Ben Rhodes argues US foreign policy mirrors its domestic identity, contrasting JFK’s aspirational USAID era with Trump‑era nationalism, dismantling of aid, and renewed talk of territorial expansion. As great powers ignore rules and inequality deepens, he says renewal abroad requires rebuilding US democracy and shared identity through reform, organizing, solidarity, and uncensored dissent.
BEN RHODES: All right. Well, it's good to see everybody. Thank you for that introduction, Melani. Thank you to everybody who helped put this event together.
It's interesting. I knew I was going to give this talk and have this conversation. And last week, actually one week ago today, I gave a similar talk on the other side of the country at the University of Oregon. So I thought to myself, well, this is great. I'll just be able to use that same talk. And then as I was getting on the plane, I realized that everything had changed in one week, and I had to redo this to keep up with the pace of events.
And so I know what we're all experiencing is the kind of dizzying adjustment to a new reality that seems to be changing underneath our feet every day. That's an unusual place to be. I think that it makes it even more imperative that there be spaces, be they academic or civil society or communal, where people can just come together to try to figure things out.
I preface everything I say here with that caveat, that I don't have all the answers. [LAUGHS] Anybody who tells you they do right now is either Elon Musk or Donald Trump, or not telling you the truth.
[LAUGHTER]
But I'm going to offer some thoughts on how I'm thinking about this question of foreign policy, which feels less and less disconnected, if disconnected at all, from what is happening in this country. One of the things that I experienced as someone who worked in both politics and foreign policy is there was always kind of an artificial boundary between the two, and now there's no boundary at all, because the kind of country that the United States is is projected through its foreign policy.
And it was interesting. As I was coming here, I wanted to address, obviously, what's happening with USAID. And it was interesting to be in Boston because it led me back to the founding of USAID, which happened in the Kennedy administration. And I went and found online this video of John F. Kennedy addressing the first collection of USAID mission directors and deputy directors in 1962 before they went out into the world.
And he talked about how it was difficult to get public support for foreign assistance. But then he made this case that it was absolutely essential to the United States for there to be a USAID, and for these people to go out into the world as part of America's role, as a leader of the so-called free world.
And he said, "There will not be farewell parades to you as you leave," contrasting aid workers with the military, nor will there be "parades when you come back." At the time, though, there were also not young DOGE interns when they came back. But the reward that Kennedy was saying was the work itself and the cause that it served.
And it got me thinking the extent to which a nation's foreign policy is a pretty accurate reflection of its psyche, of what is going on in the body politic at the time. And so the JFK era that produced USAID had this expansive vision of America in the world as a country that defended freedom, as a country that buttressed international institutions that we'd created, and as a country that had to wage battles for the hearts and minds of people, particularly in the newly liberated, post-colonial societies around the world.
That was a self-interested effort, by the way, because it was tied to the Cold War. And it was also an effort that became symbiotic with the Civil Rights Movement in this country as America's racial hypocrisy was a force undermining its global aspirations to appeal to people in the post-colonial world. And Kennedy's own movement towards the embrace of the Civil Rights Movement was very much tied to his interest in starting a USAID. That was the self-conception of the United States at the time.
The Trump era America that is right now dismantling USAID is a country with a very different sense of itself in the world. It's-- and I-- no surprise. I'm going to offer a critical view. It doesn't, again, mean it's the only view.
But we're now in a place where just in the last few days or a couple weeks, we're threatening conquest of smaller nations. We're withdrawing from international institutions. We're kind of casually proposing the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. This is kind of a mirror image of the message that Kennedy was seeking to project.
And it's a worldview that complements what's happening at home with mass deportations and the erasure of diversity programs. It's a nation that feels like it's growing smaller, quite literally in size, and also in self-conception.
Now, to be clear and to be fair, President Trump ran for reelection promising to transform America's foreign policy and its place in the world. And some of those critiques are ones that people like me could find merit in, and certainly a majority of Americans could find merit in. After the failures of post-9/11 overreach in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, he was going to enforce greater discipline among a national security establishment that he calls the deep state that has been slow to learn the lessons of those forever wars.
After kind of building grievances around allies not paying enough into global security or trade partners of the United States getting more advantages from globalization than the American working class, Trump was very clear that he was going to use older tools like tariffs to leverage better deals. And he was very clear that after being resisted by parts of the federal workforce in his first term, that he was going to remake the federal government in the image of him and his MAGA movement.
And essentially, what this added up to, though, was in a chaotic world full of strongmen, America was going to get one of our own. And that was essentially the deal he offered to the American people.
But I do think that it would be wrong to dismiss this kind of dizzying array of announcements and executive actions as just fulfilling campaign promises. Trump did not run on the platform of dismantling USAID. He didn't run on Greenland. He certainly didn't run on a US occupation of Gaza.
And as I was watching this play out, I couldn't help thinking that rather than showing a sense of strength, this kind of feels to me like an America that's actually lost self-confidence. In some ways, even lost self-respect in that we've eliminated even any pretense of the kind of values, propositions that the United States stood for after World War II. Freedom, self-determination, collective security. Things that we always were hypocritical in living up to, but was an aspiration and a values proposition that we could offer.
And frankly, if you strip that away, Trump cuts a very familiar picture from history, which is an aging strongman musing about territorial expansion for his own consolidation of power and construction of a legacy, a transactional ethno-nationalist in a world full of those people. And so he is reflecting something that has happened in this country. And I think the risks to it are the construction of an American order-- sorry, of an international order that is kind of meant to actually check American excesses. Or at worst, this brand of nationalism in this many places with this many older, strongmen-- and they're all men-- can lead to real great power conflict.
And so I just-- I want to get into the conversation here, but I do want to just go through a few of the things from the last week that I think illustrate where we are and what some of the dangers are that are structural. They're not just the individual issues.
Trump is the first president in my lifetime who came to office pledging, in his inaugural address, an era in which the United States, quote, "expands our territory." So we're kind of back in a pre-World War I mindset where territorial acquisition is at least on the table.
To that end, he's insisted that the US should take back the Panama Canal, take control of Greenland from Denmark, despite repeated objections from those governments and the people of Greenland, Denmark, and Panama. And look, it's possible that this is kind of posturing to open negotiations for things that, frankly, aren't top of mind for Americans like paying less fees in the Panama Canal or getting access to minerals and basing rights in Greenland. But I also think we have to, on the one hand, take seriously Trump's repeated affirmations of this interest in territorial expansion.
But I also-- even if they're negotiating tactics, there are a couple of problems I want to highlight about them. The first thing is that picking on Panama and Denmark, and there was a dust up with the Colombians, and there was a kind of near trade war with Canada and Mexico, it does not feel like kind of a reassertion of American confidence. These are smaller countries. Kind of feels like a bully on the schoolyard looking for someone small to beat up, you know? And that's not, I think, the image that is constructive to project around the world.
I think the other thing we have to recognize is this is a US president in word and deed kind of ignoring the principle of state sovereignty that has been the kind of cornerstone-- shaky at times-- cornerstone of global security for so long at a time when there's already been a normalization of a return to nationalism-based conquest. You have that with Vladimir Putin obviously in Ukraine and potentially other parts of the former Soviet Union.
You have that in terms of Xi Jinping's increasingly bellicose commitments to assert control over Taiwan. You have that in the Israeli right's interest in the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank. And so, again, the US joining that parade, even if the US itself doesn't act on it, is kind of further eliminating the norm against territorial conquest that was the basis of the creation of an international order after we saw where that leads in two world wars.
