Former Obama official questions American ‘primacy’

Is Pax Americana officially coming to an end? Now, even liberal internationalists are starting to call that worldview into question. In a lengthy piece for Foreign Affairs, Barack Obama’s former foreign policy speechwriter Ben Rhodes argued that the US should “abandon” its “mindset of American primacy”.

According to Rhodes, the US needs to “pivot away from the […]Western-centric view that has caused [the Biden] administration to make some of the same mistakes as its predecessors”, citing a continuation of Trumpist policies on Cuba and Venezuela as examples.

But Rhodes also displayed flashes of self-awareness, warning that Trump’s “rhetoric” about the Deep State “strikes a chord with voters who wonder why so many of the politicians who promised victories in Afghanistan and Iraq were never held to account”. Just don’t expect Rhodes to be flying the MAGA flag anytime soon…