about this as a series of regional dynamics?

Yes, definitely. Periodically, we would do a review almost and try to put this in a regional dynamic. In 2011, the speech Obama gave at the State Department was the first effort to do that, because what we did is we didn’t just talk about the Arab Spring. We talked about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Iran, and we were trying to overlay a regional perspective on what was happening.

Part of the problem, even at that time, I remember, is that we couldn’t be consistent. Bahrain was not—[laughs] the U.S. government was not going to, given the centrality of—once it got into the Gulf, given the attitudes of both the Gulf monarchies and, obviously, the enormous U.S. interests in stability there, it made it hard for us to apply the same framework to Bahrain that we did to Egypt. I think we were victims of our own contradictory and competing impulses in some respects.

We continually, each year, would try to do an exercise. Because then what ended up happening is it became increasingly connected to geopolitics, because the Arab Spring started to become this proxy—Syria, for instance, obviously, with Russia and Iran coming in. You had the Iran nuclear issue. You had [Benjamin] Netanyahu being recalcitrant on the Palestinian issue. The region, after 2011, returned to being a geopolitical center of events.

I remember when Susan Rice became national security advisor in 2013, she did a very rigorous review—What is our regional approach here?—with me, and [Antony] Tony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan, and I think [Philip H.] Phil Gordon, and some other people. The result of that was the UN [United Nations] General Assembly speech that Obama gave in 2013, in which he basically said, Here’s what we’re doing. We’ve got to solve this Iran nuclear issue. It was Obama saying, “I want this to be rooted in American interests.”

Our top interests are—obviously, there’s a continuing counterterrorism interest. Then there’s the Iran nuclear interest because Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be a huge issue for the U.S., not just about the region itself. We put the Arab–Israeli conflict into that as a priority, mainly because John Kerry was very committed to making a run at that, and because I think we thought—our basic point was, We’re trying to diminish our commitment to this region in terms of resources and attention. If you could get an Iran agreement and, ideally, get an Israeli–Palestinian agreement, but at least keep the lid on that, and then allow time to work through some of these political issues—and, obviously, Syria was the most pressing—that would guide us, and that did.

I actually think that Susan Rice review—that is what we did the rest of the Obama administration. We did an Iran deal. We continued counterterrorism, and obviously ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] then becomes an issue. We tried and failed on Middle East peace. And then we just managed the Arab Spring dynamics. I actually think we had a pretty consistent policy from the fall of 2013 on, after a pretty bumpy couple of years. And that’s after the “red line” [Syria’s use of chemical weapons]. That was the moment where it’s like, OK, we’re not going to go in and remove [Bashar al-] Assad. That happens at the same time. That’s in the fall of 2013 too.

Why don’t we cycle back because a couple of those issues are, I think, foundational to getting us to that fall 2013 articulation. One, of course, is Libya. The other is all of the Syria dynamics. Can you give us some insight as to how the process, with respect to Libya—how is it that the coalition begins to take shape with respect to providing humanitarian protections for Libyan civilians? This ultimately culminates in the United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.

That happened quite fast. As Egypt is pulling out, we’re beginning to see the same things happening in Libya. But in Libya, it’s different because in Libya, pretty quickly, by—I don’t remember the timelines exactly, but by February, say, of 2011, [Muammar] Gaddafi has lost control of eastern Libya. Benghazi [Libya] has always been this hub of opposition energy. Unlike Egypt, where it’s a Cairo-based political drama, in Libya, it was a failed-state circumstance, where you have Gaddafi in Tripoli, and then you’ve got this opposition in Benghazi, and then you’ve got street protests. So we’re watching this.

I wrote about—there’s a similar drama in all these Arab Spring countries where everybody waits to see what the leader is going to say. Gaddafi comes out, and he’s maximum bloodthirsty, anti-American, anti-opposition, and he begins, essentially, to march east to crush the opposition. There’s a period of a week or two where this is building to a crescendo, and there’s a lot of pressure. In retrospect, people acted like Obama just suddenly decided to invade Libya or something. There was tons of pressure: Why aren’t you doing anything? Why aren’t you putting a no-fly zone in place? How can you let Gaddafi do this?

As things come to a head, the other dynamic is that there are several things happening at once. One is people are genuinely concerned that there’s going to be a mass slaughter in Benghazi, in particular—that we can literally see this Gaddafi army moving across the map. They’re getting closer. If they get there, they’re going to go door-to-door and kill potentially tens of thousands of people. That was not a post facto justification. That was literally what we were being told in the Situation Room: We expect that to happen. Gaddafi can overwhelm these people, and he’s saying he’s going to kill a lot of them, and we should take that seriously.

At the same time, the Arabs didn’t like Gaddafi. The same Arabs that were against change in Egypt, even wary of change in Syria, there was no support—the Arab League was on board with getting rid of Gaddafi because they didn’t like him, and so you had this Arab support for some intervention. The Europeans, particularly the French and to some extent the British, felt a little exposed by how close they’d gotten to Gaddafi. They had welcomed him back into the fold more than the U.S. did. The Europeans had—“embraced” might be a strong word, but they met with Gaddafi. [Nicolas] Sarkozy, in particular, was becoming very vehement about the need to act.