And this is another reason why the suggestion of taking ownership of Gaza and turning it into the Riviera of the Middle East was so jarring beyond just that image of Trump hotels in the Gaza Strip. Like many things Trump proposes, it's not likely to happen. But again, it further legitimizes an idea that there are two million people, Palestinians in Gaza, who don't get a voice in any of these discussions about their future, who are being told to leave where they want to live without being consulted.
Jordan and Egypt don't want to take in two million Palestinians. They couldn't afford, for purposes of their own stability, to be complicit in that kind of ethnic cleansing. And it implicitly endorses this view that foreign policy's going to go back to big or powerful nations making decisions over the heads of smaller nations and less powerful people. And that, again, is a kind of law of the jungle that leads to places that we spent a long time trying to build institutions to prevent.
Now ironically, if he wanted to rebuild Gaza, he's actually destroying the agency that would do it [LAUGHS] in USAID. And already, the freeze on assistance is making it impossible for USAID to fulfill just the humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, never mind the arduous task of clearing rubble and clearing unexploded bombs and reconstruction. And so kind of speaks to this short-termism, the lack of seeing things and pieces of how they fit together.
Now, people may say to me, these are just pronouncements. These are things he says. These are distractions. But the Elon Musk-supervised dismantlement of USAID, well, that's something that's happening now that is having tangible consequences for people around the world who have been cut off from foreign assistance, whether those are organizations or whether those are programs that Americans expect to protect them from terrorism or from disease or from the rising global influence of who Trump identifies as the preeminent competitor to the United States, China under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
I remember going in the Obama years to the African Union in Ethiopia, and we were there with a very counterterrorism-focused agenda. And we went out to the African Union outside of Addis. And it's a beautiful building. It's the preeminent political institution in Africa.
That building was built by the Chinese government. The road to that building was built by the Chinese government. The ports along the coast of East Africa were built by the Chinese government. And the idea that we're going to win some big geopolitical competition with China by dismantling the already insufficient amount of commitment the United States has to competing in those spaces, I think it's going to be the opposite. I think if you threaten countries with tariffs, if you humiliate foreign leaders, if you pick these types of fights, they may be very nice to you, right?
You might not want to go up to the bully in the schoolyard and punch back. But you're probably going to go over to the other corner of the schoolyard [LAUGHS] and find another group of people to hang out with. And I think that's what's going to happen over the next four years, that we are going to see a whole host of countries either becoming more regional in their cooperation or looking to China for investment or technology.
And so it won't show up overnight. Not everything in the world happens on an American news cycle, but it happens. And it's already happened over the last eight years, and it's just going to accelerate.
And so I think that this kind of blending of the Trump-Musk nationalism and libertarian mindsets is one in which guardrails are removed from people with political power and people with wealth. And again, this comes back to this idea of-- it's kind of a reflection of what the society currently prioritizes in this country.
The idea that Elon Musk could go in and smash up USAID would have been ludicrous eight years ago. It doesn't feel that unusual today. The idea of Trump doing some of the things and saying some of the things he's saying would have been ludicrous even in his first term. It doesn't feel that way anymore. And that's a cultural shift that's happened because of our politics, because of a whole range of issues in our society, which we can obviously talk about.
But I would, again, argue that rather than a kind of golden age, as President Trump said in his inaugural address, it's kind of like your late-stage superpower and decline vibe. I mean, this is not like a strategy for resurgence. It's kind of a strategy for squeezing as much out of the-- much juice as we can out of what remains, and then handing it off to someone else to deal with the residue.
So on that note, I will say that you return to Kennedy, and he made this powerful case about aid being a source of strength for the United States. As he said to those mission chiefs, "We do not want to send American troops to a great many areas where freedom may be under attack, so we send you."
In those days, by contrast, America was this kind of newly minted superpower, and Kennedy in his youth and his new frontier ethos kind of spoke to where the country saw itself at the moment. That led to a lot of great things like USAID and the Peace Corps. It led to excesses in hubris too, so I don't want to overly romanticize it.
But it was a signal that it's possible for Americans to have a sense of shared national identity and a sense of national pride that is about affirmative things, that's not just about taking things away from other people. Or it's not just about grievance, or it's not just about an other, whether that other be at home or abroad. It is possible-- and both political parties have done this-- to have a different concept of national identity. And ultimately, that's what it's going to take to have a different foreign policy.
And so I would argue that those of us who are alarmed by these trends have to recognize that we're not going back to some past. I found some things to criticize in President Biden's foreign policy, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't. He had a slogan that he used when he was running for president the first time that I actually think informed his worldview and his foreign policy, which was, America's back. I don't know if you remember that.
And it was kind of like, well, let's just roll this clock back. [LAUGHS] There was no Trump, and there's not been all these changes. And what I think he found is that was a useful worldview in Europe and with NATO and with a handful of Asian allies. But the rest of the world is like, we don't want to go back to when you guys told us what to do.
In Gaza, it led to a massive blind spot where there was just no self-examination of applying no rules over here while we are applying rules in Ukraine that we flagrantly ignore in Gaza. And I think that what those of us who are critical of these policies need to bear in mind is that we should not succumb to our own make America great again, that there's just some international order we can go back to.
That international order doesn't exist anymore. It's fractured. There's a US collection of like-minded countries. There's a Chinese bloc of countries and institutions. There's a whole bunch of rising powers to kind of pick and choose between. And we have to negotiate something new that can emerge from all of this.
And there'll be new ideas developed in places like this about how the United States can constructively engage people around the world, live peacefully with other great powers. I would argue negotiate around issues like technology and artificial intelligence, climate change, the return of a nuclear arms race, kind of existential things where there's a basis for negotiation among these different blocs.
But again, I think to reach any kind of constructive future-- and I'd say some new development agency, whether it's called USAID or not. But I'd say to reach that future, we have to look inward for a little bit. I think it's OK that there's not big resistance right now. I mean, obviously, you want to push back on things like USAID, or you want to protect marginalized people who are vulnerable right now.
It's time to take a minute here and think about things, and to not just think about, what's the best policy for this or that region or issue, but to think about, what happened here in this country that this is what we're projecting to the world? Because ultimately, what's going to make us more effective in foreign policy is if we are healthier at home. And what is going to help advance democracy again in the world is not-- and this pains me to say as a speechwriter-- like, the speeches that presidents give about democracy. It's going to be what people see in democracies like the United States.
And so this is a time to see who each of us are. I mean, I really mean this, like, individually. What are you valuing? Where and how are you getting your information? What are you participating in or not participating in?
Unfortunately, like a lot of you, I've been doing some deep reading on [LAUGHS] life in certain political systems. And you have to start from that level and build out. What is happening in my community? What is happening in my municipality? The best ideas, I think, are going to come from cities and states and communities. And how does that ripple up into a healthier political culture and politics?
And there's opportunity in that. As someone who's going through a home renovation right now that is getting more expensive by the day, this is a rebuild, not a renovation. And there's opportunity in it. There really, truly is to come out on the other side, if we make it to the other side, [LAUGHS] with the opportunity to build something new. And again, universities are going to be central to that because it's going to be a pretty blank slate. So with that, I look forward to having a conversation and taking your questions.
