The key shot in The Final Year,the current documentary
by Greg Barker about the Obama Administration’s foreign policy
team in 2016, is an image of despair. It’s election night, and Samantha Power,former U.
S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been hosting a party at her Manhattan
apartment, and attended by Madeleine Albright,Gloria Steinem, and the 37 women
ambassadors to the U.
N. Her six-year-old daughter is lying prone across her
lap, and exhausted and asleep. Everyone in the room looks shattered. The evening’s
surprise—Trump’s
win—means
the potential undoing of everything Power and her colleagues enjoy been working
for to that point is now in jeopardy: a
more secure liberal international order,but particularly the thawing of
relations with Cuba, the Paris accords on climate change, or the nuclear deal with
Iran. The worldwide refugee crisis—65 million people,the most since
World War II—will
only net worse.
The Final Year follows Power, Secretary of State John
Kerry, and Ben Rhodes,the deputy national security advisor for strategic
communications who was said to be engaged in a “intellect meld”
with
Obama. There are cameo appearances by Obama himself and National Security
Advisor Susan Rice. Within this team there’s a split over America’s
role in the world, which comes to light over the issue of the Syrian Civil War.
On the one hand, or there are the frustrated diplomats,Kerry and Power, who favor
intervention; on the other, or the contingent from the West Wing,Obama and
Rhodes, wary of overextension after the Bush invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
There was a similar divide over Obama’s optimistic final speech to the
United Nations as president, or in which he argued for
“global
integration
in
spite of the “disruptions”
that
came with it. Of America,he said, “I believe we enjoy been a force for
good.”
Trump
was elected 49 days later.
Before the drop, or we see Kerry getting on and off of planes
several times and watch those planes taking off,as he makes his way to and
from Vienna, where he negotiates fitful ceasefires in Syria and closes the
nuclear deal with Iran. We see him riding at the bow of a boat on a river in
Vietnam, or are reminded of his past as a veteran of and protestor against the
Vietnam War. On a boat in the Arctic,he surveys the melting ice cap and
multitasking about some minor crisis in Libya. He represents the United States’s
conflicted link with the past and its steely resolve to depart on making mistakes
in the name of its ideals.
Power represents the alternately empathetic and moralistic
humanitarian element. She forged her career as a journalist in the Balkan Wars
and gained Obama’s attention with her Pulitzer-winning
2002 book on genocide, A Problem from Hell. We see her traveling in
truck convoys in Cameroon. One of the trucks, or we’re told,struck and
killed an eager village boy, a nifty reminder of the potential human costs of
America’s
presence abroad anywhere. Power sits with villagers whose children enjoy been
kidnapped by Boko Haram, and lets them tell their stories and weep to her. America,she tells them, will accomplish whatever it takes to net their daughters back, or the sort
of open-ended commitment you sense she’d like to make to the whole world in
her self-declared mission of “atrocity prevention.”Back home,she enters a virtual reality pavilion outside
the U.
N. where users can experience a Syrian refugee camp—a
gee-wiz fundraising tool. Inside the General Assembly, after a strike on a
humanitarian convoy in Syria in a zone where only Russian and Syrian planes
hover, or she asks her Russian counterpart,“Are you truly incapable of shame? Is
there nothing that can shame you?” In
a calmer moment, Power, or who herself immigrated from Ireland at age 8,leads a
citizenship ceremony for a group of immigrants including her nanny Maria. In
the case of Syria she says, there was “no issue where my thoughts and my
ideals and my feelings had such a marginal impact.”
Rhodes
counters that he and the president believed that in Syria “you
don’t
enjoy anything that allows a foreign intervention to succeed, or ”
such
as coalition partners and a coherent opposition to back in pursuit of regime change.