I wrote about this at length, so I don’t have to—because it was a pretty dramatic meeting, where Obama basically decided, OK, well, if there is a basis—I always say he outlined in his Nobel Peace Prize address his threshold for the use of force. What was interesting about Libya is it crossed it because it was basically, like, if we can get UN support for an authorized international military intervention to avert an atrocity, that’s a scenario in which I would at least consider using military force. That was possible in Libya because the Arabs and the Europeans were fully supportive of doing something militarily.

Then there was this flurry of diplomatic activity, and the key part of that activity was that the Russians indicated that they were willing to abstain from the resolution, which would allow it to pass. They’d actually already supported a UN Security Council resolution on Libya before. I think that was why Obama, reluctant at first, was ultimately persuaded. The Europeans—he called [David] Cameron and Sarkozy and said, “Will you guys”—if we are in the front of this thing, and we go in, and we take out essentially all their air defense systems and do the heavy lifting at the beginning of this operation, will you commit to really carrying your weight in this thing? They said yes. I think that very quickly, all these factors aligned to initiate that Libya intervention.

OK. Was there as much discussion quickly thereafter or contemporaneously about what, if anything, was needed to follow through with respect to postcombat stabilization, that kind of stuff, on the ground?

Well, there was an interesting dynamic in Libya, when I look back on it, because the initial intervention was to just save the city of Benghazi, stop an atrocity. But Gaddafi was still there. Actually, if there was a flaw, it was that we didn’t mentally decide this is a regime change intervention at the beginning. But then so long as Gaddafi’s there, there’s an ongoing threat of people being massacred. I remember it was a pretty important moment. Obama wrote an op-ed, of all things, with Sarkozy and Cameron, I think, that made clear that as long as Gaddafi’s in power, civilians are not safe in Libya. So it transitioned to a regime-change effort.

The Russians hated that, and I wrote about this too. [Dmitry] Medvedev, who had, I think, gotten out ahead of [Vladimir] Putin with that abstention—and I do think there was an underappreciation of the fact that Medvedev was pushing, not just on Libya but on a bunch of things. He was pushing a little bit out in front of Putin’s comfort zone. The cartoon that Medvedev has become is not who he was back then.

That turn to it being a regime change intervention was obviously hugely consequential, and then we are planning for the “day after” or whatever you want to call it. When Gaddafi is killed in, I guess, the fall of 2012, there was this brief moment of optimism. But what was challenging there is it became hard to figure out where to focus your efforts. There was this, I think the acronym was the TNC, the Transitional National Council of Libyans that were all saying the right things. But in retrospect, these were a lot of diaspora people. It’s your classic case of these guys are the right people saying the right things, but they don’t control the militias who are running parts of Libya, whether it was Benghazi or Misrata or Tripoli.

We’re having this political track with these people that are not connected to the people with guns in Libya. The Europeans were supposed to train Libyans to try to start to cohere a security force. That never really worked. Then the Libyans did not want much international presence in the country. That was a uniform view in Libya. We don’t want even a big UN footprint in Tripoli because they were very sovereignty conscious. We were struggling to piece something together that could work politically.

And then Benghazi happens, the attack in Benghazi happens, and it just became very hard for the U.S. to even be there. It’s a perfect storm of events. And the politics of Benghazi were a new dynamic, and I think a pivotal dynamic in American history because in my mind, the conspiracy theory–laden aftermath of the Benghazi attack leads right to Trump [laughs] in a way. It made it just very difficult to do things in Libya because there was this bizarre, absolute zero tolerance for any risk for an American in Libya because of the hysterical nature of American politics around the Benghazi attack. We never really regained the initiative.

Right, almost as if it poisoned the well.

It did, and the reaction to it poisoned the well because even if you think about Congress, the kind of people that you would normally be trying to work with, like a Lindsey Graham or a John McCain, they were—not McCain as much, but Graham was wearing “tinfoil hats” [believing conspiracy theories] on Benghazi and really going for the jugular for me and Susan Rice. It just made it very difficult to—if you can’t even have an ambassador in Tripoli because of this hyperpoliticized approach—yes, it was a perfect storm.

By the way, I’m not sure that would have—Libya’s a challenging place anyway. As with Egypt, it might not have made a huge difference, but it definitely created this vacuum where you could get a [Khalifa] Haftar in Benghazi, and you could just, there was a sense that the international community was going to be—I think the Libyans understood, These guys are not really going to be around, and so it made it hard.

If there hadn’t been an attack in Benghazi, would we have gotten that new politics and that new distortion of the ability of the country to have intelligent arguments about controversial foreign policy anyway? Would it have just latched onto something else?

