Topic: Decline of the West
One of the characteristic products of contemporary journalism is the unintentionally devastating profile piece. Usually penned by a starry-eyed admirer of the subject, such stories reveal by accident those inconvenient truths that the journalist would never report on purpose. Here’s a prize example of the genre: a profile of UN Ambassador Samantha Power in the Washington Post. Manuel Roig-Franzia, who writes for the paper’s Style section, just can’t say enough about his subject. And that’s just the trouble…from Power’s point of view.
Samantha Powers made her name as a human-rights activist focusing on genocide. She became famous for her denunciations of US policy where such episodes of mass murder are concerned, most notably in her book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2003), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. Tapped by presidential candidate Barack Obama for service as a senior adviser on foreign policy issues, she stumbled badly in 2008, calling arch-rival Hillary Clinton a “monster.” Power believed that she was speaking on background and that her juicy comment would not be reported—early evidence of her political naiveté. For this embarrassing faux pas she was dumped by the campaign. But Power is Barack Obama’s kind of foreign policy expert: young, female, well credentialed and, not least, highly critical of past administrations. So a place was found for her on the new president’s national security team.
“The education of Samantha Power” as Roig-Franzia calls it began in the winter of 2009 when she and a number of other “grimly determined” White House staffers undertook to get the United States to sign a long-stalled treaty banning land mines. This appeared to them to be a no-brainer. More than 150 countries had signed the treaty—so why not the America? When Power & Co. began pushing to get the treaty signed they found out. The Pentagon was against it, pointing out the million land mines sown along the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea constitute a key component of the US/South Korean defense plan. Confronted with this argument, Powers grumbled: “I didn’t have any idea how complicated these things become once you’re in government. This is as far from a no-brainer as I’ve ever seen.” This from a woman described by Roig-Franzia as “one of her generation’s most dazzling diagnosticians of our government’s failings”!
Nothing daunted by this initial rebuff, Power kept pushing on behalf of the treaty. But in 2012 she suffered a brutal put-down at the hands of General James Thurman, then commanding US forces in South Korea. “I wake up every morning with 1 million North Korean troops right across the border,” he told her bluntly. The general scoffed at Power’s argument for high-tech alternatives to the mines, calling them costly and unrealistic…and that was that. President Obama, Power’s great admirer, proved unwilling to side with her against the opinion of his military advisers.
There’s more along these lines in Roig-Franzia’s piece, much of far from flattering to its subject. I don’t doubt that Samantha Power means extremely well. But this profile shows that Power’s impressively credentialed celebrity activism left her unprepared to grapple with the realities of politics and power. In this she much resembles her boss, Barack Obama. Their education, alas, has come at America’s expense.
