The Obama Doctrine 2.0: Ben Rhodes is kind of a shit.

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Volkerball: Oct 15, 2009; by FactsAreUseless

There's a very fascinating new long form article by the New York Times in the vein of the Obama Doctrine that focuses on how the Obama administration navigates politics, policy, and messaging simultaneously. It's not written by Jeffrey Goldberg, who did the original Obama Doctrine piece (that thread is here btw). In fact, this article seems to have a bit of disdain for Goldberg, calling him a "handpicked insider." But it's a very good and in depth look into the PR campaigns behind Obama's foreign policy strategies.

The man behind it is Ben Rhodes, who is a familiar face if you do much keeping up with US foreign policy. The article is a bit...disconcerting to me, for two reasons. The first being that I've disagreed with a lot of the defining narratives the White House used to present its policies, so being on the wrong end of the muddying makes me feel like we've been robbed of productive political discourse on certain things where I felt Obama chose wrong. The second is that the long term implications of an extensive network of "journalists" and "experts" who exist solely to regurgitate White House talking points while presenting themselves as impartial, with limited ability to counter them in a 140 character world, are pretty scary.

I disagree with Obama, but his talking points have mostly revolved around redefining more or less pacifist positions into aggressive, militaristic ones, functionally equivalent to what more hawkish politicians are demanding, to silence detractors. I disagree with his presentation, but there's certainly less noble aims that this type of narrative control could be used to support. Ben Rhodes admits as much.

This is the meat and the potatoes of the article. It's long because the article is long, but it's a very good read. Here's a link to the story if you'd prefer to read the whole thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html?_r=0

The method in action after the story of the US sailors who's boats were detained by Iran broke right before the State of the Union address.

quote:

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer�s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama�s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president�s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations � like military or diplomatic service, or even a master�s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing � is still startling.

Standing in his front office before the State of the Union, Rhodes quickly does the political math on the breaking Iran story. �Now they�ll show scary pictures of people praying to the supreme leader,� he predicts, looking at the screen. Three beats more, and his brain has spun a story line to stanch the bleeding. He turns to Price. �We�re resolving this, because we have relationships,� he says.

Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration�s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from �senior White House officials� and �spokespeople.� I watch the message bounce from Rhodes�s brain to Price�s keyboard to the three big briefing podiums � the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon � and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It�s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate � a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.

quote:

The job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that people in Washington were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business � 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade � in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the �content� they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game � to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products � to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. �All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,� he said. �Now they don�t. They call us to explain to them what�s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That�s a sea change. They literally know nothing.�

In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes�s assistant, gave me a primer on how it�s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. �But then there are sort of these force multipliers,� he said, adding, �We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn�t want to name them � �

�I can name them,� I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.

Price laughed. �I�ll say, �Hey, look, some people are spinning this narrative that this is a sign of American weakness,� � he continued, �but � �

�In fact it�s a sign of strength!� I said, chuckling.

�And I�ll give them some color,� Price continued, �and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they�ll be putting this message out on their own.�

quote:

This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which tended to be an art best practiced in person. In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a �narrative� over any serious period of time. Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.

When I later visited Obama�s former campaign mastermind David Axelrod in Chicago, I brought up the soft Orwellian vibe of an information space where old media structures and hierarchies have been erased by Silicon Valley billionaires who convinced the suckers that information was �free� and everyone with access to Google was now a reporter. Axelrod, a former newspaperman, sighed. �It�s not as easy as standing in front of a press conference and speaking to 70 million people like past presidents have been able to do,� he said. The bully pulpit by and large doesn�t exist anymore, he explained. �So more and more, over the last couple of years, there�s been an investment in alternative means of communication: using digital more effectively, going to nontraditional sources, understanding where on each issue your constituencies are going to be found,� he said. �I think they�ve approached these major foreign-policy challenges as campaign challenges, and they�ve run campaigns, and those campaigns have been very sophisticated.�

On selling the Iran deal.

quote:

In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the �story� of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a �moderate� faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime �hard-liners� in an election and then began to pursue a policy of �openness,� which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015: �Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not.� While the president�s statement was technically accurate � there had in fact been two years of formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the J.C.P.O.A. � it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the �moderate� camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran�s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making. By eliminating the fuss about Iran�s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between the two countries, which would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.

quote:

As Malley and representatives of the State Department, including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, Rhodes�s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. �We created an echo chamber,� he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. �They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.�

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America�s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. �In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,� he said. �We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.� He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. �We drove them crazy,� he said of the deal�s opponents.

