However, Rhodes’s travels, and his contemplation of the scene at home, lead him to an important conclusion: The United States, having exported to the world unleashed capitalism, ungoverned social media and a militarized foreign policy, has now seen its pathologies weaponized by its enemies and turned back upon itself. Much that he tells us about these places will be familiar to any attentive newspaper reader. Only during Rhodes’s visit to Hong Kong does the reader get anything like the feel for place that journalism affords. He tarries longer in Hungary, but not, apparently, long enough to meet anyone who shares the illiberal views of Prime Minister Viktor Orban and thus help us to understand his immense popularity. He does not go to Russia and travels to China only briefly, with the ex-president. (In Navalny’s case the meetings were held via Zoom.) One cannot help hoping that such remarkable representatives of what Rhodes calls “the 9/11 generation,” with their “particular blend of idealism and disillusionment,” somehow come to power in their cruel homelands.īut in this hybrid work, the author’s quest often feels oddly curtailed. These include, notably, Zhanna Nemtsova, the daughter of the murdered liberal activist Boris Nemtsov, and Alexei Navalny, who has taken Nemtsov’s place as Vladimir Putin’s leading antagonist. In the book’s most appealing passages, Rhodes sits down with people very much like himself, chastened idealists who have come to know the world as it is but refuse to conform to its demands. He writes about Hungary, Russia and China, each with its own distinctive form of authoritarian culture and politics. “After the Fall” takes the form of a quest: The author goes out into the world in order to understand how it has come to be such an illiberal, authoritarian mess. He has, that is, yielded to a much more subtle temptation, the sort that exerts a special pull on the morally and intellectually serious: the urge to write a Book of Everything, a book about the world, about America, about the author himself. Now Rhodes has written a more ambitious and less conventional book that seeks to combine the firsthand experience of the foreign correspondent, the special access of the intimate to power, personal memoir and armchair speculation.
First, he wrote a memoir, “The World as It Is,” animated by a vivid portrait of a president at once visionary and cautionary, a reformer with a tragic awareness of the limits imposed by refractory human nature.
If you have spent eight years as the chief speechwriter and confidant of the president of the United States, as Ben Rhodes did for Barack Obama, when you leave you can take your pick of gaudy opportunities - television pundit, investment banker, global consultant. Being American in the World We’ve Made By Ben Rhodes
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