[APPLAUSE]
MELANI CAMMETT: Well, thank you so much. And it's exciting to hear that somebody thinks universities are important and should be protected.
[LAUGHTER]
So thank you. Well, you ended by focusing at home, so maybe I'll invite you to expand on that, and then ask you some questions about foreign policy in the world today. So I want to start with our democracy, if we can call it that. I think we're actually getting coded as a hybrid regime right now, maybe not a full-blown democracy anymore.
BEN RHODES: It's never good when the regime word starts entering the conversation.
MELANI CAMMETT: Not a good sign. Not a good sign. So what kind of guardrails are left here in place to protect democracy? And I know you've argued-- and I think this relates to some of the comments you were making at the end. You've argued in some of your work that we need to detoxify democracy here.
And I'm intrigued by your notions of building a shared national identity, which I think is very important. That is absolutely critical. And it's tough in a multicultural democracy, especially when those cultural divisions are being politicized and weaponized. So how do we get there? How do we build a shared national identity, and how do we detoxify this democracy? I'd love for you to expand on some of your ideas there.
BEN RHODES: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. From my last book, I asked a Hungarian opposition figure, how did Orbán, Viktor Orbán, transfer this country from a liberal democracy to kind of a soft autocracy on that spectrum in a decade?
And he said, well, that's easy. Orbán got elected on a right-wing populist backlash to the financial crisis. He packed the courts with far-right judges who would find in favor of his power grabs. He redrew parliamentary districts to entrench his party in power beyond the vote share, changed the voting laws to make it easier for his supporters to vote and harder for his political opponents to vote. He enriched a bunch of cronies through corruption who then poured that money back into financing his politics.
He started putting restrictions and harassment of civil society, trying to control what they could do, what universities could teach. He used social media to demonize and harass his opponents. And he wrapped it all up in an us versus them bow. Us, the true Hungarians, against them, the Muslims, the immigrants, the liberal elites, George Soros.
And I remember thinking, wow, that's a pretty familiar playbook, you know? And I say that to make the point that we're much further along the spectrum than we want to acknowledge. And that's kind of what I mean about what's happening now wouldn't have been possible eight years ago. Like, there's been this kind of steady erosion.
And so there are not many guardrails. Institutionally, the guardrails-- there are elections. And I'm not one of these people that thinks Trump is going to stay in power again for a term. I mean, there'll be a midterm election in two years, and there'll be an election in four years, and the pendulum can and very likely will swing. It's not guaranteed.
But then there's these other fundamental questions on democracy and then on identity. I think on democracy, the challenge, the trap that-- I've written about this-- but that the Democrats walked into, people like me walked into at times, is that we were so in opposition to Trump that we felt the need to defend all the institutions, like defend the integrity of the federal workforce and the national security enterprise and Congress, and defend all these things that Americans are actually pretty fed up with.
And it kind of became a proxy for defending even globalization itself, because democracy has been connected-- and I see this everywhere I travel around the world. People connect democracy to globalization. Those two things kind of got linked psychically in the '90s.
And I think what Democrats have to-- not just Democrats. I'd love Republicans to do this too, is how do we-- instead of-- if Trump kind of wants to ignore those institutions or kind of remake them in his image, and Democrats have kind of been defending their integrity-- and Biden, I think, reflects a kind of very institutionalist view-- how do we become about reform? What does a different kind of Democratic system in this country look like?
And by the way, you can be for things that might not pass the first year in office. That's fine. Trump was for plenty of things in 2015 that seemed crazy, and now nobody thinks it's weird that they're building a wall, you know? I mean, so you can be for court reform, money in politics reform, voting rights reform, but you can try to build consensus in states.
I think one thing that Democrats have to do is innovate on democracy at the state and municipal level, and then try to nationalize those approaches and those messages. And so there's a host of things that could be done there.
But I think it is about getting focused on reform, and connecting your economic message to your-- I agree with Chris Murphy. The idea of dealing with wealth inequality is seen as an economic issue. It's also a politics issue, because that's how you get an Elon Musk, and that's how you get that tableau of Jeff Bezos and Elon and Sundar, and all these people at the inauguration. We don't want an oligarchy in this country. We have one.
Then the last thing I'd say on identity is part of the reason why American politics is so polarized is because it's become so much about identity. And I think there's an opening to try to remove these identity conversations from the center of the political space.
I mean, Trump kind of drove them there through his behavior. And ultimately, his brand of ethno-nationalist identity politics is both numerically larger and more capable of dividing political opposition.
I think that it would be important for the next Democratic standard bearer, or Republican for that matter-- I think people are sick of this. I'd like to root for a sports team without knowing the political priors of the quarterback, you know? I'd like to not-- like, everything is so politicized.
And I think there's a big opening for people to come along and say, let's just-- let's keep arguing about this, but let's argue about it over here. Like, just trying to-- and that means not following every provocation from Trump or right-wing influencers. Because again, this hyper-politicization is-- not only is it just kind of boring, but it's ultimately advantageous to the most potent brand of ethnic-- of identity politics in human history, which is majoritarian ethno-nationalism.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Yeah. So we're going to open up for questions later. So I want to actually move-- I mean, there's so much to unpack there, but let's pivot a little bit to the multipolar world that we're living in now. And I totally agree with your comment about the waning superpower vibe moment that we're in. And clearly, we have a rising or risen China and other rising powers.
And so how does the US maneuver in this context? I know you've written about this. You wrote this Foreign Affairs piece. And it is absolutely essential that we have multilateral cooperation to address the most pressing problems of our time, whether it's climate change or trade or conflict, or whatever it might be.
But are the things that need to be done to address those problems possible in a kind of Trump administration, in this multipolar world? Are there-- I think some of what you've written is aimed not just at the US administration, but also at civil society, at political parties.
So how does the administration maneuver? How do we expect this administration is going to maneuver in that multipolar world? And what are the opportunities for actors outside of the administration, like political parties, like civil society organizations, to try to address these pressing problems that require collaboration?
BEN RHODES: I'd actually-- to take that backwards, I've been a big proponent for a long time with some people who are in this room of there being far more collaboration and connectivity between-- again, I'm reflecting a view, but center left and progressive civil society, political parties around the world. And all you have to do is look at what the far right has done for the last 15 years. It's been incredibly networked. Shared media strategy, shared political strategists, shared lessons learned.
And so if you-- again, it's not unlike if you want the country to have a better foreign policy, if you want the international order to reflect a different political momentum, you have to generate that political momentum too. And that requires, I just think, a greater-- by the way, there is more collaboration today than there was when I left government eight years ago. Not because of me, just because a lot of people have seen this problem. But there could be more of that.
I think on your question, though, I mentioned that you kind of have this US-led rump. You've got the G7, and you've got NATO, and you've got a handful of other security alliances. And it's not a truly international order. It's like-minded countries collaborating through selective institutions.
And then you have China building a parallel Belt Road Initiative, the BRICS, multilateral development banks. And then you've got, in an interesting way, if you're India or you're Turkey or you're Brazil, you kind of shop around. [LAUGHS] You know, like, what am I going to do with the Americans and the Europeans, and what am I going to do with the Chinese?
Trump, I think, like I said, is going to probably accelerate a sense of, we need, oh, antibodies against the United States slapping tariffs on us. I think Europe will probably have a more independent China policy.