I think it probably would have latched onto something else. I think there was something happening anyway in the country, and particularly online in the online ecosystem. I think this is a really important issue that doesn’t get enough attention because—at the risk of reopening old wounds here, right now, in 2025, I believe that what Susan Rice said on a Sunday show—it’s crazy that this became such a big thing when you realize that it’s not like the Trump people are held to that standard, but I think what she said was correct. [laughs]

There was a video that had denigrated the Prophet Muhammad. That had caused protests all over the Muslim world, as happens from time to time. There was a protest at our embassy in Cairo that became violent. Some people in Benghazi saw that on whatever satellite television, and a bunch of people were like, Well, let’s go down and attack the facility here. Some of those people were terrorists of a sort. They were part of Islamist militia groups. Some of them were just people that were like, Let’s go down and loot the American facility.

Actually, the strangest thing about it is—I remember there’s a reporter, a very good reporter, David Kirkpatrick, for The New York Times, who wrote this painstaking reconstruction of Benghazi a year later that basically said this. I remember him saying to me, “Why don’t you guys go out and point out that you actually—when all the dust settled, it turned out you were right about what happened.” I was like, “I can’t say that because if I say that, I’ll literally get hauled out of the White House and thrown in prison or something.”

The reason I relive all that is that the truth didn’t matter. It was the first time when I just felt like none of this was about trying to figure out what happened or figure out how to secure things. What was really interesting is there would be these conventional ways of dealing with a controversy like that. Different committees investigate, and they make conclusions, and maybe we take a shot or two. But all the investigations that the House Republican committees were doing basically found, Well, sure there are gaps in security. And maybe we should have paid more attention to the security situation in Benghazi, but nobody questioned the premise that there was a video that existed in the world and that X led to Y.

What was interesting that I noticed is that while that was the “above the surface” Washington thing, “below the surface,” these conspiracy theories were starting to bubble up. I would see them online because I had a Twitter [social media] account or something, and I’d see people—that we were running guns to jihadists in Benghazi, or I was part of a Jewish conspiracy to control the news, or we’d edited a 60 Minutes transcript, or something. Very “Trump-y”–type conspiracy theories. It was the first time I felt like the online discourse was more powerful than the traditional political media discourse. I saw the Republican politicians increasingly were responding to the online discourse.

By the time you get to whenever [John] Boehner announced, that special select committee on Benghazi, which isn’t until a couple years after the event, the online discourse has become the Fox News discourse and the House Republican position essentially. I really think it’s a critically important moment in American history because it’s when the thing flips to, you’ve got conventional politics and media, and then you’ve got conspiracy theory and online stuff.

Benghazi was the first place where it flips, and it’s upside down all of a sudden. Something similar happened on immigration, too, so it might have been immigration if it wasn’t Benghazi, unaccompanied children and things like that. But by the time Trump comes down the escalator in 2015, he is actually much more in the zeitgeist of where all the energy is on the Right than anybody else because he’s living—he comes out of that online stew.

I actually think that it’s a much more important—for a while, I used to question, Do I just think this because I became a target? But I actually think no. It is the case, if you look back. There’s a logic to it.

How did, or why did, the Republicans, even before Trump, become more in tune with and more willing to join forces with, take advantage of, that long-existing conspiracy culture? Is there a key person before Trump who gets the Republican Party to do that? Were Democrats slow to catch up with what was happening on the other side?

Yes, I think we were slow to catch up. I think it did start—what’s interesting is it kind of started with Glenn Beck. Again, this is where it’s helpful that I was in the political side. Every day, I’d be in the briefing for the press secretary before their briefing, so I’m following this stuff even as I’m doing my national security job.

Glenn Beck was incredibly conspiratorial: We’re trying to reengineer American society, and Cass Sunstein is—I don’t even remember what the conspiracy theories were. But it explodes on Fox. He becomes the new figure on Fox. We thought, wrongly—we’re like, This is weird. This isn’t going to work for them. It’s way out there. We almost saw it as a negative for the Right that this is where their energy was going.

Then you have the ACA [Affordable Care Act] debate, which became very conspiratorial: “death panels.” And the same thing. We were like, This is—we’re fighting back with facts, and we’re like, No, actually. There are no death panels. But it didn’t matter. By the time we were fact-checking things, whatever the theory was had hardened opposition to Obamacare [Affordable Care Act].

Then Trump comes in in 2011 with the “birther” stuff [questioning Obama’s citizenship]. In 2011 is when you get that whole Trump boomlet that’s all about the birth certificate. By then it’s like, Huh, this is not going away. [laughs] Again, I guess to be—I don’t know if “sympathetic” is the right word. To be understanding of the Republicans, I just think that—

We’ve seen this with Democrats. When you’re in opposition, the online space almost becomes more important because it’s where, increasingly, people are getting their news. As, again, someone who wrote speeches and was in communications, you could feel—in 2008, it was a pretty conventional news environment for that campaign. By 2012, it was a hybrid. There was a lot of online energy, but there was still some conventional news. The nightly news mattered, and interviews and press conferences mattered. By 2016, it didn’t matter at all—2016 was the first post-whatever, American media election.

Some people say post-truth.

