Where Samantha Power appears
24 total
…ly arose that the women in the administration—Clinton, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, and national-security aide Samantha Power, whose Pulitzer Prize—winning book on genocide was influential in Obama’s thinking—drove the debate. “The idea that...
…politicians not yet scheduled Vice President Biden Senator Mark Warner Governor Jerry Brown UN representative Samantha Power former sec of State, Henry Kissinger former Sec of State Condaleeza Rice former Chancellor of the NYC schools, Joel...
led the Democratic Party since Vietnam—when to sanction the use of force abroad—is to support wars of national liberation. This is likely not a solution at all. In a speech in 2006, Power told graduating students at Santa Clara University L...
ffice, like George W. Bush, promising to repudiate the arrogance of his predecessor, only to be seduced by the lure of militant democracy. Power’s argument that there is a coincidence between humanitarian intervention and American national...
ailure to fill the security void.” Power’s assumption appears to be that given the right approach, Iraq might not have degenerated into sectarian warfare. There can be no doubting that the Bush administration botched the occupation. But it...
ng his own reverence for reason onto one who clearly observed different norms. “The massacre was totally unnecessary.” (What massacre, incidentally, is necessary?) In this telling, Vieira de Mello, who sought to curry favor with leading Ser...
ng a crusader, Vieira de Mello was ready to compromise. For example, Power writes that when it came to protecting the rights of Vietnamese boat people, he could have gone to greater lengths to use his pulpit at [the UN’s refugee agency] UNH...
lian United Nations bureaucrat. He served the UN in a number of hot spots—East Timor, Rwanda, Cyprus, Cambodia, Lebanon and the Balkans (where Power first met him in her capacity as a journalist). He was a UN high commissioner for human rig...
pointing to the human-rights abuses perpetrated by the Sandinistas. Reagan, for all the bellicosity, was loath to send American troops into combat, withdrawing them from Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in 1983. What P...
of a convention declaring genocide a violation of international law, though America refused to sign it for four decades. Now it provides a basis for military intervention. Which returns us to Bosnia yet again. Power does an excellent job of...
few actions, as Power notes, taken to punish the Turks. Woodrow Wilson, eager to remain neutral in World War I, had resisted the calls of his ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, to protest the killings of Armenians. Power ca...
that it worked. Reticence about protesting mass murder was a constituent part of America’s hard-nosed, realist approach to foreign affairs. What is missing from Power’s work, however, is a political context. There seems to be the assumption...
as not adventitious. It has become the siren song of liberal interventionists. Part of the legend of Power is her first mission to Bosnia, where she filed reports for the Boston Globe and other publications about Serbian belligerence and We...
st for someone who was otherwise championing the cause of stopping mad and bad dictators around the world. Indeed, absent Power, Obama may not have intervened in Libya. Obama now uses arguments to justify the intervention that are somewhat...
ould say, the prophet armed. Along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice, Power has become closely—and publicly—identified as one of the advisers most responsible for pushing Obama to intervene in Libya. It is...
…ther words, will become ever again. IT WOULD be hard to think of a more ardent promoter of this doctrine than Samantha Power. Power is not just an advocate for human rights. She is an outspoken crusader against genocide. She has referred se...
nglanders during the Boer War. Then, as the insurgency developed, the alliance melted away. A notable defector was Peter Beinart, who first wrote a book calling for a nationalistic Democratic Party, then issued a second one taking it all ba...
f humanitarian intervention. The conceit is that when America intervenes, it is not doing so on the basis of sordid national interests but, rather, on the grounds of self-evidently virtuous human rights or, in its most extreme case, to prev...
amantha and Her Subjects Jacob Heilbrunn April 19, 2011 -- HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION—the conviction that American presidents must act, preemptively if necessary, to avert the massacre of innocents abroad—is steadily acquiring a new prominen...
… America’s first season’s guests included Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Cynthia Nixon, Shaquille O’Neal, Yo Yo Ma, Samantha Power, Herbie Hancock, John McCain, Nas, Angela Duckworth, Bono, Regina Spektor, Frank Gehry, Stuart Weitzman, E.O. Wilso...