But to answer about what I would like to see happen-- and Trump could do some of this, although I obviously would probably trust someone else to do it more. But I mentioned three issues, AI, climate, and nuclear weapons, where that's what you need to negotiate with if you're the US and China and a handful of other countries.
And just to go through them quickly, on AI, the US under Biden and then continuing under Trump thus far had this theory that we're going to wall off China. We're going to prevent them from getting chips and investment in their tech sector so that our technology companies win this AI race.
And well, guess what? China has a lot of money, and they have their own technology, and they have a lot of smart people there. And they figured out how to build pretty much the same stuff for a lot cheaper, [LAUGHS], which by the way, is going to be attractive to third-country buyers that may want the discount anyway.
Wouldn't it be better to sit down with the Chinese and say, instead of having these competitive processes, what are the norms around AI? I'm a security guy. How do we prevent it from producing biological weapons? How do we get it out of nuclear command and control?
Obviously, there's societal disruption questions, proliferation questions. That is a much more rational way of dealing with this than being in this kind of, we're going to try to keep as much stuff away from you.
And climate change. We are in the process already of decoupling critical mineral supply chains that are necessary for clean energy transition. It is not the most efficient way to deal with climate change for there to be a whole Chinese supply chain on critical minerals for clean energy, and then a whole separate American-led one, and then probably places like the Democratic Republic of Congo get torn apart by proxy wars. Better to negotiate a shared commons around clean energy, right?
Nuclear weapons. You want to cut the federal budget, you don't spend $2 trillion modernizing your nuclear weapons arsenal, which is what the United States is currently planning to do. And China is following suit, and Russia.
So right there, there are three issues that-- by the way, you're not going to solve them all. But the process of negotiation-- there's something in between just competition and isolation. It's negotiation. And through that negotiation over time, maybe a long time, maybe 10 years, you begin to outline some new rules for how the system operates.
MELANI CAMMETT: Mm-hmm. And we are seeing such a rapidly changing world. I think it's pretty clear that the rules-based order is dead. That's become apparent in the last few years.
So there's a United Nations. It still exists. There's a Security Council. There are resolutions, and so forth, but they don't get enforced. And these bodies like the ICC or the ICJ seem to be impotent. And we now have an executive order in the works to, I think, sanction the ICC. So what about this rules-based order? Where do where do you see that going? And is there-- what's going to emerge in its stead?
BEN RHODES: No rules-based order can work if the big countries just choose not to follow the rules. By the way, that's true in life as well as foreign policy. And there's always been some of that. But I think over the last decade, there's been-- now it is-- that's the norm.
If you're a US or Russia or China, you kind of just-- you exempt yourself from the rules. You don't do anything that is inconvenient to you. You only follow the rules when it is totally aligned with your interest. And then the rest of the world sees that and they say, well, why should I follow these rules?
And again, I think the ICC piece is fundamental. I mean, when the United States-- I would always laugh when there'd be these articles that were like, why does-- why is the United States having trouble getting the Global South to support its Ukraine policy?
And then the United States goes and trumpets the ICC indictments of Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine. And then when the exact same standard is applied by the exact same people to the Israeli government in Gaza, it's like, oh, that's the end of the world, and we're going to sanction those people.
And well, of course, the rest of the world is going to look at that and be like, these people-- this is not a rules-based order. This is ridiculous. And again, there's been a lot of that in American foreign policy history, but it's just-- there's more of it now.
And so I think what it's going to take, unfortunately, is some kind of shock. It took the shock of World War I-- and actually two of those, because the League of Nations didn't get across the finish line in Congress. But it took that shock to write all these rules, to say, we should have rules governing when you can go to war, and how you can fight a war, and how you get nuclear weapons, and all these other things.
And I just think we're going to need a shock. And I would hope that that shock is not another war of that scale, which is precarious now with Ukraine and the Middle East conflicts and Taiwan sitting there.
And I think that there could be an economic or fiscal shock that might scare people straight. There's something that feels unsustain-- I'm no-- there are much smarter economists here at Harvard than me. I didn't even really do well in-- I forget the number class it was. But there's just something unsustainable about levels of spending deficits, lack of central bank authority, what they're doing with crypto right now.
So there's a correction that will have to happen to return to some form of rules-based order in which big countries feel it's in their interest to do things that are inconvenient to follow the rules. Absent that shock, I'm not sure what gets you there other than maybe enough bottom-up pressure.
And this last point to your guardrails thing, another thing you see about authoritarianism even in truly authoritarian systems, there is still public opinion. Public opinion is a guardrail on President Trump.
Right now, he's not feeling that guardrail. And so that's the other question. Is there something that shocks public opinion in this country sufficiently for there to be that kind of pushback?
MELANI CAMMETT: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. And you've brought up the question of Ukraine, so maybe we could talk about that a little bit. That war has been going on now for several years, and so much destruction. And Trump seems to present himself as a deal maker and has a better relationship with Putin than prior administrations. So do you think that he has the capacity to do something about this, to push for a ceasefire, to broker some kind of peace plan in Ukraine?
BEN RHODES: He does. I mean, I think that there was already a kind of an alignment of factors, Ukraine feeling like their capacity to hold the front line has been steadily eroding, a fatigue with the war in Europe, but also massive losses in Russia. We don't even know what it looks like under the hood there. I just can't imagine that-- I know that Russia can withstand a lot, but they have some interest in at least slowing this thing down.
And so I think there's some arrangement that could be made. I think the biggest challenge is giving the Ukrainians enough in terms of a political horizon in Europe and security assurances that, A, they could probably accept a degree of territorial loss that is going to be tough for them to swallow, but that B, they can feel assured that the war won't just start again in three or four years.
And so what that package looks like that makes this worth the while for the Ukrainians-- because you can see why it would be in Putin's interest to, at some point, take a-- pocket what he could in controls and regroup. But the question is, can you persuade the Ukrainians that that's not just a regroup?
That actually, it's in your interest to accept the very painful territorial loss you might have to face, because the remaining Ukraine is going to be a part of Europe, is going to have security assurances, is going to emerge from this better than they started. And whether Trump can do that or whether the Europeans can do that-- I mean, it's a real challenge for European leaders-- that to me is going to be critical.
MELANI CAMMETT: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so one last question. You brought up Europe. And I know colleagues of mine in Europe who study the European Union are a bit concerned about how Trump's global effects will play out on the EU. They're worried that there's the potential for the EU to become further destabilized and maybe break apart, and that would be a big disaster from their perspective. What do you think about EU coherence, EU interactions with the Trump administration?
BEN RHODES: I think it's hugely consequential. Look, in this world, the most rational thing would be for Europe to make more collective decision making across the board. And this always gets cast around NATO and military spending.
But I mean, what is the European technology policy? What is the European climate policy? What is European trade policy? What is the European approach to migration? The more collectively they can make those decisions, the more they can navigate a world with China and Russia and the United States and India. And obviously then, they're negotiating also with regional blocks in Southeast Asia and Latin America and Africa.
However, the politics in Europe right now are kind of moving the other direction where you see the kind of foothold for the Putin-friendly right in Hungary and Slovakia, the kind of Meloni hybrid model where they're tough on Russia, but they're kind of EU skeptic in Italy.
You've got a French election coming up in which the National Front, National Rally, the far-right party is a real challenger. You've got German politics fracturing. So it's not exactly the ideal moment for Europe to be blazing a trail in the direction of collective decision making.
