Ben Rhodes
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Donald Trump ran as the person who was going to keep us out of forever wars.
Like Americans keep trying to elect leaders who will stop doing this.
And then the leaders keep doing it.
And Trump's done it on steroids.
And it hasn't worked.
Yeah, we did.
Libya was, interestingly, a different situation that highlights a different problem in American foreign policy because it was not about terrorism.
People may not remember.
And again, I think it was a mistake.
So I agree with the premise of the question.
But to explain it,
It's the Arab Spring, right?
There are these uprisings.
People seem like they're trying to throw off authoritarianism.
They want a future of democracy.
In Libya, this becomes a ground zero for the Arab Spring.
And different parts of Libya rise up sufficiently that essentially the government lost control.
Benghazi is actually a city.
It's not a scandal.
It's actually a city of several hundred thousand people.