THE DOCTRINE OF POWER
by Paula Broadwell
Prospect
July 18, 2013
On 5th June, in the Rose Garden of the White House, Samantha Power
stood next to President Barack Obama as he named her as his choice
for the next US Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United
Nations, one of the top American diplomatic posts-and in the past,
one of the most controversial. “One of our foremost thinkers on
foreign policy, she showed us that the international community has a
moral responsibility and a profound interest in resolving conflicts
and defending human dignity,” said Obama, introducing what to many has
seemed a surprising choice. A striking figure, tall and lean, Power was
dressed in a dark sea-green dress that complemented her long red hair,
an image that newspapers and television cameras were quick to seize.
For her, this was the culmination of a long journey, from her
upbringing in Ireland to her arrival in the US and a career that led
through journalism to academia and finally politics. To her supporters,
she represents a chance to suffuse American foreign policy with a moral
idealism. Her reputation as a tough-minded and passionate defender
of human rights captures the image the Obama administration seeks to
project. To her critics, and Obama’s, the President has appointed
a “bleeding heart” who will urge America back into humanitarian
missions around the world that it cannot afford. Although Power
is widely expected to be confirmed in her role by the Senate, she
will probably face a grilling from Republicans during this summer’s
confirmation hearings.
Power rose to prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s as a war
correspondent reporting from the Balkans and Africa for the Economist
and Boston Globe, and for her academic work on genocide. Troubled by
America’s failure to prevent crimes against humanity, she developed her
own strong view of the role it should have in the world. “US foreign
policy should inject first-order concern for human rights into every
policy decision,” she wrote in a much-discussed 2003 article for The
New Republic. “American decision makers must understand how damaging
a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really
is in the long term.” Power charged American politicians to submit
every decision to “full cost accounting in which the harm to and
welfare of foreign citizens would constitute a key variable in the
cost-benefit calculus.”
As UN Ambassador, she will face the challenge of applying those
principles in practice. Many Americans know little about the UN but
among those who do, a sizable number question its importance. The
position of UN Ambassador is frequently accorded cabinet-level rank,
although John Bolton, who held the post under George W Bush (and
was a fierce critic of much of the UN’s activity), publicly opposed
this move, arguing that it “overstates the role and importance the
UN should have in US foreign policy.” Nonetheless the post remains
a key member of any president’s foreign policy team. In peacekeeping
operations, to take just one area, the Permanent Representative has
unique responsibilities.
One of Power’s central tenets is her support for the UN’s
responsibility to protect doctrine (R2P, in the jargon of the UN
corridors). This is the principle that if a regime violates the norms
of governance (by failing to protect its population from genocide,
ethnic cleansing or war crimes, for instance), then the international
community is morally obliged to intervene to protect civilians at
risk-using military force if necessary-after peaceful measures have
failed. The doctrine was agreed upon in 2005 at a summit of world
leaders and approved by the UN General Assembly in 2009. But it is
an idea regarded with suspicion by those, including many in the US,
who think that sovereignty should be absolute (see Douglas Hurd, p16).
Power’s vocal support for liberal intervention and the responsibility
to protect remain controversial, and her new role will put her ideals
under strain as Obama continues with drone strikes and targeted
killings abroad. When she arrives in her new office in New York, Power
may find herself chafing against the increasingly entrenched mood in
Washington among both parties to avoid intervention abroad that could
be costly in money or lives. As the national debt continues to rise,
Power will have to balance her support for a proactive foreign policy
with the need for the US to put its own fiscal house in order.
But Power is a popular figure in Washington. She has friends on
both sides of the political aisle-an increasing rarity after years
of bitter partisan fighting-including Senator John McCain and Richard
Williamson, former UN Ambassador under George W Bush. “I have a broader
range of experience representing the US at the UN than anyone in
American history,” Williamson told me. “There is no question in my
mind that Samantha is up to the challenge, and if confirmed, will do
an excellent job.”
Nonetheless, Power will face opposition from critics who fear she is
too inexperienced, as well as sceptics in the military and Republican
establishments. In July, a group of nearly 50 former military and
national security leaders sent an open letter to Harry Reid, the Senate
majority leader, to protest against Power. “In light of her low regard
for our country, her animus towards one of our most important allies,
Israel, and her affinity for those who would diminish our sovereignty
and strengthen our adversaries,” said the letter, “we consider her
to be a wholly unacceptable choice for this sensitive post and urge
you to reject this nomination.”