Post-truth election, because it was an online thing. I’ve been interested in conspiracy theories for a long time. I just basically think that the simple answer is that my first boss in Washington [D.C.] was a guy named Lee Hamilton, and he would get letters because he had been chair of the Iran-Contra committee [House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran], he’d been chair of the Intelligence Committee. He’d get these long, crazy letters from conspiracy theorists about CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] mind control or whatever. But it took the effort of someone writing a letter and sending it to him.

When all of a sudden you have an online ecosystem and more than half of people are getting their news on Facebook [social media], this stuff can just travel so fast. And then when you have more mainstream figures like Trump, and then after Benghazi, more mainstream Republicans willing to say on television the things that are online, it gave it the imprimatur of truth. These people are saying this is the case. This thing I’m reading online must be true because I’m hearing this from elected officials or celebrities like Trump.

I think that was a huge sea change, and I felt it impact everything. The Iran deal became this relentless “whack-a-mole” [futile responses] with different lines of attack that often didn’t have much to do with how many centrifuges are going to be in Qom [Iran]. By then, it was just normal that you were fighting—you were literally playing whack-a-mole with the truth everywhere.

That was fascinating. I’m hesitant to even ask this question because in retrospect, it feels like a footnote, but nevertheless, a footnote can become a meme. Can you shed some light on the “leading from behind” quote that came from someone in the administration? I don’t know who it was, but nevertheless, it occurred in the Libya context, and it was picked up with, I thought, relentless vigor.

Yes, that was a bizarre episode, too, which connects to what I was just talking about. Let me just say a couple things at the outset here. I’ve never in my life heard Barack Obama say the phrase “lead from behind.” I literally don’t even—even a student of [Nelson] Mandela, like him, I’m not sure he maybe even knew that phrase existed. And I’m not the one who said it, despite what everybody thinks.

Basically what happened is, there was a writer for The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza, who happened to be doing a long story about Obama’s foreign policy around the time that Libya was percolating. I did talk to him at length. I remember he was trying to find the “Obama doctrine.” We did talk about this last time. We didn’t want a doctrine because we just didn’t think that it was—we thought it was a strange—the world is too big and complex to say that we’re going to do the exact same thing everywhere under a doctrine. People can disagree with that, but the point is that we did not want to say, “Our doctrine is lead from behind,” or anything.

Somebody told Ryan Lizza on background that the way in which we mobilized the Europeans in a coalition in Libya was “leading from behind” because we let them be out front on a lot of stuff. That gave them more buy-in, which meant that they could put in more resources. But I don’t think this person meant to say, All of Obama’s foreign policy is leading from behind. I think they just thought it was a clever way of capturing a certain dynamic that was at play in Libya, which, as Obama relentlessly pointed out to me over the years, was not actually accurate because we did everything in the front in Libya. [laughs] We, the U.S. military, basically just destroyed all of Libya’s air defenses in a couple days.

It became this—I guess it just sounded weak, and it overlapped with a criticism of Obama from not just the Republicans but from hawkish foreign policy people that he was too passive. It became endlessly hammered on places like Fox, and it became a real problem because it was—what I hated about it is we didn’t choose it. It felt like why—because people were saying it was our theory. I remember—I’ll never forget when Gaddafi died, Obama made a statement, and the Fox guy shouted out, “Does this validate your doctrine of leading from behind?” It wasn’t our doctrine. It wasn’t our choice. It was one of these bizarre things where—to me, it was shorthand for how hard it is to communicate about foreign policy because here’s some phrase that somebody said on background that became this multiyear thing.

There is a sleuth thing to it. Everybody thought it was me, which bothered me because I didn’t say it, and it bothered me because it would have been probably a dumb thing to say to a reporter. Lizza actually set it off because he ended his story by saying, “While they say there’s no doctrine, one may be emerging, and it’s lead from behind.” Then people said, “Well, it must be Samantha Power,” in part because I’ve actually—I had heard Samantha Power say the phrase “lead from behind,” even if she didn’t say it to Ryan Lizza. But then Lizza took the unusual step of saying it wasn’t Samantha. I don’t know why he did that. He didn’t say it wasn’t me, but he said it wasn’t Samantha. I’ve heard some people say they think it was Tony Blinken because he also used to use that phrase, [laughs] which is ironic because Tony became the secretary of state.

Anyway, that is a side note. But it was a weird—it did speak to the strangeness of the moment. What it spoke to is that there was this kind of hostility to Obama on the Right that, for all the Trump “Deep State” stuff, Obama got a lot of grief from the more hawkish national security establishment, Democratic and Republican. I think the right-wing energy coalesced with the Deep State energy, if you will, and made it stick to us for years.

All right. Perhaps we could turn our attention to Syria. I think there are a couple of decision points that I’d like to hover over for a little bit. The first is Obama’s explicit call in August of 2011 that Assad needs to step down. My question for you is, can you describe the deliberations, to the extent that there were extensive deliberations about the president explicitly saying that Assad needed to go?

