Top Obama official reflects on Biden, Harris, Trump, and US aid

Sad and energizing. That’s how Ben Rhodes, former U.S. President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser and a prominent voice in U.S. politics, described President Joe Biden’s historic decision to drop out of the November election and pass the baton to his vice president, Kamala Harris. Sad because after 50 years in public service, Biden is essentially acknowledging he is nearing the end of his career, and “that's an incredibly difficult and painful decision.” “If you look at President Biden, the hardest thing that somebody can do is kind of reach the determination that it’s not in the best interest of the country, or the fortunes of the Democratic Party, to continue on,” Rhodes told Devex Editor-in-Chief and President Raj Kumar during a Devex Pro Live interview on Monday. At the same time, the party can now regroup and move forward with what will be an “incredibly difficult and hard-fought election,” Rhodes said. While Harris is not yet formally the Democratic presidential nominee, all signs point to the fact that the Harris juggernaut is unstoppable at this point. As for the acrimonious process that got us to this point, Rhodes said it was healthy. “I'd rather be in a coalition of people that are capable of having differences of views, and even very, very difficult conversations that sometimes spill out into the public, than the alternative, which is to, you know, keep everybody in line,” he said. “And then I also think that coming out of it … it's very energizing. People want to be united, people want to all be moving in the same direction. And I have had a sense for some days now that whenever this period ended, that there would be this kind of collective both relief but then new wells of energy to draw from,” Rhodes continued. “And I think you feel this kind of rapid coalescence around Vice President Harris kind of indicates that people want to get to work.” “I woke up with more optimism than I felt in a very long time,” he added. So what would a potential Harris administration mean for U.S. foreign assistance and development policy? “I'm sure there'll be a good deal of continuity from President Biden, but at the same time, I think she'll have particular areas of interest where she wants to make a mark,” Rhodes said. “She'll have some of the same personnel, but inevitably, she'll have a different senior team, and so therefore, the personalities around her, and their areas of expertise and interest, will lead to, I'm sure, slightly different priorities.” If Donald Trump wins, however, all bets are off the table — and Trump 2.0 will look very different than Trump 1.0. Rhodes pointed out that many of the officials in Trump’s first administration “were pretty conventional people who were in charge of that foreign policy apparatus. That is not not going to be the case this time. They have well-developed plans. Trump, I think, both believes that his instincts were better than the people that kind of talked him out of doing certain things. … [and] believes that he was validated and those people were wrong, and that he should have trusted his instincts. “And so … if Donald Trump wins, he’ll be surrounded by much more ideological people who have more experience being in agencies, which means not that they want to effectively govern those agencies, but they want to essentially engage in a hostile takeover of those agencies.” The Make America Great Again ideology would also seep into Trump’s foreign policy agenda, according to Rhodes. “I think they are going to begin to look at everything through the lens of their kind of identity politics here at home,” which means they will push back against “things like climate finance, things like gender equality — anything that could be kind of put under an umbrella of what they see is their kind of domestic political opposition.” Indeed, Republicans in the House of Representatives have already indicated they would make steep cuts to certain foreign aid programs, gutting climate change and gender equality initiatives, for example. Meanwhile, multilateral institutions such as the United Nations would essentially see their U.S. contributions evaporate. Rhodes worries this will lead to a “pre-World War One nation-state system, where it's all transactional. It's all tests of strength and might makes right and we're no longer bound by norms and expectations for what the United States is going to do, whether that's contributing to humanitarian assistance efforts, or whether that's maintaining agreements, or whether that's not bullying other countries in certain ways.” This “law of the jungle” world, where it's just everybody for themselves, would be “the worst kind of environment for international development,” he added. In the past, there were congressional guardrails that thwarted deep cuts to foreign affairs spending and curbed extreme isolationist tendencies. Not this time, Rhodes warned. “In the early Trump years, you had some capacity for Congress to be pretty independent on certain things, on things like assistance to Ukraine or Russia sanctions, for instance. “A lot of those people are gone. They got exhausted by being in Congress, and the people who stayed made their peace as it were with the new ideological direction of the party,” Rhodes said. “As someone who's been in this community, there were Republican champions for development assistance. Sometimes they shared my priorities, sometimes they had differing ones, but they weren't questioning the kind of central premise of should the United States be active in different parts of the world. “My sense is that for a time, particularly in the beginning of the Trump administration, there was a kind of autopilot to foreign assistance,” Rhodes added. “I don't think that's going to happen this time. I think he's going to come in with a much more assertive and ideological approach. …There'll be some pushback, maybe from the [Capitol] Hill and other places, but particularly if there's [Republican] control of Congress, I think we could be looking at truly seismic changes.” So how can development practitioners prepare for a Trump presidency? Check out the video for Rhodes’ advice, along with his blunt words on Taiwan, Russia, and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.