In the book’s most appealing passages, Rhodes sits down with people very much like himself, chastened idealists who have come to know the world as it is but refuse to conform to its demands.

Little of the analysis is new or original, but it is certainly elegantly expressed.

Here is vital reading for Americans and people anywhere who seek to understand what is happening 'after the fall' of the global system created by the United States and shaped increasingly by China under Xi Jinping. The book’s analyses of recent events and apparent trends are based on facts, as the author finds them, presented in an offhand, nearly conversational manner. Other experts may disagree with the interpretations of Ben Rhodes but must take account of the realities he describes. A trimmed-down version of After the Fall could serve as an eye-opening supplementary text for AP, college, or adult ed courses on world affairs..

... lucidly written.

The author clearly shows that fear and self-censorship work in the U.S. as well as anywhere in the world. As for the pandemic and Trump’s failings there, the U.S. emerges as 'a country that killed hundreds of thousands of people through our own unique blend of incompetence and irrationality,' no model for anyone. It’s a stinging, and entirely well-founded, rebuke of a political strain that shows no signs of disappearing. A powerful synthesis of recent world history that should disabuse readers of any notion of American exceptionalism..