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.

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.

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.

Ben Rhodes Quotes