Play Book Tag discussion

I am already a pretty big fan of Ben Rhodes through his podcast he hosts with Tommy Vietor, Pod Save the World, so my review might be a little biased. That said, I always appreciate his refreshing point-of-view on American foreign policy on that podcast. Even before that, when he was still working in the Obama White House, I felt an odd kinship with him — I too am that rare creature who got an MFA in Creative Writing before feeling compelled to get into politics. Knowing all this, I thought it was time to check out one of his books.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made is a thoughtful book, one I would describe as part investigative journalism and part memoir. Rhodes is a gifted writer, and that MFA polish to his prose is apparent. Unlike a lot of political nonfiction, there is some real lyrical prose in this book, and some deep thinking that goes beyond the rote, rigid categorization that usually plagues foreign policy discussions. I can see why I gravitated toward him in the first place. This book contains legitimate flashes of brilliance as Rhodes contends with America's place in the world after spending eight years in the highest echelons of power trying to shape it. There's also vulnerability here, and a lot of admissions of past mistakes and things he wishes the Obama administration had done differently. Political nonfiction rarely possesses such honesty.

Rhodes also refrains from offering any solutions to the creeping authoritarianism that has swept the globe in the last few years, which might strike some as unsatisfying, but I appreciated it. I struggle with this stuff all the time, and beat myself up a lot over whether I should try to obtain a job in government, whether that would help more than being a writer on the sidelines. This book showed me you can be in the room where it happens, so to speak, and still be as lost as anyone as to how to deal with the direction the country and the world is going. Government is made up of people, and these people are fallible like anyone else.

I rate this book four stars because for the "worldos" like me, a lot of what Rhodes writes about is very similar to things he has discussed on the podcast. I often felt like I was retreading the same ground, especially in the sections regarding China and Hong Kong. However, I am also a big fan of Alexei Navalny (#FreeNavalny), and this book contains a really great interview with him, so that section sort of made up for it. All told, I think a newcomer to foreign policy might benefit the most from this book, as it contains a good overview of trends from the end of the Obama administration and through the Trump era.

(view spoiler)[(Spoiler cut for wonky talk) For one slight critique of the substance, I can't speak to the other sections because they're outside my area of expertise, but I took issue with Rhodes's assertion that the Beslan terrorist attack was any sort of turning point for Putin's handling of Russian governance. While he's right to point out that the rhetoric in Putin's speech advertised the humiliation Russia suffered when the Soviet Union collapsed, and appealed to a sense of grievance among a certain set of the Russian population, Putin had been at this sort of thing for years already. If you want a more approximate start date, I would look to the 1999 lead up to the second invasion of Chechnya, which involved a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and Dagestan that scholars nowadays strongly suspect had FSB involvement to create a pretense to invade. Rhodes mentions this only in passing, and I found it odd because it's such a missed opportunity — he was drawing parallels between Russia and America's authoritarian turns. Russia's wind up to invade Chechnya under Putin and America's wind up to invade Iraq under Bush contain a multitude of uncanny similarities that he could have expounded upon. The Russian-Chechen conflict is already such an overlooked topic in English language scholarship and I wish Rhodes had been able to give it more attention. But then he never professed to be a Russian studies guy – so perhaps my critique is hyper-specific. (hide spoiler)]

On the whole, this is a good, thoughtful book, and useful for anyone wanting to contemplate American foreign policy and its consequences through an unflinchingly honest lens.