Ignorance and Indignation
7th December 2025
There is a curious irony about the path trodden by many veterans of the Obama administration, including Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national-security advisor for strategic communications. The administration they served and the logic of its retrenchment policies unwittingly helped to ignite the devastating conflict that has roiled Gaza and the region beyond for the past two years. But the lesson that many former Obama deputies have drawn from this tragic episode is to forswear American intervention more completely.
Having come of age in the shadow of 11 September 2001, the younger Obama officials were disenchanted with American hard power and “forever wars,” and so they set about extricating their country from the forbidding labyrinth of the Middle East. Committed to “nation-building at home,” the Obama presidency sought to distance the United States from the territory stretching from the Persian hinterland to the Mediterranean, and as America stepped back from these tormented lands, Obama and his vice-president Joe Biden foresaw what they called a “receding tide of war.” Instead, the black flags of the Islamic State filled the security vacuum left by the American withdrawal from Iraq, while Iran’s bid for regional hegemony grew increasingly menacing and belligerent. The popular uprising against Syria’s barbaric Assad dictatorship was left almost entirely unaided, and the agony of that country’s civil war was allowed to take its grisly course.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was the main beneficiary of these years of American retreat. Its heavily armed proxies and clients in the Levant surrounded Israel in the hope of catalysing a war that would ultimately destroy the Jewish state. By the time that war broke out on 7 October 2023, it was obvious that Obama’s hankering for a post-American world had made the Middle East much more dangerous, and that this ought to have discredited the administration’s analysis. Instead, that analysis has been perversely reinforced, sweeping the Obama veterans into paroxysms of rage against American power and those indigenous forces still upholding the American regional order.