That said, my recommendation would be, don't fall into the trap. What Trump wants and what he's going to do is he's going to try to divide all the Europeans against each other, and he's going to use things like tariffs to pick winners and to punish losers. And the losers are almost always going to be center left or governments. And that if you fall into that trap, no European country is big enough to be in the weight class with the US and China on these types of issues, but Europe is.
And so what I think it's going to require on things like Ukraine, on certain trade issues is they might not actually be able to do it through their laborious collective decision making process in Brussels, but they may need to find ways for like-minded EU countries to have shared policies. First best if I was European would be more effective and efficient EU decision making.
But in the absence of that, rather than just kind of letting Europe turn into a mini Game of Thrones, there should be enough like-minded leaders across the political spectrum, by the way-- and Meloni has been, I think, on Ukraine doing this-- to say, OK. Well, we might not be able to offer the full EU deal to the Ukrainians, but if enough big countries get together and say, we're giving you security guarantees, and we're going to be there, and we're going to give you X and Y and Z, that can make a difference.
Or if there's a trade war, they have to hunker down together. And so it would be interesting to see if they can find other ways for collective action if the EU itself is too tied up by some of these spoilers.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Well, I want to give the audience members an opportunity to pose their questions. So as I mentioned at the outset, if you have a question, please approach one of the mics, and we'll try to get to as many people as possible, depending on how many people have questions. And if you could state your name and who you are, that would be helpful as well, where you're coming from.
AUDIENCE: Can I go first?
MELANI CAMMETT: You want to start? Please.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Ooh, this is high. Hello.
BEN RHODES: I'm not that tall either.
MELANI CAMMETT: [LAUGHS]
AUDIENCE: Cool. So I appreciate your talk. As a Palestinian American, I grew up in a military city, so I'm used to living in the shadows, our narrative being ignored, accepting the ignorance of the country, and being so dehumanized, I suppose. My question-- so I've found a lot of peace in your podcast the last 16 months, so just want to say thank you for reporting and sharing a narrative that has been so hidden. Thank you.
I struggle a lot, especially with the last two days, just understanding what the world can have as power and leverage when the US keeps shutting everything down. Like obviously, we're ignoring the ICJ, ICC, and the rest of the world has vocalized a different opinion.
So I'm just curious your position of how the world can move forward if the US is this roadblock and there's a clear, massive support in a different direction. It obviously isolates the United States, but how can human rights still have any power if the US has a different position?
BEN RHODES: Yeah. Well, thank you for the comments on the podcast, but it's insufficient, I'm sure. I think that, just to wade into some tricky waters here, the test of whether or not people are going to be willing to hear narratives of different people-- well, let me put it this way.
What has been done to speech around Palestinians and Palestinian Americans is a chilling preview of what's going to come to other issues. If you can silence people for expressing totally legitimate views about what has happened to the people of Gaza, don't think that that won't happen on DEI, on women and gender issues, on things that you're not even thinking right now.
So it should stir people's conscience that for a year and a half, the world's largest superpower was providing unconditional military assistance for the absolute obliteration of a densely populated area of two million people. If that's not enough, I would caution that-- be wary of where that mindset might travel to.
And so that kind of leads into answering your question, which is that the reason for there to be some sense of solidarity with what Palestinians have endured in Gaza and the kind of lack of any accountability is that it's kind of a fault line about, what kind of world are we going to live in, you know? And at the risk of obviously disagreeing with American policy of both administrations, the same thing is true of countries.
Like, if you allow-- what's interesting is that the ICC was kind of set up by the US and Europe. But actually, the champions are now coming from other places. That's interesting, and potentially kind of valuable.
As the United States withdraws from international institutions and human rights norms, you see other countries stepping forward to fill that space, right? I mean, South Africa most prominently on the Palestinian issue, but on other issues too. There are different countries stepping forward.
And that might infuse those institutions with different perspectives than the ones that created them. And so I'd be thinking, again, in terms of-- there's literally going to have to be a reconstruction of an international order over the next 10, 20 years.
And the more-- you have to continue to insist upon right and wrong, true and false, objective reality versus disinformation, justice, even when it's not being enforced, to get to the place where there start to be institutions that are more empowered that reflect that. And so I just think building solidarity across different sets of countries and institutions to weather a pretty rough period-- now, that doesn't immediately do as much for the people in Gaza as it should. But actually, I think it is what preserves some capacity for there to be a return to a more rational or more fair-minded approach to not just that issue, but to other issues.
So I just think it's-- what autocrats or dictators or ethno-nationalists want, they depend on cynicism and apathy, right? Cynicism, nothing matters. Apathy, nothing can change. There have to be enough actors around the world-- governments, civil society, individuals, artists, writers, right?
It's not just-- we let all these conversations be dominated by politicians. There has to be enough solidarity and creativity in those spaces to both get through this and then help inform what's built on the other side.
MELANI CAMMETT: Thank you. And we have a lot of people lined up--
BEN RHODES: I'll be quicker. I'll stop--
MELANI CAMMETT: Oh, I'm not trying to--
BEN RHODES: No, it's fine.
MELANI CAMMETT: --to shut you up, but--
BEN RHODES: Never give a guy a podcast and--
[LAUGHTER]
--he answers questions too long. It's the reason Joe Rogan goes for, like, three hours.
[LAUGHTER]
I won't do that.
MELANI CAMMETT: No, it's great, but please keep your questions brief. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Ben. Thank you for being here. My name's Ian. I'm a recent graduate of the Government Department, currently working in health care policy here in Cambridge now. I was wondering if you had reflections on former national security advisor Sullivan's pitch of a foreign policy for the middle class. That was kind of the Biden administration's attempt to react to the first Trump administration and create a way that kind of an American-led international order is felt by the working class here in the US.
And it seems like maybe in the last election, that didn't fully ring through to people. I was wondering if you had reflections on Jake Sullivan's attempts at building that foreign policy and what lessons to take in terms of trying to push back against Trump in his second term.
BEN RHODES: Yeah. I mean, look, the idea of the US embracing aspects of industrial policy and huge investments in our clean energy sector and our technology sector and our basic research I think was a smart and necessary corrective to decades of either underinvestment or kind of trust that markets would address some of these challenges. So that's the aspect of that policy that I liked.
I think that it was kind of-- it was two-- it was tethered to some more hegemonic actions in terms of their foreign policy. It was kind of schizophrenic in a way, because it was like, we're adjusting to this new world. We've got to keep up. We've got to invest in these places. But we're also going to flex our 1990s muscles on the world stage. And we're going to try to, like I said, cut off the Chinese from everything.
And so I think as a substantive matter, it kind of addressed part of the problem. But it could have been accompanied by more pragmatism in other spaces. In other words, yes. All well and good to negotiate with Congress and get all this funding for clean energy here.
But how do you negotiate with even allies to make sure that those subsidies aren't at odds with what the Europeans or others are doing on climate, that we're not kind of, again, creating redundant, duplicative supply chains that make clean energy more expensive? So they were kind of missing a bit of s negotiating piece substantively.
I think politically, I just don't think that they-- I don't think people were aware of it. And again, I don't mean to sound overly negative, but President Biden in an incredible-- like, an incredibly already difficult political environment for any politician, he was just not present as a narrator. And I'm biased as a speechwriter, but the president is also kind of the narrator of what's going on. And you've really got to get out and tell people.
