If statement is fact, then President Donald Trump will soon be negotiating with North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un — yet another one of the president’s moves to reverse the foreign policy strategies implemented by his predecessor President Barack Obama.
When a new president takes office, his first actions are often to trash the most hallowed achievements of the former president. For Trump, (this summer’s health care debacle aside) that meant dismantling Obama’s oblique foreign policy techniques. No more strategic patience. Trump replaced inaction with bluster.
But of course, this attitude has not sat well with many and it’s starting to show in the outpouring of media love letters to the Obama tenure. About a month ago, documentary director Greg Barker released “The Final Year,” a film bemoaning the loss of Obama foreign policy and implicitly criticizing Trump’s unrefined approach. Released on the one-year anniversary of Obama’s leaving office, the film follows Obama’s foreign policy team as they trot around the world with the president, trying to ensure peace between all nations in 2016.
Although it features input from former Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, former Secretary of State John Kerry, and even former President Obama himself, “The Final Year” centers on former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, as he tries to make sense of what it means to be a superpower in the digital age.
A Master of Fine Arts student at New York University turned policy wonk, Rhodes became indispensable to the administration as a strategist and speechwriter. He also became nationally prominent when a 2013 New York Times profile portrayed him as the paranoid puppetmaster of America’s soft empire.
One particular moment in the New York Times story revealed Rhodes’ idiosyncratic understanding of foreign policy. Reporter David Samuels asked him to characterize the Obama administration’s challenges in 2016 — issues such as the Iran arms deal, the Cuban thaw, and the Syrian civil war — in terms of the work of a fiction writer. Rhodes answered that he thought of the waning Obama era as material the author Don DeLillo could easily adapt into a novel.
“That’s the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu,” Rhodes said. “And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.”
Scary. DeLillo is arguably the United States’ premier author of history-as-decay. Some of his major works — “Libra,” “Mao II,” and “Underworld” — chronicle American moments such as the Kennedy assassination or a 1980s mass Moonie marriage in Yankees stadium or the 1951 “Shot Heard ‘Round the World Game” between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. DeLillo uses moments where individuals break free from crowds to voice his concerns with empire and what it means to be an American in a world where everything is connected and nothing is comprehensible.
Rhodes explained to the New York Times that he saw Obama and himself as negotiators caught in a DeLilloan moment — towering individuals manipulating “the blob” of Washington reporters to support whatever foreign policy he and the president devised. And Rhodes was not exaggerating his importance: Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice once described his relationship with Obama as a “mind meld.”
“The Final Year” makes the case that this mind meld is The Obama Legacy. Many scenes feature Rhodes alone in the White House basement, typing up one of the President’s speeches (in addition to his other duties, Rhodes wrote nearly every one) and explaining how he and the president are reshaping the United States’ relationship with the world and with itself.
In one of these soliloquies — dated right after the New York Times profile — Rhodes sighs at how the press lambasted him for calling itw “the blob.” If only they had read their DeLillo, they would have understood that as “the news,” they are the conduit for the history he’s writing.
“People seem to need news, any kind — bad news, sensationalistic news, overwhelming news. It seems that news is a narrative of our time,” DeLillo told The New Yorker in 1997. “It has almost replaced the novel, replaced discourse between people. It replaced families. It replaced a slower, more carefully assembled way of communicating, a more personal way of communicating.”
For Rhodes, to control the blob is to control the narrative of our time. Throughout the film and throughout his speeches for Obama, Rhodes rips words out of DeLillo and rephrases them to fit the agenda of the day. In a notable example, Rhodes says that what makes America globally meaningful is what it stands for and how it acts, but not the amount of control the nation exerts over the rest of the world.
“You have to understand that our new foreign policy is less militarized and more engagement focused,” he said.
But what does “engagement focused” mean? In Rhodes’ view, it means signing an unenforceable arms deal with Iran. It means normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba. It means practicing strategic patience in foreign policy, what DeLillo characterized in “Underworld” as a “neural labyrinth.”
“It’s not enough to hate your enemy,” he wrote in a section about J. Edgar Hoover’s approach to foreign policy. “You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep contemplation.”
Barker’s choice to place Rhodes — and by extension DeLillo — at the center of “The Final Year” changes the tone of what is normally a racially-inflected narrative of the Obama legacy. The Barker narrative recontextualizes The First Black President and his retinue as global actors in the grand drama of history. The rest of us are just left to study what they do. It’s a bit overwrought, but entirely unsurprising. DeLillo could have written this novel.
Writing for The New Yorker in 1991, the public intellectual Louis Menand characterized the typical DeLillo character as a paranoid who envisions himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics on a global scale.
“They approach the world with demands that are too serious; they are too easily affected by tiny changes in the cultural weather; they register deeply impressions that everyone else reflects. And their disappointment sometimes has violent or tragic consequences,” he wrote.
Rhodes fits the bill. The Obama advisor has said multiple times that he became interested in foreign policy because of the 9/11 terror attacks. Still a graduate student at NYU when he saw the World Trade Center towers falling, he first thought of the cover of “Underworld,” which features the Twin Towers rising into a smoky haze. He knew he had to do something.
“I immediately developed this idea that, you know, maybe I want to try to write about international affairs,” he told the New York Times.
As Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor and top speechwriter, Rhodes was able to do even more than write about international affairs; he wrote international affairs. But even then, he was only a character in the DeLillo novel he wanted to write.
Rhodes’ presumptuousness becomes clear in one of the last scenes of “The Final Year.” He’s standing on a hill in Cuba, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. The president has just attended a joint ceremony with the Cuban government, celebrating renewed diplomatic relations between the two nations.
“If these two countries can put the past behind them, then maybe we can all do that,” Rhodes says.
Maybe so. But likely not. If Rhodes really did aspire to be like DeLillo, he would have remembered the haunting conclusion to the prologue of “Underworld,” in which a raincoat drunk rounds the bases at New York’s old Polo Grounds, celebrating a fleeting victory in which he took only the smallest part. Ever the pessimist, DeLillo leaves his readers with the knowledge that no matter what history’s actors do or accomplish, they will all end up victims to time’s obscurity.
Now Obama is gone, and Rhodes is too. Trump and the Republican Congress are blustering their way to repealing and otherwise reordering the mind-meld vision for America. And yet, these new measures will likely be re-reversed in another few years.
Like everything else, history is always falling indelibly into the past.
Nic Rowan is a junior studying history.