The U.S.-Israel relationship is so important.
— Ben Rhodes
Mandela was a guy who didn't come in and just eviscerate the existing institutions. He sought to co-opt them. He brought white South Africans into his government.
Talking and diplomacy is often seen as a concession in America, in a way that it is not in other places.
When I think of the things that Trump has done, ironically, everything is sort of - we care so much about Cuba and the Iran deal. I think pulling out of TPP is just devastating.
Billions of people around the globe had come to know Barack Obama, had heard his words, had watched his speeches, and, in some unknowable but irreducible way, had come to see the world as a place that could - in some incremental way - change.
I had the Secret Service actually patrolling my block at some point. I didn't sign up for that. I went to work to write speeches for Barack Obama!
When I first went to work in the West Wing, the most daunting thing was how small this place was... You walk in: it's three floors, and there's a few offices on each floor, and that's it.
Our basic assessment was that if America keeps going down these rabbit holes in the Middle East, we're just going to put ourselves out of business as the world leader because we're just draining resources and diplomatic bandwidth, and we're not producing outcomes.
We want a rules-based order in Asia-Pacific like we have had in the Atlantic.
In China, you just don't have the space for civil society and independent discourse and free media that you do in India. That's why India's success is so important as the world's largest democracy.
I don't think people realize how many decisions the president of the United States makes about military action.
I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.
I never set out to work in the White House.
All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don't. They call us to explain to them what's happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington.
Increased remittances to Cuba from the United States has helped Cuban families.
Faith leaders, young people, American companies, human rights advocates, and many others have demonstrated a unique interest in our Cuba policy. But no community cares more deeply about these issues than Cuban Americans - young and old - who have maintained a profound interest in Cuba and an abiding faith in the Cuban people.
Jose Marti, known as 'the Apostle of Cuban Independence,' was an influential poet, journalist, and political theorist who became a symbol for the Cuban people's bid for independence. The concepts of freedom, liberty, and self-determination feature prominently in his work.
One of the things you learn in government is there's a long tail to American decision-making when it comes to foreign policy. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem, pulling out of the Iran deal, pulling out of Paris, not speaking up for democratic values - the world doesn't end the next day.
There are a very limited number of people in senior roles at the White House, and time is their most precious asset.
If you are a speechwriter, you have to know what the person you're writing for thinks. A lot of foreign policy advisers are thinking, 'How can I get my proposal into this guy's speech?' I was just thinking, 'What does he want to say?'
The only place in the world where, I think, leaders have preferred Trump are in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia and Israel.
It was wrenching to read about the brutality of Assad every morning, to see images of family homes reduced to rubble. I felt we had to do something in Syria.
I was a relatively anonymous guy, and for whatever reason, I became one of the villains for the Right.
The Benghazi attack was one of the more confusing, chaotic days that we had at work because you had these multiple violent protests taking place in the Middle East.
What I do miss is foreign travel, because there really is no substitute for showing up somewhere and representing the United States.
President Obama has been on the world stage for 10 years, and people know what he believes. He doesn't single out individual countries and doesn't say, 'I believe in LGBT rights because I want to embarrass the political leadership in India.'
Active citizenship doesn't just mean running for office or going into politics; it means starting organisations that promote change or solve a problem, pursuing social good with economic success.
There are very few things I've ever been a part of that I believe in more than the Iran deal, and everything I said I believe to be true, and I was trying to make a case about the facts.
I found people I really wanted to work for; I made myself available to do whatever I could with the skills I had; I took some risk, packing up and moving to Chicago; and I looked for the opportunities that fit for me. So I think the biggest advice is to find people you love to work for who you're going to learn from.
When it comes to Israel's security, our military and intelligence cooperation, that's off limits. That's protected. That's sacrosanct.
The fact that there were discreet channels of communication established with Iran in 2012 is something that we confirmed publicly. However, we did not have any serious prospect of reaching a nuclear deal until after the election of Hassan Rouhani in 2013. Yes, we had discussions with the Iranians before that, but they did not get anywhere.
For more than fifty years, the United States pursued a policy of isolating and pressuring Cuba. While the policy was rooted in the context of the Cold War, our efforts continued long after the rest of the world had changed.
For more than fifty years, Americans and Cubans have been isolated from one another even though Cuba is only 90 miles away from Florida.
Havana is a source of great pride to the Cuban people.
'Make America great again,' is not that different from Putin's nostalgia for the Soviet Union or tsarist Russia.
Laos is the ghost of American military interventions past.
What's interesting about the foreign policy establishment critique is, you know, I think the Blob and I have more in common in some ways than people might think, but also, what I was saying can be misread.
As people who know me know, probably to a fault, I am usually not without thoughts and words.
The events of my twenties felt historic, but the people involved did not. I wanted a hero - someone who could make sense of what was happening around me and in some way redeem it.
The fact of the matter is the West Wing never gets fully renovated because nobody wants to vacate it. And so you have basically patch-up jobs that are being done, but it's a tight and cramped environment.
In the Arab Spring, that obviously came to a head in Syria. I found myself arguing for intervention, mainly just because I wanted things to get better, and I had this germ of liberal humanitarian interventionism.
There's this constant narrative of anxieties: Is the U.S. in decline? Is China rising? People forget... no other country is trying to play the role we play. They're not signing up to be responsible for security in the Middle East, responsible for the global economy, responsible for enforcing international norms.
What people admire about Prime Minister Modi is that he is an ambitious leader who is trying to elevate India economically, and enlisting all Indians in that project will make it more successful.
The world order and American actions in the world have deep wiring.
I think one of the critiques of me is that I thought I knew it all. But I was learning from the enormous resources available within the U.S. government who have a very different view of the world than many of the people commenting on foreign policy from outside of the government.
People make a mistake when they think that if you just accumulate a set number of things on your resume, it's going to lead you to a particular place - the pattern of essentially compiling credentials to climb your way up a ladder. That may work, but that's not at all what happened to me.
I don't know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.
We want to open up more opportunities for U.S. businesses and travelers to engage with Cuba, and we want the Cuban government to open up more opportunities for its people to benefit from that engagement.
Cuba is only 90 miles from Florida, but for a long time, the distance between our two countries seemed a lot greater.
Baseball is a great example of the cultural ties between the United States and Cuba and a powerful reminder of the shared experience between people that transcends our difficult history.