Yes, there was this undercurrent for a while about that question, Why aren’t we saying that? We essentially said that about Mubarak. We certainly said it about Gaddafi. We kind of said it about [Ali Abdullah] Saleh in Yemen. It’s like, This guy is worse than all those other guys, and he’s a geopolitical adversary of the United States. Why won’t you say Assad needs to go? We were getting asked the question. This is the one thing that people—we could have just said, “We’re not going to answer that question.” But part of this is that you’re constantly being asked, “Why aren’t you calling for Assad to go? Are you saying he should stay?” I was dealing with that because I was the guy that had to help figure out how we were going to answer questions like that.

What we did is we—I remember we had a number of conversations with me; [Steven] Steve Simon, who was the lead NSC staffer on the Middle East at the time; Robert [Stephen] Ford, who was still the ambassador, still in Syria, I think, at the time; and Hillary Clinton. I think Hillary wanted to call for Assad to go, so I think that was also informing this. She wanted to get there because she also was being asked. We took it to Obama, and Obama said—he was ambivalent. He’s like, I’m tired—I don’t know that we need to keep doing this. We need to get out of this position where we’re calling for regime change on such a routine basis. But he was persuaded—

I remember he talked to some other leaders—Europeans, [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan—and not unlike Libya, other people wanted Assad to go. I think Obama gave a direction essentially. Well, if we can line up a whole bunch of other people to do it with us and accompany it with some action, like sanctions and more of a strategy, then he would do it. Again, it wasn’t like he was vigorously supportive of this. There felt like an inevitability to it, and so I think his view was, If there’s an inevitability to it, we should build a coalition, and we should do it collectively. That’s what happened.

When I look back on it, he didn’t make a public statement. We had a written statement that went out, but he did not want to go out and speak. I think he was always skeptical about Syria, about Assad going easily, so he didn’t want to overcrank the announcement. So that’s what we did.

In retrospect, I think for all the focus on the red line, this one is one that might have been a mistake, or at least to bear scrutiny, because I think we were a little—the intelligence assessments were probably a little too optimistic about Assad going. People were looking at defections in the military or in Assad’s circle. You could look at the information and convince yourself that he wasn’t going to be around that much longer. Obviously, with the benefit of hindsight, that was a call for him to go without either a strategy that was going to make him go or without a high likelihood of him going, which was—obviously with Mubarak, the writing was on the wall in a way that it wasn’t quite with Assad.

Well, and one of the parts to that strategy then would of course, or could conceivably, have been robust support to a quote, unquote, “free” Syrian army. What is the assessment over the, I’d say, ensuing year after Assad has to go, as the administration is watching these dynamics and the Syrian civil war expand, become increasingly worse? What’s the thinking about whether or not assistance, be it lethal assistance or otherwise—to a Syrian opposition group that’s not an ISIS type, or that’s not controlled by or influenced by Russia—how is the administration thinking about this, parsing it?

Remind me of the date because I think you had it in front of you. When did we call for Assad to go?

He calls for Assad to go in August 2011, and August 2012 is the red line. November 2012 is when Obama decides against arming the Syrian rebels. It’s over a period of a year and a half.

I think in 2011, again, Assad looked—he did look wobbly, and there was some sense that he might not be able to weather the storm. We’re doing what we can to affect that, whether it’s sanctions, but also contacts, third parties, trying to get defections. There was a whole series of things happening. We were trying to talk to the Russians, who we still talked to at that time, about it, getting them to support some transition, so there was a period of diplomatic activity.

By the time you get into 2012, Assad is—it’s pretty clear he’s digging in. The Russians are digging in. The Iranians are obviously dug in. Then you have—you start to see these intelligence reports about potential chemical weapons use, so you have that statement that Obama gives at the VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars], I think, inserted into a speech, so a scripted statement that basically says, “We’re seeing this. Don’t use chemical weapons.” We didn’t say “red line.” We said, “You’ll be held accountable.” Kind of an ambiguous formulation. Again, I hesitate to put this on Obama because presidents say so many things. Again, I’m now living in the absurd world where a president can say anything and nobody cares, but this “red line” word became fixed in stone for the rest of time.

Part of it is we’re seeing this chemical weapons danger. Then there’s a proposal made by Petraeus, mainly, to begin to arm the Free Syrian Army. Obama was very hesitant, very hesitant, to go there. He didn’t like the history of the U.S. arming people in proxy wars. He could not be assured that we could separate the more radical Islamists from the more—“secular” or “moderate” gets thrown around, but less radical opposition.

To me, there was an absurdity. I forget when the U.S. decided to support the designation of al-Nusra [Front] as a terrorist organization at the UN, but to me, it encapsulated the absurdity of the whole policy. We’re simultaneously talking about arming the opposition and saying that we’re going to designate the biggest part of the opposition, or the most effective fighting force in the opposition, as terrorists. To me at the time, I thought, This is crazy. You can’t engineer an opposition from Washington with terrorist designations. These people are all fighting. What do I know about what it’s like to fight in Idlib Province [Syria] or something? How do you say to some people, “You can fight with our weapons as long as you don’t fight with the same guys that are fighting your shared enemy”?

