Instead, he shifted gears and rapidly rose through the ranks of Obama’s first presidential campaign and into the inner circle of his administration. When the Twin Towers fell, he lived in New York and still hoped to become a novelist. Rhodes considers himself part of the “9/11 generation,” a cohort of young people who had a political awakening and moved to D.C. By book two, it has become an established truism.
He tells us of traveling through Kaliningrad, Russia as an aimless 23-year-old graduate student, in an experience he now regards as “one last journey through the post-Cold War world that America bestrode as a colossus.” Gone is the skepticism Rhodes had displayed in his first book, where America’s late-twentieth-century world dominance is treated as an assumption worth interrogating (“Did we?”).
In Rhodes’s second book, After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, published in June, the phrase is deployed without quotes. “A trillion dollars later, we couldn’t keep the electricity running in Baghdad.” By then, the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, which began not long after that triumphalist Krauthammer dictum, had cast a pall over Obama’s foreign policy record. Did we? It was a story we told ourselves,” he writes. “I remember a snippet from a column around 9/11: America bestrides the world like a colossus. Rhodes quotes Krauthammer’s simile in his first book, The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (2018), in a reflection on the pressure President Barack Obama faced in his second term to ramp up military force in places like Syria and Ukraine. I n both his first and second books, published three years apart, Ben Rhodes recalls a turn of phrase from the end of the last millennium that left a deep impression on him: “America bestrides the world like a colossus.” The neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer wrote those words in a 1999 column for Time called “A Second American Century?” about the unipolar system that seemed to have emerged after the Cold War.
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