Let me start by saying that I like Ben Rhodes. He is kind and smart, and, by all accounts, a decent human being. When I moved to Washington in 2012, he was then-President Obama’s trusted advisor—a wunderkind speechwriter turned foreign policy factotum—and my only interactions with him were those befitting a reporter and her source. After the end of Obama’s second term, he followed the path of so many Obama staffers who hadn’t expected a Trump victory. He went on TV, he wrote a book—Rhodes famously has an MFA in creative writing—and, instead of waiting at a think tank for the wheel of fortune to return a Democrat to the White House and hire people like him, he started his own foreign policy initiative.