Idealism is a word that comes up time and time again in discussions
about Power. In 2004, she sat next to the journalist Mark Bowden,
author of Black Hawk Down, at a dinner in Boston. “At some point that
evening, she leaned over to ask me what was my ambition in life,”
remembers Bowden. “I assumed she meant professional ambition, so
I said, “~I want to write good books.’ Then I asked her [what her
ambition was]. Power said, “~I want to change the world.'”
Born in 1970, Power grew up in Castleknock, a suburb of Dublin, before
moving, aged nine, with her parents to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After
graduating from Yale University in 1993, Power travelled to Berlin
to teach English for six months, a trip that set the foundations
of her professional career. The fall of the Berlin Wall four years
earlier had brought new life to the city, which was bustling with
art, nightclubs and tourists. But the most striking aspect for Power
was the number of refugees-Bosnian Muslims escaping from the ethnic
cleansing taking place in the Balkans. “The people who tumbled into
Berlin were fleeing for their lives,” said Power in a speech at
Swarthmore College in 2002. “They were filthy. They were needy. And
they were angry. Many were reliving the horrors they had experienced:
concentration camps, rape camps, little boys and girls picked off
their bicycles by Sarajevo snipers.”
“I saw only people I had no capacity to help,” she told the audience.
But arriving back in Washington to begin an internship at the
Carnegie Endowment think tank, she met Mort Abramowitz, a former US
Assistant Secretary of State, who was to become a consistent mentor. He
encouraged her not to walk away from the Bosnian horrors. Revolted by
the crimes and by her country’s indifference to them, she resolved
to become a war correspondent. Although her only previous reporting
experience was covering women’s volleyball at Yale, she moved to
Bosnia and for the next two years wrote hundreds of thousands of
words for international newspapers and magazines.
The height of the Bosnian conflict in 1995 finally galvanised
international consensus on the need for humanitarian intervention.
Power’s views on the responsibility to protect also strengthened during
her reporting from Rwanda, Cambodia, and East Timor. She returned to
the US in 1996 to study law at Harvard and in 1998 became the founding
Executive Director of the university’s Carr Centre for Human Rights
Policy, where she began researching the book that introduced her to
a wider audience: her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell:
America and the Age of Genocide.
In the book, published in 2002, Power looked at the Ottoman massacre of
the Armenians, the Holocaust, Pol Pot in Cambodia, and Saddam Hussein’s
gassing of the Kurds. In each case, she argued, America’s lack of
response to the slaughter-despite many early warnings-was immoral and
emboldened the perpetrators of such crimes. “It was not surprising
that we didn’t send troops, but that we didn’t even denounce killings
while they occurred,” she wrote. Top-level government officials spent
little time debating what to do, instead delegating to subordinates
with less influence.
In 2004, when she was 33 and teaching at Harvard, Time magazine chose
her as one of its 100 Most Influential People. Her class had waiting
lists. Her authoritative demeanour at the podium was matched by the
equal confidence in the values she articulated to graduate students,
many of whom-like me-had served in the Balkans and witnessed the war
there or had been recalled to military duty in the wake of 9/11.
Power’s persona as a passionate and informed intellectual was a magnet
for those who had experienced the horrors of war and policymakers
working on theories of just war. Infusing human rights into the
decision-making process was a refreshing and bold idea for many of
us more familiar with the attitude of “might makes right.”
Power briefly left the bully pulpit at Harvard in 2004, returning to
Africa to cover the government-backed slaughter of Sudanese civilians.
In a graphic article for the New Yorker, she told the story of the
crisis through one family’s experience. She wrote of a young mother
who saw friends and family members brutally murdered, dismembered
and stuffed, piece by piece, into a water well. Power described how
the woman dug through bloody arms and legs to find her son’s head
separated from his body. The traumatised woman fled with the head to
the mountains. With 400,000 casualties, Darfur was, for Power, another
tragic example of America’s failure to prevent ethnic cleansing.
Power’s foreign affairs expertise led to her 2005 meeting to discuss
Darfur with then Senator Barack Obama. They spoke for over three
hours, forming an instant connection. “They really hit it off,” says
Mort Abramowitz. While serving as a foreign policy fellow on Capitol
Hill in 2005-6, Power was credited with deepening Obama’s support
for the doctrine of responsibility to protect. Her influence as an
Obama confidante has increased over time.
“Her view of the responsibility to protect is grounded in her personal
experience of seeing war up close, almost as close as the combatants
themselves, having friends killed and sharing the intense suffering of
civilians caught in an inferno not of their making,” says Anne-Marie
Slaughter, who was until 2011 the Director of Policy Planning at the
State Department and previously the Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson
School of Public Policy. “The media loves to portray that sensibility
as a “~bleeding heart,’ but in Samantha’s case she understands the
deadly logic of violence and revenge all too well and is deeply versed
in the realities of politics. Her support for R2P is strategic as
much as humanitarian, grounded in the view that it is almost always
easier to prevent violence than to stop it once it has escalated.”