Yet Rhodes bridled at the suggestion that there has been anything deceptive about the way that the agreement itself was sold. �Look, with Iran, in a weird way, these are state-to-state issues. They�re agreements between governments. Yes, I would prefer that it turns out that Rouhani and Zarif� � Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran�s foreign minister � �are real reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction that I believe it can go in, because their public is educated and, in some respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on that.�

In fact, Rhodes�s passion seems to derive not from any investment in the technical specifics of sanctions or centrifuge arrays, or any particular optimism about the future course of Iranian politics and society. Those are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region�s future wars a lot less likely. When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. �I mean, I�d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,� he said, shrugging. �But that�s impossible.�

On Obama never drawing different conclusions about the US' role in Syria as the situation degraded.

quote:

Another official I spoke to put the same point more succinctly: �Clearly the world has disappointed him.� When I asked whether he believed that the Oval Office debate over Syria policy in 2012 � resulting in a decision not to support the uprising against Assad in any meaningful way � had been an honest and open one, he said that he had believed that it was, but has since changed his mind. �Instead of adjusting his policies to the reality, and adjusting his perception of reality to the changing realities on the ground, the conclusions he draws are exactly the same, no matter what the costs have been to our strategic interests,� he says. �In an odd way, he reminds me of Bush.� The comparison is a startling one � and yet, questions of tone aside, it is uncomfortably easy to see the similarities between the two men, American presidents who projected their own ideas of the good onto an indifferent world.

Which reminds me of an old Shadi Hamid piece where he acknowledged the same thing.
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Re...earch.pdf?la=en

quote:

In the early days of the Bosnian genocide, President Bill
Clinton resisted growing calls for American action. He was influenced by
Robert Kaplan, who argued in his 1993 book Balkan Ghosts that the �ancient
hatreds� of Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs were at the root of the conflict.11 �Here
men have been doomed to hate,� Kaplan writes, the word �doomed� suggesting
the kind of resigned pessimism that is perhaps even more fashionable today.
Clinton eventually came around, but it was a slow process, and it required him
to come to terms with his own role in looking away amidst a slaughter.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush is often dismissed as the anti-intellectual
president, someone who was afraid of ideas, and changing his own. Yet after
the first-term disasters of the Iraq invasion and the country�s descent into
civil war, President Bush eventually concluded that a course correction was
needed. He revamped his foreign policy team (bringing on the very non-neoconservative
Robert Gates), sought to rebuilt frayed alliances, and managed
to regain (at least some) momentum in Iraq by moving away from the failed
policies of 2003�2006, characterized by an indifference to state-building and
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld�s �light footprint� policies.

That Obama, in contrast, appeared unwilling to question his original assumptions
on Syria, despite rapidly changing events on the ground, suggests an insularity
and ideological rigidity rare among recent presidents. The difference in
these three cases is that Clinton and Bush relented to outside criticism, however
slowly. The ultimate choice was theirs, but they benefited from a growing chorus
of criticism over the paths they had chosen, which pushed them to rethink
overall strategy.

The Iraq �surge� of 2007 was a product of much deliberation and
debate both in and outside of government, and saw a variety of inputs from the
think tank community, including the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former
Secretary of State James Baker, and a sort of counter-Iraq Study Group led by the
American Enterprise Institute, featuring influential publications authored by
Frederick Kagan and retired four-star general Jack Keane. As the New York Times
reported, the decision to surge �was made only after months of tumultuous
debate within the administration.�13 Such a debate wouldn�t have been possible
if the Bush administration, at that critical moment, wasn�t open to ideas and
recommendations coming from the Washington policy community

Leon Panetta on Rhodes.

quote:

�There were staff people who put themselves in a position where they kind of assumed where the president�s head was on a particular issue, and they thought their job was not to go through this open process of having people present all these different options, but to try to force the process to where they thought the president wanted to be,� he says. �They�d say, �Well, this is where we want you to come out.� And I�d say �[expletive], that�s not the way it works. We�ll present a plan, and then the president can make a decision.� I mean, Jesus Christ, it is the president of the United States, you�re making some big decisions here, he ought to be entitled to hear all of those viewpoints and not to be driven down a certain path.�

But that can�t be true, I tell Panetta, because the aides he is talking about had no independent power aside from the authority that the president himself gave them.