Anyway, Obama’s response to Petraeus and [Michael] Mike Morell was essentially, I’m not there yet. There’s a lot of risk associated with doing this. I need to be more sure that—how do we know these people aren’t jihadist? He said no, but he didn’t slam the door on it. He said, “Refine the option. Get back to me.”

In the interim, we started to see some use of chemical weapons, but it was always very hard to determine what happened because you’d see something on social media. Sometimes then you’d find three days later that that didn’t really happen because it’s social media. But the intelligence community did this assessment, I remember, of one or two of these uses of sarin and found that, yes, there had been chemical weapons used on a relatively small scale, almost with the effort to conceal it. It wasn’t a mass chemical weapons attack. At the same time, the CIA came back and were like, “Well, we have a refined option.” We had said there would be consequences for the use of chemical weapons, and so Obama basically said, “OK, this is a better option. It’s clearer.”

Again, we probably can’t even talk about it that much, but Jordan was on board to help facilitate some of this. The Gulf was helping us identify people or something. We announced—and I had to do it. [laughs] I ended up owning our Syria policy mainly because I was the one who had to talk about it the most, even though I never really was comfortable with it. I had to go out and announce in this very opaque way that we’d made the decision to provide military support to the opposition. It was very legal, the lawyers had to scrub the—but I couldn’t say what or to who because it was obviously a Title 50 [war and national defense] program. That put us in this absurd position where we couldn’t really tell people what we were doing. That, in miniature, was part of the problem. We couldn’t really communicate.

Would that announcement normally have been through the IC [intelligence community]?

No, I think there was a sense that, when I look back on it, I didn’t want to—it wasn’t a good thing to announce when you can’t talk about it. You couldn’t have the IC do it because then you’re acknowledging it’s a CIA program. Right? It had to be this policy announcement. Actually, the State Department could have done it, I guess. Yes, that whole—that was not—I knew at the time. I was like, This is not the optimal way.

I took the hit, in a way, because whoever was going to go out there and do that was going to get—not be able to answer all of the follow-ups and was going to get—I mean, I knew it was not going to be a good rollout. It went OK, but it began this trend of, OK, now we’re doing more, and we’re getting more involved, but it’s not enough. That, in miniature, was our entire Syria policy. It’s like we keep getting more involved, but you’re not doing enough to actually oust Assad, and so, What are you guys doing?

Eventually, as the months progress, chemical weapons use is not being concealed. It’s incredibly hard to hide the death of 1,400 civilians killed. And then Obama is confronted with an interesting choice, a critical choice, whether or not to follow through on the vague “consequences will follow” as a result of the use of chemical weapons. This is a critical moment. How is he thinking about the use of force in these terms?

Well, I wrote about it at length, so I don’t want to reprise all that. I guess what I’d say is, I assumed we were going to bomb Syria. I was traveling. I got a secure video conference with an NSC meeting the day after that attack, or the day of that attack—maybe the day after that attack. All of the mood of that meeting is, We’re going to bomb Syria. [Martin] Marty Dempsey said, “I’m against intervening in Syria, but I think you have to do it in this case because of the scale of the use of chemical weapons.” We’re making the plan.

There’s an interesting “what if” of history, which is that I think Obama basically indicated in that meeting, Yes, I want to do something. Get me some options. There was a UN team that was on the ground to inspect the chemical weapons use. And Obama, I remember telling Samantha Power, “Get them out of Syria,” because he wanted to bomb Syria. He wanted them out of the way. I’ve always thought that if that UN team wasn’t there, he would have bombed Syria—I’m very confident of that—right away, so that it would have just looked like, This happened, and then here’s the response two days later.

Because this UN team stayed on the ground for the whole week, all these other things started to happen. I don’t remember the exact order that they happened, but essentially, you started to have people in Congress demanding that he come to Congress for authorization. There’s been a lot of revisionism about this, like, We’re not the ones that introduced that idea. It was Democrats and Republicans both saying, You can’t do this without congressional authorization —there was a lot of ill will over Libya because the Congress thought that we’d abused the War Powers Act in Libya. You had this bipartisan message, “You have to come to Congress.” Then the British said, OK, we have to have a vote on this, and they vote against it. Then Angela Merkel is like, I can’t support this, even publicly. Obviously, Germany is not going to participate.

By the time we get to the Friday, I still thought we were going to bomb Syria that weekend. I was working on a plan with DoD [Department of Defense] to announce the airstrikes. Even with all that was going on, I just assumed we’d go ahead and do it anyway.

That’s when Obama calls a small number of us up to the Oval Office and tells us, I’ve decided that I’m going to seek congressional authorization with the rationale being that I don’t think that you—if we do one set of strikes, I don’t think it’s going to be the last one because Assad’s not going to step down. He might use more chemical weapons. I’m going to need congressional authorization, or else I’m going to be in a very weak position because people will start saying this is unauthorized. There’s not going to be public support for it because there’s no public support for wars in the Middle East anymore.