The path Power has taken, from Ivy League punditry to the highest
levels of the policy world, is not uncommon in America. But the switch
to politics can be a bruising experience, as she learnt to her cost
in 2008 when, serving as an adviser to Obama on his primary campaign,
she called his rival candidate, Hillary Clinton, a “monster.” The
comment provoked a storm of complaint and Power resigned from the
Obama campaign soon afterwards. She publicly apologised and in 2009
was appointed to Obama’s National Security Council, where she served
until March 2013.
When Power arrived at the National Security Council in 2009, she, like
others who were new to the administration, had a steep learning curve,
according to Rosa Brooks, a long-time acquaintance of Power’s and
former counsellor to the Pentagon’s third-in-command, Under Secretary
of Defence for Policy, Michèle Flournoy. Early on, according to a
former official who worked with Power while she was on the NSC, Power
“pissed off” people at the Pentagon over Libya. Some saw her as naive
and thought she was pushing for an agenda without understanding the
broader context of the intervention. Power’s relationship with the
State Department was also “complicated at times because of structural
tensions,” says Brooks, explaining that the State Department operates
with some independence from the White House.
So what, serving under Obama, has been Power’s recent track record
on the issues about which she has been so outspoken?
In 2010, speaking at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Power gave a
public address: “What, concretely”? should we be doing-and what should
we be doing differently-in order to further reduce the likelihood
of crimes that shock the conscience?” She pleaded for all actors to
“systemise prevention.”
Her signature effort at the National Security Council sought to answer
this call. Power served as the first Chair of the Atrocities Prevention
Board, a White House task force created in 2012. The board has so far
kept a low profile, protecting its annual report for the President. It
works to forecast the risk of atrocities across the globe. In its
closed-door monthly meetings, the board has sought to address the
wave of anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar and helped secure inquiries
into alleged violations of human rights in countries such as Côte
d’Ivoire and Kyrgyzstan. Critics claim the lack of transparency taints
its credibility, while others question its efficacy, for example,
on preventing atrocities in Syria. But supporters caution that the
conflict in Syria had already progressed before the board’s inception.
“The Atrocities Prevention Board is an important development,” says
former UN Ambassador Richard Williamson, who argues that it helps keep
“the various arms of US bureaucracy attentive” to future dangers and
makes it easier to present the President with a list of practical
early steps to end atrocities before they begin. “Is it the answer to
atrocity crimes? No. But only pompous pontificators with no experience
in politics or making policy from the inside would dismiss this new
tool as less than helpful.”
Another key area of Power’s work under Obama has been Libya where,
in March 2011, she allied with then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice to persuade Obama to
support a Nato-led military intervention. Although Libya is still in
turmoil, the military action was hailed as a model intervention by
Nato’s then Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis. Such
a well-orchestrated multilateral response is rare, though it is the
ideal that Power will seek as the international community continues
to grapple with containing the violence in Syria. But “no one with
proximity to [Obama] or without it has been all that successful”
with devising a strategy for Syria, Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings
Institution told me.
In public, Power has been muted about intervening in Syria. But she
has not been silent in the White House. Her early argument for more
robust action in Syria-such as arming the rebels-has been adopted, and
at the UN she will seek to play a more prominent role in galvanising
multilateral efforts.
However, those expecting Power to speak out on every humanitarian issue
and lead every campaign for liberal intervention not only overlook
the limitations of her position, but also fail to understand how her
outlook has developed over the past two decades. “She is not just an
idealist,” says Mort Abramowitz. “She works like hell, pays enormous
attention to detail, tries very hard to understand every situation
she gets involved in, and will seek other views.” He adds: “Over the
years she has come to understand complexity and the difficulties
of decision-making. She can change her mind and some of her early
writings have been rethought.”
Joseph Nye, who was Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government
when Power set up the Carr Centre there, agrees. Regarding Power’s
reputation as a liberal hawk, he says, “I think she will be much
more pragmatic than people think. She has a bum rap about being a
dogmatist. I didn’t find that.”
Whether a US President believes a UN ambassador can actually accomplish
anything has often been signalled by his choice of nominee.
