The new documentary The Final Year records the ups, the downs, the smiles, the frowns of President Obama’s foreign policy advisers during their last months in office. It was made for HBO but it won’t hit the small screen until later this year. For the moment it’s playing in a few theaters in Obama country (Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, of course, and the pleasanter boroughs of New York City) and on various pay-per-view outlets. If you have the chance to watch it, there are stupider ways to spend your time. In the Trump-created chaos of the present, it is good to remember that chaos takes different forms.
The stars of the movie are John Kerry, U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, and Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama’s closest foreign policy aide. (Susan Rice, Obama’s last national security adviser, tells the audience that Obama and Rhodes enjoyed a “mind-meld” early on and apparently never decoupled.) They granted the filmmaker, Greg Barker, extensive access to their daily doings and mulled their way through countless interviews. Whether they did this in service of transparent policymaking or in hopes of memorializing their strenuous efforts on the country’s behalf is unclear. Evidence tilts toward the latter. The movie, says Rhodes, could “actually be a record that survives and that people could view 10 years from now.”
Every administration acquires the personality of its leader. By 2016, Obama’s foreign policy team had taken on the president’s self-possession, his distaste for confrontation, his weakness for lofty language, and his embarrassment at all the sins committed by his predecessors; also his need to let other people know of his embarrassment. The movie reminds us that Obama’s “apology tour”—during which he parachuted into various countries, told the residents how badly they had been hurt by America, and then, unburdened, skipped lightly away—was an ongoing feature of his presidency, through to the very end. In The Final Year we see the president instructing the citizens of Hiroshima about the incredibly destructive bomb we used to kill most of their grandparents. Later he drops into Laos to remind them that they were carpet-bombed by Richard Nixon. While apologizing to the Laotians, Rhodes explains, the president also wanted to force “Americans to confront that history, which is not a very good part of our history.” You may want to take notes.
When I think back over the Obama administration, I have the enduring impression of articulate, well-credentialed people talking, talking, talking. The stars of The Final Year are among the most skilled Obama talkers. When Kerry releases little bubbles of gas like “We have to be realistic about the challenges we face” he is taking a cue from the master, the president, who can say “It’s ultimately where politics, government, diplomacy has [sic] to be rooted—in that belief in a common humanity” and say it slowly, thoughtfully enough to almost persuade you he’s saying something substantial. “Bearing witness is both an instinct and a responsibility,” says Samantha Power, without clarification. Obama’s foreign policy, says Rhodes, is “engagement-focused.”
The manipulation of high-toned, empty tropes was both a cause and a consequence of Obama’s foreign policy. The most touching sequence in The Final Year concerns the “ceasefire” that Kerry negotiated with the Russians and Syrians in September 2016. The movie portrays Kerry as a clueless and oddly endearing popinjay who lurches from photo-op to photo-op, shaking hands with one international grifter after another, getting his pocket picked all the while. He spends dozens of hours “brokering” the ceasefire with those friendly Russians. Then he is astonished and crestfallen when it falls apart, after Russian and Syrian aircraft bomb a U.N. humanitarian convoy headed for Aleppo, killing more than 20 aid workers and destroying food supplies meant for 75,000 starving people.
“It’s so frustrating,” Kerry tells the camera. “Because we had an agreement that could have worked! But some people didn’t want to cooperate.”
And we know who those “some people” are, don’t we? The Russians aren’t friendly at all! Kerry rushes to the Security Council to give their mean old ambassador a piece of his mind. He condemns “in the strongest possible terms” (in Obama’s diplomacy, the strongest possible term was “in the strongest possible terms”) “an outrageous, sustained two-hour attack directed at a fully authorized humanitarian mission.” He gives the ambassador the hairy eyeball and says it again: “Fully authorized!” This is evidently the dispositive fact for the secretary of state. If the U.N. had only half-authorized the convoy—well, that would be a different thing . . .
After Kerry is gone, it is left to Power to talk like a man. She takes his seat at the Security Council and stares at the fleshy, vacant face of the Russian ambassador. “Are you truly incapable of shame?” she says. “Is there literally nothing that will shame you?” In that moment Samantha Power walks off with the movie. If only she could’ve done the same with our foreign policy.
But this may not be the movie’s highlight. For a viewer susceptible to schadenfreude—I name no names—that comes on election night, when the “legacy” of Obama and his visionaries effectively dissolves before their very eyes. A camera follows Rhodes outside, where he slumps, devastated, on a bench. He’s asked how he feels. “It’s a lot to process,” he says. For more than 30 seconds he gropes to express himself. “I can’t . . . I . . . I ca . . . I mean, I ca . . . ”
The silence is like a fresh breeze.