And he would tell people about how historic the achievements were. We passed this much money. He wasn't out telling a story about what this was doing, why it was better, why investment is better than tariffs. And Trump was able to kind of dominate that space. I also-- again, Jake is a long-time friend and colleague, but [LAUGHS] the branding of foreign policy for the middle class is exactly what the Democratic Party, does, that no human being would ever say that.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, like-- my advice to people who worked in foreign policy in the government-- and I used to be one of them-- is you don't have any idea how incomprehensible you sound to people. Just tell people what you're doing. Like, you don't have to put some label, foreign policy for the middle class, or bottom-up middle-out--
[LAUGHTER]
--let's just tell people what we're doing.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you so much for coming today. My name is Brett Cohen. I'm an MPP student at the Kennedy School right now and an NYU alumnus as well. My question for you is about bipartisanship.
One of the reasons that I was first attracted to foreign policy is that it felt relatively less partisan and gridlocked than domestic politics. Like, there was always space for real conversations between parties. But obviously, that's dwindled a lot in recent years. And especially in this administration, it feels like you have to be either for everything Trump does or against everything.
So I guess my question to you is, do you agree with that assessment? Do you think that there's still any space at all for bipartisan or nonpartisan foreign policy? And if so, how do you get there?
BEN RHODES: Yeah, there should be. I mean, I found as recently as the Obama years, which were not exactly the high water mark for bipartisanship, some of the biggest advocates for foreign assistance were conservative, evangelical Christian members of Congress. To just name one issue, we found on Cuba a bunch of Republicans, either because they were from agricultural states or they're libertarians who supported our Cuba policy-- it was actually a Democrat, Bob Menendez, who became the biggest obstacle later on.
[LAUGHTER]
I had nothing to do with that, but just--
[LAUGHTER]
--impose my policies and see where you end up.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Oh my god. I can see how that's going to go on Ben Shapiro or something.
[LAUGHTER]
But in all seriousness, I think that substantively there's a basis for this. Obviously Ukraine, we've seen this. I think what Trump has done-- and we were chatting about this before-- is he turned foreign policy into an identity politics issue. And I felt this in 2015, because-- or 2014 when Trump was already kind of-- the party was already becoming Trump even before Trump, because-- it was kind of the Foxification of the Republican Party.
Because there were ads in 2014-- I remember midterm elections-- that tied together-- there were Ebola-infected ISIS members who were going to cross our southern border with the support of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. That was actually a true set of ads that ran in that campaign cycle.
And Trump pulled that thread forward. And again, at the risk of being pretty blunt about it-- take the Iran deal. I don't think Trump had deep opinions about how many centrifuges should be allowed to operate at the Natanz facility, or what the modalities of the uranium enrichment stockpile monitoring. It was, these are some Brown people that we're giving some money to.
It connected to this, Obama is not one of us. He's making deals with these people, and he's letting these people across the border. And we used to have wins before, and now we don't. And it was just-- it turned foreign policy into this constant affirmation of identity through what we should be allowed to do as Amer-- what Trump would like the United States of America to do is what a lot of MAGA people would like to be able to do in just their workplace or their--
And again, I mean, I'm trying to be generous-- to be generous to that view. It's kind of like, we've been getting a raw deal for a long time, and so has America. And that's a powerful criticism, and there's some truth in it.
But it makes it harder for people to pick and choose. Because if it's all identity, it's hard for you to be like, well, I agree with Mr. Trump about these things, but I really like USAID.
To get back to it, I think, again, it's a version of detoxifying. Trump is a lame duck. I mean, he's trying his hardest to counteract that impression, and he'll be able to for a while. But some of these Republican senators who were elected this year, they know they're going to be there two years after he's gone.
And I think what you do is you try to find islands of cooperation. You're not going to resolve the differences between the parties, but can we just find some things where there is some left-right convergence, where there is some agreement? And just kind of-- you've got to keep coming at it, because ultimately, you're going to-- your own objectives are going to be more effectively advanced if you have some bipartisan cooperation in Congress, and then someday again between administrations.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Ben. My name is Lisa Rafols, and I work at an economic policy development-- economic development Policy Lab at MIT. And two of the things that you said kind of brought some hope to me about how public opinion can be a guardrail to a lot of this and that lots of alternatives can be proposed at the local level and kind of at the community level.
But I think that misinformation really threatens that, especially the public opinion side. And so now that the main tech actors who can kind of act as a guardrail to misinformation are kind of captured, I guess you could say, what hope is there to create some collective public opinion where people agree?
BEN RHODES: Yeah. So we're obviously not in the optimal scenario in that regard. I mean, I've been in a lot of conversations over the last eight years about regulating social media. I've been a part of some innovative efforts that other people led to do that, whether it was around content moderation, whether it was the Christchurch call after the shooting in New Zealand that did change the way in which a platform like Facebook monitored the broadcasting of certain types of violence and hate speech.
But [LAUGHS] there's been a rearguard action from the tech companies for a long time to prevent that from evolving into meaningful regulation. And now I have very little hope that we can look to regulation to save us from the excesses of social media.
So in that regard or in that environment, I actually think it kind of connects to one of the last things I was saying here. Like, I just have to think that there's a couple ways you can go about dealing with that. One is just by the kind of populating of platforms with alternative information and information that aligns with my views. And having a podcast is-- we try to do that on YouTube and other places.
But I think more importantly, again, I actually think we have to kind of help-- I mean, as someone who has an eight and 10-year-old daughter, keep hoping that the-- generations always have a backlash against what the people before them were doing. Like, waiting for the analog backlash here. Is this fun? Like, I don't find it that enjoyable to be on any of these platforms anymore. And so I actually think there needs to be-- instead of people being, like, drug addicts and being like, I hope someone comes along and makes these drugs less potent, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
That we're like, you know what? Maybe this isn't where I should be getting my information, you know? And that people are coming up with alternatives, how to get information, and alternatives of how to shape their views.
And frankly-- and the right did this. It wasn't just online. Like, more in-person civil society. I know this sounds rosy-eyed, but I think it's true. Like, we're not-- we being people, it's not even just a partisan view. Like, we being people that don't want to be bombarded with mis and disinformation and kind of toxic environments, we don't have to be there.
And so I think that the healthiest thing would be the kind of generation of alternatives sources of content. And that's kind of happening. I mean, already you see more growth in YouTube that is not quite as toxic, but Substack, other things like a return to localization of media. Great thing for philanthropists to actually spend money on, the regeneration of local media.
So that-- unfortunately, I think, as someone who's been in a lot of panel discussions about the dangers of disinformation on social media, it may just be time to-- sure, keep talking about that. But just start talking and encouraging and modeling just other, better ways of participating.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Ben. Thank you very much for your talk. I'm Adrian [INAUDIBLE]. I'm an undergrad here, and I'm French. My question today is on China and Chinese foreign policy. If you're in Xi's shoes, how would you respond to Trump's nomination? What's China's role in the world today? Have any of its strategic goals changed with the new Trump administration? And ultimately, how does China position itself in the next few years?
BEN RHODES: Yeah, I think-- I'm not-- there are people-- and I talk to a lot of China experts, and I travel to that region at least once a year. And while-- again, I'm not a deep expert on the Chinese economy. But I know there are some people that have this view that there's all these weaknesses in the Chinese economy.