�Well, that�s a good question,� Panetta allows. �He�s a smart guy, he�s not dumb.� It�s all part of the Washington blame game. Just as Panetta can blame young aides in order to avoid blaming the president for his actual choices, the president used his aides to tell Panetta to take a hike. Perhaps the president and his aides were continually unable to predict the consequences of their actions in Syria, and made mistake after mistake, while imagining that it was going to come out right the next time. �Another read, which isn�t necessarily opposed to that,� I continue, �is that their actual picture is entirely coherent. But if they put it in blunt, unnuanced terms � �

Panetta completes my sentence: � � they�d get the [expletive] kicked out of them.� He looks at me curiously. �Let me ask you something,� he says. �Did you present this theory to Ben Rhodes?�

quote:

Iraq is his one-word answer to any and all criticism. I was against the Iraq war from the beginning, I tell Rhodes, so I understand why he perpetually returns to it. I also understand why Obama pulled the plug on America�s engagement with the Middle East, I say, but it was also true as a result that more people are dying there on his watch than died during the Bush presidency, even if very few of them are Americans. What I don�t understand is why, if America is getting out of the Middle East, we are apparently spending so much time and energy trying to strong-arm Syrian rebels into surrendering to the dictator who murdered their families, or why it is so important for Iran to maintain its supply lines to Hezbollah. He mutters something about John Kerry, and then goes off the record, to suggest, in effect, that the world of the Sunni Arabs that the American establishment built has collapsed. The buck stops with the establishment, not with Obama, who was left to clean up their mess.

There's a lot more at the link. Not sure what my takeaways from all this are yet, but people in foreign policy circles are calling for Rhodes' head for essentially bragging about how effective a liar he is. Their anger was granted though, given that Rhodes entire job was to undermine their work, so I'm not sure how much that counts for. I do get the vibe that Rhodes and Obama think they are the only sensible people in the country though, given how little input they take in, and the disdain they show for people who are more or less their allies, like Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton. This entire administration seems built around that as a central thesis, where information is supposed to go out, not come in, which is not really a good building block for policy when Obama and Rhodes have been wrong multiple times, and are loathe to concede that on any front. It just leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Thoughts?

Volkerball fucked around with this message at 10:17 on May 6, 2016

# ? May 6, 2016 09:44

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# ? May 3, 2024 12:51

Bastard Tetris: Apr 27, 2005; L-Shaped; Nap Ghost

Based on the end result of the Obama admin's handling of Yemen, Syria, and Libya, there's a lot of blame to be distributed. This doctrine just made enemies we can't conventionally fight, but at the same time have a much larger international impact. It's really disconcerting that Rhodes was allowed to shape any narrative, because he fundamentally doesn't understand his job.

I'd be inclined to look the other way, because this is at least an ineffective way to run an awful foreign policy plank and at worst some dipshit playing with the lives of millions of people.

Edit: I'm with you on how this doctrine alters how people disagree with the Obama plank, that little bird on my shoulder knew that the field was set by some disingenuous rear end in a top hat.

Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 10:26 on May 6, 2016

# ? May 6, 2016 10:10

Panzeh: Nov 27, 2006; "..The high ground"

It feels like Rhodes is looking to get some publicity here and NYT is looking to say that Obama should listen to the Stupid poo poo agenda more often.

Hillary will be the queen of Stupid poo poo.

# ? May 6, 2016 21:16

Kristov: Jul 5, 2005

Honestly, the war hawks have been doing this poo poo for decades. Like boohoo, you got your own tactics and strategies used against you.

An Iran without nukes is the single best situational outcome by far. However the gently caress he managed to make that work is fine by me.

# ? May 7, 2016 21:05

mediadave: Sep 8, 2011

Worth pointing out the author of this piece, David Samuels, was a proponent of an attack on Iran, so his dimissal of the Iran deal should be taken with just a pinch of salt.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2009/04/why_israel_will_bomb_iran.html

# ? May 9, 2016 13:09

gobbagool: Feb 5, 2016; by R. Guyovich; Doctor Rope

Kristov posted:

Honestly, the war hawks have been doing this poo poo for decades. Like boohoo, you got your own tactics and strategies used against you.

An Iran without nukes is the single best situational outcome by far. However the gently caress he managed to make that work is fine by me.

How does the agreement pervent Iran from developing nukes? They're violating it left and right and president dolittle can't be bothered to even speak up about it. Iran pushed our poo poo in, hard, and pukes like Rhodes made it easier

# ? May 9, 2016 16:22

Panzeh: Nov 27, 2006; "..The high ground"