The White House has confirmed that President Barack Obama may visit Cuba in 2016–and says it is looking for ways to let the Cuban “revolution” interpret human rights norms in ways that allow it to retain power.
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer pressed White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes on President Obama wanting to train people in Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS even though “that’s been a total failure” on Monday’s “Situation Room.” Blitzer said,
Obama is scheduled to tour the Dignity for Children Foundation on Saturday. In a press briefing with reporters, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said that the visit reflected Obama’s desire to lead on the controversial issue, encouraging more countries to respond to the attacks in Paris by taking in more refugees.
Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” the deputy national security adviser for strategic communication for President Barack Obama Ben Rhodes said the president is not worried about America taking Syrian refugees despite reports that at least one man linked to the
WASHINGTON – Top Obama administration and White House officials partied away on the night of the anniversary of 9-11 and the Benghazi terrorist attack.
There are, as Isaiah Berlin said, foxes who try to do many things, and hedgehogs who do only one. In foreign policy, Americans are hedgehogs: we win wars. The best foreign policy for the U.S. is an ever-stronger military. Beyond that, we are adrift.
President Barack Obama’s announcement that he will approach the UN Security Council to approve the nuclear deal with Iran, and rescind past resolutions and international sanctions, before Congress approves the agreement, came as something of a surprise to many. When Congress passed Sen. Bob Corker’s Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, and President Obama signed it into law in May, the public understanding was that Congress would have the final say.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Western powers had “collapsed” to nearly every single Iranian demand so far in the nuclear talks.
Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes–who lacks any prior qualifications for the post–has explained to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Monday that the administration believes that a bad Iran deal is worth doing because political reform inside the Iranian regime is more likely with the deal than without. Or, to use Rhodes’s own words: “We believe that the kiss of the nuke deal will turn the Iranian frog into a handsome prince.”
Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said “an agreement is necessary, and has to be good enough to be worth doing, even if Iran doesn’t change” and that a deal is “more likely to produce an evolution in Iranian behavior”
State Department spokesperson Marie Harf and White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes have launched an unprecedented effort to discredit, discount and deny the Times story that reports that “Tehran’s stockpile of nuclear fuel increased about 20 percent over the last 18 months of negotiations.”
The National Security Council (NSC) is meant to serve as “the President’s principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his senior national security advisors and cabinet officials. Increasingly, it is a repository for radicals whose ideas are too extreme for public scrutiny, and who would never pass congressional muster. The latest case is the NSC’s hosting last month of a Palestinian-American teenager, Tariq Khdeir, who was beaten by Israeli police in 2014.
White House Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes did not say if Cuba had many any concessions regarding fugitives currently hiding in the country when he was asked on Wednesday’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” When “any give at all” from Cuba
CNN’s “The Lead” anchor Jake Tapper pressed Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes on President Obama’s evolving stance on Iran on Monday. Tapper played clips of the president in 2012 saying that “the deal we’ll accept is they end their nuclear program.
Israel’s Army Radio, via the Jerusalem Post, reports that local sources claim U.S. President Barack Obama arranged the leak of a Mossad report on the Iran nuclear talks as an act of revenge against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for agreeing to speak to Congress in February about radical Islam and the Iranian threat. The Mossad report allegedly suggests new sanctions would cause talks to collapse, and its release is calculated to suggest disagreement with Netanyahu.