You have this crazy few weeks where it’s very clear we’re not going to get the votes. Not right away, but it becomes clear over time that the votes are not really there for congressional authorization, certainly not in the House [of Representatives], which was controlled by Republicans. But then even the Senate started to slip away a little bit. Then we had the G20 [Group of 20], where he sees Putin and has this sideline conversation with Putin about getting some agreement to remove chemical weapons. John Kerry follows up on that, and then suddenly Obama is addressing the nation saying, We’re going to do this diplomatic play instead to remove chemical weapons, and that means I’m not going to take strikes. That’s basically what happened.

I’ve read in several different places that the overture came either from the Americans to the Russians or the Russians to the Americans, and you elided over that. Can you shed some light as to who broached the subject to whom?

I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I was with Obama, and so in Obama’s mind, this is something that he and Putin talked about. What he doesn’t know, and I don’t know, is whether John Kerry raised it with [Sergey] Lavrov. I actually don’t know the answer to this question, which is an interesting question because I assume it’s true that other people were talking about it.

Therefore, when he and Putin talked—because I think in Obama’s telling to me at the time, it was like he had said to Putin, Look, something has to happen here. This guy used chemical weapons, and we can’t just have him sitting there with this massive stockpile. I don’t even necessarily know whether Putin was like, Well, we could do this, or whether Obama said that, but in Obama’s mind, it came out of that conversation between the two of them and was handed off to John Kerry.

I think probably there were conversations already happening so that when he and Putin talked, this was already on the radar, but it was such a crazy time that it was hard to know exactly who was doing what.

I’d like you to wade in on a debate. Derek Chollet is pretty clear that had we gone ahead and bombed, the outcome in Syria with respect to chemical weapons stockpiles and all of that would have been worse than had we done what we did, which was not use military force, work with the Russians diplomatically, and as a result, bring the Russians into this process that results in a Syria that has far fewer, if any, chemical weapons. What is your assessment of the way this played out?

I agree with Derek entirely. At the time, Obama was saying, “If I bomb Assad, what’s to stop him from just using more chemical weapons?” They were telling Obama, too, “You can’t bomb the chemical weapons because that could set off sarin clouds,” and things like that. From the narrow interest of reducing the chemical weapons threat, what happened was actually far preferable to a strike. I freely acknowledge that for a “macro Syria,” getting Assad out faster, it wasn’t. But on the narrow question of chemical weapons risk management, removing a lot of chemical weapons, even if it wasn’t all of them, was a better outcome for that piece of the Syria puzzle.

Obviously, it did kind of indicate that Obama wasn’t going to use force against—or was unlikely, at least, to use force against Assad. I see the counterargument that it might have incentivized further Russian and Iranian intervention on behalf of Assad because they felt like there was less risk of an American military intervention—totally acknowledge that. I also agree with Obama that just doing a cruise missile strike, like Trump ultimately did in 2017, wasn’t going to remove Assad either.

So I always thought there was a bit of a dishonesty—or not dishonesty, a bit of wishful thinking—to the debate of, Oh, if only he’d done this strike after the red line, none of these bad things would have happened in Syria. We were already two years into the civil war. Assad wasn’t going to just leave because of a U.S. cruise missile strike, and we probably would have had to remove Assad like we did in Libya. I agree with Obama that there wasn’t really any support for that. There was a lot of post facto support, but if Congress can’t authorize even a cruise missile strike, how are we going to have a potentially multiyear military intervention in Syria to remove Assad and stabilize postconflict Syria and all the rest of it? I’m not here to defend the whole Syria policy.

I do believe that this red line episode got—it became almost like mythology. I also think it was politically misunderstood by the national security community because I remember after leaving office, if I was in either a national security discussion in the U.S., or if I was in Europe at, say, the Munich [Germany] Security Conference, there was a theory of everything that, If only Obama had bombed Assad, Syria would have been fine. There would have been no refugee crisis. There would have been no Trump. I’d always say to people, “Actually, I think Trump would have won by more.”

Trump was running against Middle Eastern wars. I don’t know why another Middle Eastern war would have prevented Trump or the rise of populism. There already was mass displacement of people. It got worse in Syria, but if the U.S. was at war in Syria, it still would have been bad. I think that there’s plenty to criticize about our Syria policy without this pretty lazy, “If he’d only bombed after the red line, everything would have been different,” which was not my experience of what it was like to engage with Syria all those years. It was so complicated and multifaceted, and there was so little political bandwidth for the U.S. to get involved in another war after Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and to do so without any legal authorization.

I always give very unsatisfying answers [laughs] when I’m on panels and stuff, but—I don’t know. I actually credit—I find myself questioning things like the call for Assad to go more because we never had a clear strategy. We had a lot of tactics. That, to me, is ultimately the criticism of us more than it is just this one episode.

I’m mindful of our time here. We’re coming up on 1:51. On my docket, I’ve got some questions on Crimea and [Operation] Enduring Freedom. But I want to stop because I want to give Bob a chance to ask a couple of broader questions.

I’d love to do—I can do one more [session] to do the 2014—Iran, Crimea, if you guys are interested in Cuba, or whatever, Paris [Agreement on Climate Change]. We could do one more session.

