My must read of the day is "In the Land of the Possible," by Evan Osnos, in the New Yorker:
On July 17, 2013, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee met to consider the nomination of Samantha Power to be America’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. She was an unusual choice. Although she had been a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and served on the National Security Council as the senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights, she had never been a diplomat. At forty-two, she would be the youngest-ever American Ambassador to the U.N.
Power was best known for her book " ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide." An indictment of what she called Washington’s "toleration of unspeakable atrocities, often committed in clear view," it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. For her conviction that America has a responsibility to halt or prevent the suffering of civilians abroad, she had been caricatured as the Ivy League Joan of Arc. She had written (in this magazine and elsewhere) with unqualified assurance. As a speaker, "she was a performer of the first order," Leslie H. Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. "No notes, the fingers and the arms always flashing in the air, and a voice going from a whisper to a shout. She was pure theatre." […]
David Rothkopf, the editor of Foreign Policy, whose latest book is "National Insecurity," told me, "Here is the person who wrote the best-reported, analyzed cri de coeur on genocide, in an Administration that has effectively said, in the face of humanitarian disasters, We’re going to do very little, whether it is the continuing catastrophe in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Syria or the brewing problem with Rohingya"—Muslims persecuted in Burma. "We will periodically do something, like send in helicopters to look for two hundred missing schoolgirls, or blow up somebody on the Horn of Africa. But this has not been the antidote to Rwanda that she may have wanted." As for Power’s influence on other Administration officials, he said, "Whereas she could be the North Star to some extent, she actually ends up being a kind of counterpoint, illustrating the fact that they are not, for the most part, living up to their convictions."
This was one of the most interesting pieces I read over the holidays.
Samantha Power is someone I’m fascinated by. Whether you like her politics or not, she’s an incredibly intelligent, successful female, and she’s been successful at quite a young age. She is an impressive person, and she has an impressive resume.
Her background in work related to human rights is long, but most days it doesn’t seem like a background that would push her to work for the Obama administration.
I don’t question why Power would choose to work for the administration. Presumably, she believed she could influence policy from within the system far more effectively than she could by writing papers and books from the rooms of an Ivy League campus. I get that. What I have difficultly wrapping my head around, is how she’s been able to stay with this administration for roughly seven years. How, in good conscience, does a person who cares deeply about human rights and began her career reporting from Bosnia stick around in an administration whose human rights record has been called a "disappointment" by supporters?
This article made me more interested in who Samantha Power is—as a person, an academic, and a government official—but it doesn’t answer my primary recurrent thought. I continue to wonder if there are days when Power is disappointed in the life she’s settled into. It’s one that puts her in the middle of an administration that many would argue has failed to do much or has been too slow to stand up against human rights violations, from the response to governments crackdowns in places such as Venezuela, China, Iran, and Russia, to the millions displaced or killed because of the Syrian Civil War.
No administration is going to be perfect, and no administration can stand up to every human rights abuse abroad. It would be both infeasible and negligent, but certainly human rights can be a factor in determining national security interests. Power appears to believe that, but in the most obvious examples to seemingly fit that mold (i.e. Syria) her administration has stepped back—so how has she been able to spend years playing the game without guilt? She’s been able to help in some ways, as the article notes, experts credit her with helping the situation in the Central African Republic to not be even worse, by "alert[ing] people to the potential of genocide." However, in the scheme of problems the administration has encountered, specifically on human rights, that’s a minimal achievement. If she doesn’t have guilt now, I can’t help but wonder if it’s going to come later, and if one day Power will regret her long role in the administration.