Some of that is true, but Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party is more than happy to absorb economic pain in the short term. And in terms of how they're trying to position themselves, they've tried to reconfigure their economy so that they are poised to be a superpower in clean energy and technology, betting that those are ultimately going to be-- I'm sure they still do plenty of manufacturing and other things. But for a variety of reasons, some domestic and some international, they've really bet on that.
And look, if I'm them, I'm thinking-- and not me personally, just looking at Xi Jinping-- OK, we've got to minimize the da-- it's going to be a bumpy ride here for four years. But if we can minimize the extent to which these tariffs hurt or whatever else Trump throws at us hurts, we have a huge opportunity.
The Americans are leaving the field on clean energy. They've done a lot of smart things in that sector in terms of supply chains globally. They had caught up on AI. They're going to be able to-- the AI they're developing-- people-- there's a kind of American thing that I sometimes do where we kind of laugh at, well, the Chinese ChatGPT, you ask it about Tiananmen Square and it doesn't answer, you know?
Most countries are not looking for that. They're looking for robotics so that their factories can be more efficient. So we may win some race for the best chatbot, but the Chinese uses of AI are actually more aligned with what most of the world wants from AI, particularly developing countries.
And then never mind just the idea of coming in behind every country that Trump insults. I'm sure the Chinese ambassador was in to see the president of Columbia the day after that happened. I'm sure.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]
BEN RHODES: I know that they were in to see the president of Panama and just say-- be quiet about it, but you should start buying our stuff or selling your stuff to us, you know? And so that they can look up in four years and be like, yeah, our economy took some hit, but we just won the geopolitical game, and we are the leaders in the district. They want to do to AI what they did Huawei, right? It's cheaper and less strings attached. And they want to do clean energy what we did to fossil fuels, which is run the whole system.
I don't think that's a dumb bet. And I think there's a lot of American hubris, like, oh, the Chinese. Look at their economic indicators. I don't think the Chinese government's that worried about the next quarter. They think-- because they don't have to worry about elections. They think in a longer time frame.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
AUDIENCE: Hi. My name's Jed Schwartz. I'm from Somerville. I'm a writer. I'm aligned with the Warren-Sanders wing of the Democratic Party at this point. And you probably would agree that the Democrats are trying to scramble to refine their approach at this point, because it failed. The Biden-Harris approach failed.
One of the areas where I think they could refine their approach is to engage in a critique of the international corporate rules-based order that Putin has criticized, but was laughed off by Joe Biden, and essentially by Harris as well. That is to say, there's a lot of support in the third world or the Global South for Putin's aggression in Ukraine.
And I'm wondering if you see any room for criticizing the current state of the corporate world order. Is it, for example, too skewed toward the interests of capital and not enough toward the interests of people? And I'll leave it at that. Yeah.
BEN RHODES: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. [LAUGHS] And I guess a couple of things I'd say beyond yes. First of all, something that's not corporate, but I think-- it's something that's not in the corporate space, but I'll get to that. It is that Biden and Harris, I think-- and Biden really-- missed on the Ukraine piece is the United States for a long time, including the administration I served in-- but it keeps getting worse under each administration-- vastly overuses the tool of economic sanctions, and the rest of the world is completely sick of it.
And by the way, not just the people being sanctioned. The Europeans, everybody has to cooperate with these crazy sanctions regimes. And by the way, let's look how they've worked out. The most heavily sanctioned countries by the United States are Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela. Wow. That's really worked out. Like, we really changed those governments, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
But so then when we sanction the Russians and then say to people around the world, you can't buy this cheap Russian oil, they've literally participated in the largest black market operation in human history to just ignore us. And that's not because they like Putin. It's because they're sick of the United States weaponizing its control of the dollar and the US financial system for seemingly insane political strategies that don't work, right? So that's one point.
Then-- I mean, the broader question of a global corporate agenda, part of what is so odd about American politics today is that Donald Trump has an agenda that is the dream-- you could not have a bigger corporate dream of regulatory capture by fossil fuel companies are going to self-regulate now, the tech companies.
This is not new. It's the same-- been the same thing in American politics since the '70s. And yet, somehow the Democrats were the ones left holding the bag for being in bed with corporations.
And I think it speaks to a unnecessary reluctance of the Democratic Party to be populist. Like, there was this fear of Bernie. And I'm not saying that it had-- but it was-- it was an irrational fear of Bernie, who was saying the most popular thing. Like, even if you don't think Bernie Sanders should have been the nominee in '16 or '20, he was saying really popular things. So one was like, there's space for some populism here. You can sound angry about economic inequality. That's actually where people are.
There also was a strange kind of-- where the corporate America was visibly aligned with the Democratic Party was on these social, kind of DEI-type initiatives, which in many cases were totally window dressing. I mean, so-- because somebody has a chief x officer or something, the Republicans are saying, oh, see? They're in bed with the Democrats, these corporate elites. When actually, that was kind of not for the Democrats. It was for their own employees. Like, look at us. We're actually trying to address these issues.
And then there was just the failure to stand up to your own donor base, you know? And we've seen that on a range of issues in the Democratic Party. Obama had a big enough donor base that he just had a little bit more freedom to maneuver.
But I think you've got to be willing to-- I mean, and this is reported. Kamala started pretty populist. And then someone kind of got to her and was like, hey, just dial that back a little bit, you know? And suddenly, she's putting out plans for entrepreneurship and startups instead of saying, corporate America is a part of the inequality problem in this country.
So I just think this is not-- this one-- I mean, I got some hard questions about social media. It's not hard to see what a populist Democratic Party message would be in 2025. You just need messengers who are willing to deliver it.
AUDIENCE: Hello, Ben. My name's Ryan. Graduated from my humble Michigan State University. So I think a lot of people definitely are mourning the loss of USAID and its functions to deliver international aid. But I think what a lot of them are missing is that USAID has also been used to directly destabilize foreign governments, public influence operations, and funding tons of nonprofits in the Balkans to replace government operations to make them more subservient to the United States.
And I think the real question is, now that USAID is gone, it's like, if you want to try to reconstitute it, it's like, do we really want to try to focus it entirely around like this mission of delivering aid to developing and poorer countries? But would it be possible to do that without the regime change aspects of it that were really one of the primary reasons that USAID was really doing before it got dismantled?
BEN RHODES: So I agree with part of your question, and not all of it. But just to show that I agree with-- like, I see your point. Jeff is here, who is Ambassador to Havana. And when I was in negotiations with the Cuban government, they would always lecture me about these USAID programs, you know? And I used to actually joke with them. Like, you guys are so inside those programs, you probably get some of the money.
[LAUGHTER]
But then-- [LAUGHS]. Notice who's laughing the hardest.
[LAUGHTER]
And then there was this story that broke in the news of some kind of crazy USAID-funded Twitter disinformation campaign in Cuba. And I finally was just fed up, because I had no idea. I was-- I'm negotiating. I don't know what they're doing.
So I was like, I would like a spreadsheet that shows all the USAID funding for Cuba. And they're like, well, we can't do that, you know? And then it was like, well, no, this is crazy. I'm not trying to shut you down with some 21-year-old interns. I just want to know where the money is, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
And by the way, this was not some-- this was like-- well, I won't say who the staffer was, but let's just say it was not someone that agreed with what I was trying to do in Cuba. And this was the most insane list of spending I've ever seen in my life. I think I can say this now. There were PO Boxes in Miami, literally Post Office Boxes in Miami getting USAID money.