Oh, absolutely.

Terrific.

Well, I wanted to shift, for the time we have left today, to some of your broader reflections about Obama, how he compares to other presidents, how his legacy is likely to play out in the future as you’re thinking about it. Let me just throw out one idea that you might respond to: Should we think of Obama in the category of presidents who really cared about speechmaking, presidents like [Woodrow] Wilson, [John F.] Kennedy, [Ronald] Reagan? All presidents give speeches. Communication is important for all of them, but some of them are themselves writers or people who hire and admire really good writers. Is that a category of president that’s worth thinking about and putting Obama into?

Yes. I really like how you did that. I’ve had to think about this a lot [laughs] because when you leave office, you think your legacy is these laws you passed—health care, Dodd–Frank, the stimulus, whatever—foreign policy things like Iran, and Cuba, and the Paris Agreement. When you have your successor come in and try to take apart as much of that as possible, you obviously—you’re like, Well, what was that all about?

To be honest, and I don’t think this is just pure coping with the Trump of it all, when I think about presidents myself—my hero, for instance, growing up was John F. Kennedy. When I was growing up, before I got deeper into stuff, I couldn’t name any bills he passed through Congress. I knew he’d managed the Cuban Missile Crisis well. I knew he did the Peace Corps. But what I knew about were his speeches and the feeling that those speeches gave people. Those speeches motivated some people to run for office or to get into public service. They updated how people thought about America and themselves. They planted a flag for where liberalism was going.

To me, Obama is very much in that category of president, where he looms large and his approval ratings are high. I think that’s a combination of his personal comportment—he was a guy that wasn’t corrupt, and he managed a competent White House, and he was elegant and had a good marriage. These things matter. But then, also, I think that there are certain presidents that become a narrator of what is happening in America and the world, or they foreshadow where America is going. I think Obama, in many ways, is—the reason the Obama–Trump comparison is so interesting is Obama is like, We are becoming a multiracial democracy. I embody that. I’m talking about that. I’m making changes that are going to have impacts on the culture. Trump is like, No, we’re not.

When I think of it as, like, Reagan, Kennedy, Wilson, there’s a kind of president that is articulating where America is, is both effectively communicating and reaching people in the moment in ways it sticks with them. People think fondly of Obama in part because they remember his speeches and how he acted. But also, hopefully, from my perspective, in 20 years—if we survive this strange period—people will be like, Yes, Obama was ahead of the curve there, [laughs] and we had a very strange decade or two after Obama, but ultimately, as with Kennedy, he seemed like he came from the future. That’s how I think about it, which, again, I freely acknowledge there’s some coping in that, but I think it does bear out. At the time, I saw him as being in the tradition of Reagan and Kennedy, as a communicator and as a politician.

Did he think of himself that way?

That’s a really interesting question because I think he tried not to. I think he was wary of being just a charismatic politician. He really wanted to have a Bill Clinton component to him, too, like a wonky—and Clinton was a great communicator too, by the way, so you could put him in that category too. But Obama liked policy, and he liked governing. He really enjoyed—I think things that he’s proud of are, like, Ebola [virus]—a really well-executed government response to something—fixing the implementation of the ACA to get that in a good place by the time he left. He liked digging into governing.

I think he was a bit afraid of a cult of personality. I’ve been in many meetings with him where he was told, “You’re the next Nelson Mandela,” and he’d say, “No, I’m not. I’m not in that stature.” But I think intuitively he knew he was, though, or else he wouldn’t have given all these speeches.

I had a very interesting conversation with him late in the presidency. There was a shooting in Dallas [Texas] where several police officers were killed, and it was right when that was becoming a thing after Black Lives Matter [movement]. Obama was going to have to go speak at this memorial service in Dallas, and he didn’t want to at first. He’s like, “I’ve given so many speeches after mass shootings or about race.” I remember saying to him, “But people want to hear from you, and that’s a good thing.” Again, to just contrast it, there was not the same expectation that Joe Biden would address the nation after an event. Even if he [Obama] was somewhat reluctant, he always gave the speech.

He didn’t want to give the speech where he sang “Amazing Grace” at first. He was like, “What else is there for me to say about a shooting like this?” But not only does he give it, he sings “Amazing Grace.” I think even though he was reluctant sometimes, because he wanted to be seen as not just a charismatic speaker, he always showed up and did the thing. Even if that wasn’t necessarily his self-conception, it is the role he played.

Well, with that, boom. We hit the 2:00 mark. Well done, Ben. As we always say, music to our ears as oral historians to hear the person we’re interviewing say, “I could do one more. I could do another session.”

Because it’s the part I like—some of the stuff I’m proudest of is in the last two years, so I want to make sure I get to it, even if it’s the stuff that got dismantled. Paris, Iran, Cuba. And Crimea is important. We have to do Crimea.

Absolutely. We’ll be in touch, and we’ll get time scheduled, and we thank you again.

All right. Thank you all. Take care.

[END OF INTERVIEW]