Ben Rhodes on What Happened to America -- and the World?

Working Capital Conversations

For eight years, Ben Rhodes served as Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama, engaged in issues ranging from reestablishing relations with Cuba to Benghazi to helping negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran nuclear deal. Now, more than four years after leaving that role – but still engaged in business, politics, and international relations – Rhodes has written a book about his personal post-Obama journey that sought to answer a simple question: What happened – to the world, America, and himself as the undertow of history pulled us into the currents of nationalism and authoritarianism – and what we should do about it? It's titled "After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made."

As Rhodes writes: “To be born American in the late twentieth century was to take the fact of a particular kind of American exceptionalism as granted— a state of nature arrived at after all else had failed... Somehow, after three decades of unchecked American capitalism, military power, and technological innovation, the currents of history had turned against democracy itself.”