And some of this was clandestine, right? This is not the CIA. This is the USAID. I'm like, what is going on here? And that was not the federal government. That was Congress. That was people in Congress who control that budget, just shoveling money through a bunch of loopholes to their preferred groups.
And we at least, with a lot of effort, brought it all into the sunlight. So I actually couldn't turn off the funding, because it was congressionally approp-- well, I guess I could have.
[LAUGHTER]
I thought, because it was statutory, congressionally funded, I couldn't, in the executive branch, just stop it. But I will say, it's a much smaller amount. As someone who probably shared a lot of your political views, most of the USAID budget is health and food security. And yes, there are some programs, some of which I would defend, including in the Balkans.
But where I would meet you is-- it's what I was saying earlier. There's going to be a new USAID or something else, either under Trump, but say a Democrat, or frankly, a non-Trump Republican gets elected. I think there'll be a regeneration of some international development agency.
Here's what I think is the most important question for that agency to ask itself. When I was a speechwriter, I used to occasionally ask for public opinion polling about if we were going to Africa, if we were going to Southeast Asia, what is most important to these people? I thought about it like a campaign. President's talking to these people. What do they care about? What do they want to work with the United States on?
And every time, the answers were education, health, science and technological cooperation, entrepreneurship. Guess what's not on the list? Terrorism, nuclear weapons, the things that we talk to them about.
Or even in these democracy spaces, I would make the case that, you know what would help create more stable democracies is just better outcomes for the people that live in these countries, you know? And that means having a plan for how to get more crop yields so that you don't have pockets of instability because people are hungry, right?
So I think that the way to meet between us is to say, a US international development in the 2020s and beyond should actually be focused on the issues that are of concern to people around the world, which, I would argue, are health. Guess who stopped Ebola from getting to the United States? It was USAID. They literally built a huge network in West Africa of clinics to stop Ebola.
So this isn't just all soft stuff. This is, how do you prevent ISIS from regenerating in Iraq? And again, that's not counterterrorism. Actually, it's not. It's effective governance. It's effective economies. It's hope.
And so that's, I think, where USAID can be-- we can argue about civil society funding. I think there's a way in which that can be done that is not regime change-y, and it's important. But I don't think that should be the predominant mission. I think it should be these areas that people care about.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
MELANI CAMMETT: So I think we have time for one more question. I feel your pain. I'm very sorry to those of you we're not going to get to, but we will have a reception afterwards, so I invite you to talk to Ben. So you will be the last question. Sorry.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Ben. My name's Malik. I'm a local tech bro and long time worldo. That's a real joke I wrote down to read out loud. I'm really glad the conversation here mentioned some of this left-wing populism, and I have a few more follow-up questions about that, but I'll shorten it to one.
I want to ask, what do we have to be hopeful about? It seems that capital's power on our political process, its corrosion of our society, of our institutions, of literally local gatherings is an elephant in the room we pretty much never address. Money interests are why so many Democrats are scared to even speak about what's happening in Gaza. What do we do after the fall?
BEN RHODES: Yeah. So a general point, and then more specific. I mean, first of all, part of what I was writing about in After the Fall is the fact that you had this kind of unbridled form of capitalism over the last post-Reagan decades. But the convergence between capitalism and technology and kind of national security has kind of created this unholy power structure that is just further and further concentrated wealth.
Because part of what I always push myself is to realize that there was never some-- it's never going to be perfect. It never was, right? There are always going to be some people who have more money than other people and their corporations.
But why has it gotten so out of joint and so disproportionate? A lot of that is policy choices, right? To deregulate, to get rid of a progressive tax system. But then a lot of it is this kind of blending of technological power with financial power, and there's a whole conversation around that.
I would say, though, part of what gives me hope is these problems are created by policies like the changes in the tax system, the changes in the regulatory framework, changes in antitrust enforcement, changes in the absence of restrictions on money in politics. So they can be fixed by policy changes. They really can.
There's this effort to make you think that it's inevitable, that Elon Musk will have $200 billion. That's not inevitable. That's a creation of government policies. And pendulums swing back and forth, left, right, and apparently in other directions. I don't even really know what this is right now.
And I have to think-- again, it's a version of what was asked about the international order. There's probably going to have to be some economic or fiscal crisis, I think, to give the jolt that is necessary. Frankly, like dismantling the US federal workforce and cutting taxes and increasing spending and deregulating the crypto industry seems like it's going to bring that about sooner rather than later.
And so part of it is, how do you make sure that when the moment emerges, you can really try to address this in a policy basis more aggressively than Obama did after the financial crisis? He kept the system alive. But clearly, in retrospect, if something like that were to happen again, I'd say, go right for the inequality.
That's the broad point. The pendulum can and will swing back, and there are policy solutions that can not fix this entirely, but can make it less excessive. And it's imperative that-- the Democratic Party, again, needs to blend its economic populism with its reform agenda, because ultimately, everything should be about preventing what we saw at that inauguration. That is what's wrong. Those four guys-- guys, unless you count Jeff Bezos's date--
[LAUGHTER]
Are they mar-- I don't know if they're married. But those four guys standing behind the president and in front of the cabinet, that's the problem. And that's the problem with our tax system. That's the problem with our tech regulation. That's the problem with money in politics. It's all right there.
And then the last thing I'd say-- you mentioned this about Gaza. I don't know. I remember-- I made a decision a few years ago to not self-censor on anything. I have some views that are not that helpful to some future confirmation hearings. It'd be more helpful if I ran, like, astroturfed right-wing organizations and got drunk, apparently.
[LAUGHTER]
But which-- you know. But on Gaza-- and this is not an aggrandizing point at all. It really isn't. It's just like-- I was like, we never self-censored, I don't think. And guess what? Nobody showed up and arrested us, yet. And our audience got bigger. And I still get invited to play-- like, people-- these systems are designed to make you self-censor.
Now, I know we're in a place where actually it goes beyond that, from what I've read. But that doesn't mean there are not other spaces to express yourself. And I just think we're going to be living-- it's not just Gaza. The next four years, institutions and people are going to be under tremendous pressure to self-censor. And the moment you allow that to happen, it's over. It really is. It's not worth it. It's just not worth it.
And yes, people should take risk into account if they're going to be deporting people who do participate in certain protests. I mean, that person may have a view. But more powerful people, then it's all the more important that those people don't self-censor. If there's going to be a stigmatization and targeting of more vulnerable people with retribution, then I'd like to see other people step forward and fill that space.
Because otherwise, what's the point? Like, what is the point? Like, I don't understand it. I don't understand, what's the point of having a platform if you don't say what you think? What's the point of running a company if you are worried that DOGE is going to come and shut you down because you have some diversity initiatives?
I mean, it's just-- this is crazy. And there's not-- there's not actually that much real power behind it. It's a bunch of executive orders that read like press releases, and they can't pass legislation, so they-- that's why they're doing a million executive orders, because he's got a three-seat majority in the House. He couldn't legislate this stuff. If he could legislate it, he would.
And so I think we all have to be mindful that, yes, this is going to be hard. And yes, there are some people that are truly vulnerable. But a lot of the rest of us, the moment that you just say, I'm not going to say that, then why are you saying anything, you know?
MELANI CAMMETT: I think that is the perfect note to end on. Very inspirational. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]