Ben Rhodes

And it's, it's your point.

It's like someone needs to put an arm around us and say, you don't control things, you know, like, like come sit over here.

Let me talk to you about the fact that you need to invest in education in your country.

Like you need to, like, I think we're at that point.

I think that in the room, I think that the problem is that people become fixated on finding some formula

To deal with a problem without seeing the whole picture in the sense of we're talking about Syria today in the Situation Room.

What are our levers, you know, sanctions or arming the opposition or bombing them or diplomacy with the Russians or?

And everybody is kind of hyper-focused on this country as if it's something that we control or if we pull the right levers, X will happen and lead to Y. And again, what is absent is why are we talking about this at all?

Why do we think we can control what happens in Syria?

And

That if we do these actions, it's going to cause all these second order effects like a migration crisis.

Now, the pressure at the time, John, is why isn't Obama doing anything about Syria?

People are being killed there.

This is horrible.

He's weak.

He's not sitting up to Assad.

And so then it becomes there's a pressure to do something like American politics, not American people.

And this is where I would actually challenge Democrats to get a spine on this stuff is

It's kind of this weird mix of the pundit class and the think tank world and this – I called it the blob, right?

But this kind of discourse machine in Washington demands that you solve Syria.