It has been said that George W Bush picked Bolton precisely because
he was sceptical about multilateralism and knew his famously
confrontational new ambassador would reflect that. Obama seems to
take the position more seriously, but some critics, such as former
Republican Congressman Allen West, suggest he has selected Power,
rather than a more skilled and experienced diplomat, because of her
loyalty. Yet her closeness to Obama is a crucial asset, believes Nye.
“What matters is not so much the office as it is the relationship
with the President… and contacts in the White House,” he says.
Bruce Riedel at Brookings believes the role is critical. “US
ambassadors do matter,” says Riedel, citing Thomas Pickering’s
influence on rallying the UN Security Council’s response to Saddam
Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and Madeleine Albright’s decisive
support for intervention in the Balkans. “If you are a friend of
[the President with] long-standing and years of intimacy, you can be
very influential. [Power] has that clout. Add to that her connection
to Susan Rice [now Obama’s national security adviser] and it’s a
powerful dynamic.”
But can Power influence the international response to the Syria
crisis? “A key problem in Syria is the total lack of support in the
Congress and public for US intervention, without which any mission
will be unsustainable,” says Riedel. “Power has little experience
with either. Perhaps she can generate support for a robust policy
but it will be a tough sell.”
Power’s own views of the UN are complicated. She has strongly
criticised the Security Council, the body charged with maintaining
international peace and security, whose five permanent members with
veto power include China and Russia. “The UN Security Council is
anachronistic, undemocratic, and consists of countries that lack
the standing to be considered good-faith arbiters of how to balance
stability against democracy, peace against justice, and security
against human rights,” wrote Power in 2003. “But, for all of the
flaws in the international system, it remains a fact that securing
international consent or participation increases a policy’s legitimacy
in the eyes of others.” Power supports more extensive US involvement
with the UN in order to start “restoring the legitimacy of US power.”
Power is also explicitly against American unilateralism. Instead,
she wants the US to take a lead in shaping international institutions.
Discussing the International Criminal Court-which the US has not
joined, and which has been criticised by many American politicians for
threatening to override US law and judicial procedure-Power wrote that
“only US resources and leadership can turn such institutions into
forces for the international stability that is indispensable to US
security. Besides, giving up a pinch of sovereignty will not deprive
the United States of the tremendous military and economic leverage
it has at its disposal as a last resort.”
What size “pinch” of sovereignty she is willing to give up remains
to be seen. However, comments like this make her an easy target for
Republican hardliners. So, famously, did her “mea culpa” doctrine-that
US officials should consider apologising for “the sins of their
predecessors” (her words, although she did not specify which sins
she was thinking of). In June, Ted Cruz, a Republican Senator from
Texas, posted on his website: “No nation has spilled more blood or
sacrificed more for the freedom of others than ours, and yet Ms Power
has publicly embraced the need for America to continue apologising to
the world for perceived transgressions, going so far as to explicitly
urge “~instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa.'”
Power’s views on Israel have also landed her in trouble. While Jarrod
Bernstein, a former liaison to the Jewish community for the White
House, commends Power’s diplomatic work with Israeli officials, some
critics have rebuked her for her supposed hostility towards Israel. In
2002 she gave a now-infamous interview in which she suggested that,
in a hypothetical situation where a human rights catastrophe was
occurring in Israel-Palestine, it might be necessary to send in an
international protection force to impose peace. She issued her own
mea culpa for her statement shortly thereafter, though she maintains
that more should be done for the peace process to prevent “major
human rights abuses” against Palestinians.
Can Power manage the much broader portfolio the UN will present?
Ambassador John Negroponte, who began his appointment to the UN just
seven days after 9/11, thinks so. “The UN maintains a major focus on
many human rights challenges across Africa, including the use of child
soldiers and UN peacekeeper sexual violence toward indigenous women,
for which Power has a deep appreciation and personal connection,” he
says. “These issues won’t be lost on her.” But, he added that Power
will have to spend time mastering hallway diplomacy, “jaw-boning
and holding hands” with the other permanent members on the Security
Council if she really wants to gain traction.
Most importantly, Power is going into the job without rose-tinted
spectacles. “She knows the UN’s strengths. She knows its weaknesses,”
said Obama when announcing his nomination of her. But despite the
pragmatism that she has developed since her days as a reporter, Power
still chose to sound an idealistic note when accepting his nomination.
“The question of what the UN can accomplish for the world and for the
US remains a pressing one,” said Power. “I have seen UN aid workers
enduring shell-fire to deliver food to the people of Sudan. Yet I’ve
also seen UN peacekeepers fail to protect the people of Bosnia. As the
most powerful and inspiring country on this earth, we have a critical
role to play in insisting that the institution meets the necessities
of our time. It can do so only with American leadership.”