I just stumbled across some tweets from former Obama administration officials Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau. They are quite upset, responding to the Federalist’s Ben Domenech on “Fox News Sunday” last weekend. Domenech’s remark that “Ben Rhodes was denied a clearance. He’s a vacuous fool who should never have been in his position” has them especially up in arms.
Ben Rhodes was one of former President Barack Obama’s most-trusted foreign policy advisers — perhaps the most trusted. But Domenech’s words outraged Vietor and Favreau, who explained that Rhodes did ultimately get a Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance, or TS/SCI.
Tough when the big scoop you got from your GOP Hill pals was already in a book that came out last year.
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) March 8, 2019
Whatever you make of Rhodes’ eventual approval for a security clearance, Domenech is absolutely correct about his worthiness to serve as a top foreign policy adviser to the president. And it says volumes about their own defective understanding about foreign policy that Vietor and Favreau are so outraged in their defense of Rhodes.
In the pro-Obama documentary “The Final Year,” Rhodes is shown to be both arrogant and delusional. As a good example, Rhodes proudly claims to be the pivotal negotiator responsible for the Obama administration’s detente with Cuba (which, by the way, has enabled Nicolas Maduro’s destruction of Venezuelan lives). But the most telling moment comes later in the documentary. It shows a moment when, even by late 2016, Rhodes is still confused about why the Russians are bombing aid convoys in Syria. As I explained at the time, it wasn’t that complicated.
That cuts to the key issue here: Russia. Because on Russia, Rhodes was consistently useless. He and Obama repeatedly failed to recognize Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategic interest towards the U.S. was zero sum — the maximum degradation of U.S. interests in favor of Russian influence. And in handling matters such as Russia’s downing of the MH-17 passenger airliner over Ukraine, Rhodes helped craft a response of shameful American weakness.
Of course, none of these failings is unsurprising. Rhodes knows little history or strategy relevant to statecraft, so he never understood what his job required. He never realized that effective leadership isn’t about popularity. Instead, it’s about being identifying a challenge and addressing it with appropriate action. This led to the Obama administration’s alienation of close allies in the Middle East and in Europe.
The French were let down by Obama’s red-line collapse against Syrian President Bashar Assad. The British were let down by Obama’s reluctance to deploy special forces in larger numbers against ISIS. But popularity-seeking and a refusal to see foreign actors for who they are is also what led Rhodes to advise Obama to prioritize largely worthless deals — the agreements with China, for example, in which Xi Jinping hilariously agreed to maybe reduce carbon emissions beginning in 2030 and pledged to stop stealing intellectual property. In return, the U.S. avoided the necessary action that we have seen under President Trump: full spectrum confrontation with China in all areas of its challenge.
Vietor can call Domenech a “dishonest dipshit” all he likes, but when it comes to foreign policy, Rhodes, Vietor, and Favreau were anything but luminaries. Obama and America deserved better.
