decision-makers helped to create a world amenable to autocracy but also how autocratic stylings have been imported back into the United States. The book is more subtle than that, a confrontation with how U.S. Its subtitle - “Being American in the World We’ve Made” - suggests that influence only runs one way, that Americans go galumphing about the world while everyone else sits passively awaiting their fate. The book begins with the admirably cosmopolitan premise that one might learn something about the United States by asking people elsewhere how things look from their point of view. The political disquisition wrestles with the future of American power around the world but also with what it means to be an American at home: How should liberals understand their country’s history at a time when the left “sees America as doomed to do no good in the world” and the right doubles down on an unthinking patriotism? These three approaches do not always work seamlessly together, but they reflect Rhodes’s varied identities: speechwriter, podcaster, national security expert, everyday dad troubled by the state of the world. The travel diary takes us to Hungary, Russia and China, where Rhodes interviews dissidents (including the recently jailed Alexei Navalny) in an effort to understand the ever-faster creep of authoritarianism around the world. The personal memoir describes Rhodes’s journey from his Upper East Side childhood to Obama’s speechwriting room - not far to go as a general matter, perhaps, but interesting in its specifics. Such questions are at the heart of Ben Rhodes’s “After the Fall,” a combination of personal memoir, travel diary and political disquisition.

Ben rhodes after the fall