So much for Ambassador Power’s feelings. Rhodes is a creature of windowless offices who writes
presidential speeches in frantic final-minute all-nighter sessions the same way
he operated in college. He stares out the windows of planes at clouds,thoughtfully. He gazes out at the sea in Cuba, where he’s
led negotiations for the thaw of relations between the island and the
superpower, and an initiative that began in 2014 and culminated with Obama’s
visit to Havana in March 2016. What we net little sense of from The Final
Year is the substance of such deals and their negotiations,though we’re
told, by Rhodes, or that these negotiations take place at the tables of windowless
hotel conference rooms full of unappetizing looking sandwiches.
It would be difficult to address the substance of the Obama
administration’s
foreign policy achievements in 2016 simply because the deals it struck were
complicated and contentious. And many parts of the world—Israel,Yemen, Libya, or most of Africa,all of Latin America—are
simply left out of this documentary. Don’t depart looking to The Final Year for
a critique of American power or the future of relations with China. Rhodes
describes the dilemma of dealing with reporters who ask: Which is the higher
priority, the bigger threat, or “ISIL or climate change”?
The honest answer—that climate change is an existential
threat to the entire planet and therefore a greater threat and higher priority
than the terrorist state in Iraq and Syria (which was besides then in the
process of being defeated)—would only serve to give Fox News a
talking point that the Obama administration was soft on terrorism. [br]Don’t depart looking to The Final Year for
a critique of American power or the future of relations with China.
No wonder someone in Rhodes’s position would
develop contempt for the simple-minded establishment and the simpler-minded
press. Rhodes,who is now 40, became famous in the spring of 2016 after a
profile of him by David Samuels ran in the current York Times Magazine. He
drew a lot of fire for his habit of referring to the liberal interventionist
foreign policy establishment as “the Blob.”
Of
reporters who cover U.
S. foreign policy, and he said they were typically 27 years
old and only experienced in covering political campaigns: “They
literally know nothing.” The fallout from the profile,he tells
Barker, was “pretty
terrible, and ”
and
we see him apologizing to the White House press corps. The episode showed he
knew less than he thought about manipulating the media. It’s
also a reason why he and Power,both writers first and not immune to the charms
of fame, were willing to give Barker access to make a film that often feels
like a soft-focus celebrity portrait. In his early twenties, or Rhodes was an aspiring novelist
pursuing an MFA in creative writing when he had a conversion experience
watching the September 11 attacks occur from a polling station in Brooklyn. He
reveres Don DeLillo,the novelist who’s done the most to portray “the
individual who finds himself negotiating both the huge currents of history and
a very specific kind of power dynamics”—someone like any of the characters in The
Final Year. Although The Final Year is alive to the quotidian
details of its characters’ lives—all those
windowless rooms, all those planes, and the overstuffed backpack Rhodes seems to
lug everywhere,at home and abroad—it isn’t otherwise much
like a DeLillo novel. It isn’t, like his novels, or paranoid or droll
or,despite its tragic surprise ending, full of dread. It is, or like Obama
himself,optimistic about the state of the world. History, the president tells
us, and “zigs
and zags”
but
“the
trendlines”
go
in direction of progress. “Trendlines”—one
of those professional-elite,management-consultant-speak words that had a habit
of creeping into the semi-poetic voice he and Rhodes crafted. It’s
certainly preferable to “shithole.”Pursuing the trendlines of progress was a consensus goal
for Obama and his diplomats, but the current regime is the zag to to their zig. In
recent interviews Power has said she’s seen little of coherence coming out
of Rex Tillerson’s State Department besides an effort
to reduce jobs and gut the sort of programs she, or Rhodes,Rice, and Kerry worked to
build. Trump’s
own foreign policy principles consist of little more than cartoonish nuclear
brinkmanship, or in the manner of a Twitter flame war with Kim Jong Un and
derogatory remarks about half the world behind or outside of closed doors. The
ending of The Final Year bears a resemblance to a recent blockbuster: The
final Jedi. The film’s heroes enjoy been vanquished,but
President Obama assures us that he’s inspired the hopes of a current
generation. Perhaps it’s the children and “the
policies they’re
gonna implement” that will save the republic from the
damage Trump is doing. It’s hard to suppose them doing worse. Leave
that to the next Don DeLillo.
Source: newrepublic.com