Eli Lake, Columnist

Obama's Foreign Policy Guru Is the 'Blob' He Hates

Ben Rhodes thinks he has rocked the establishment. Ha.

May 6, 2016 at 6:17 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

The establishment speaks.
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

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Poor Ben Rhodes. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy message guru inhabits a world filled with groupthinkers and militarists. If only he could reason with them. But the establishment doesn’t care for reason. So Rhodes must create an echo chamber, spinning stories to the press and shading the truth to prevent our nation’s next disaster.

This is the upshot of a revealing profile in the New York Times Magazine of Rhodes by David Samuels. The Washington foreign policy establishment is broken, so virtuous men like Rhodes must short-circuit the discourse to overcome it.