Power Shaped The Obama Administration’s Foreign Policy With Her “Humanitarian Hawk” Outlook
Power Joined The Obama White House In 2009. “Power, who provided Obama with foreign-policy advice when he was a senator and a Presidential candidate, joined the White House in 2009 as a champion of humanitarian intervention in an Administration dedicated to ending the conflicts it had inherited and refraining from entering into others.” [The New Yorker, 9/9/19]
Power Saw War As The Instrument For Dealing With Humanitarian Crises. “Power generalized from her Balkans experience to become an advocate of American and NATO military intervention in humanitarian crises, a position which became known as being a ‘humanitarian hawk.’ She began to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values. ‘The United States must also be prepared to risk the lives of its soldiers’ to stop the threat of genocide, she wrote. She condemned Western ‘appeasement’ of dictators.” [The Nation, 3/30/11]
While In Obama’s White House, Power Advised The Catastrophic Libya Intervention
Power Advocated For U.S. Military Intervention In Libya, Which Had Dire Consequences. “In her book, she doesn’t agonize much over the part she played in the response to the Libyan crisis. But senior Administration officials say that Power, a forceful personality, pushed hard for a military intervention. ‘She was clear in her views,’’ Derek Chollet, another member of the National Security Council, told me. A Times story described her role, along with that of Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, as decisive. Power, in her memoir, calls the story ‘bizarre.’ Yet she concedes that she did recommend the course of action that Obama chose, while saying little about the catastrophic consequences that followed, apart from noting a ‘severe downturn in security.’ She also refrains from addressing several questions that linger over the intervention, the kind that preoccupied her in her first book. The most basic among them is whether, given the way the intervention turned out, war was necessary.” [The New Yorker, 9/9/19]
- Power “Essentially Absolves” Herself From The Intervention, Which Obama Has Characterized As The Worst Decision Of His Presidency. “Power essentially absolves herself and the Administration of what happened after the bombs: “We could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own.” In a certain light, this sounds like an argument for not intervening at all. Obama has referred to America’s involvement in Libya as the worst decision of his Presidency.” [The New Yorker, 9/9/19]
Power’s Track Record As U.N. Ambassador Is Checkered
Power Testified That “Common Security And Common Humanity” Would Be A Driving Force Of Her Leadership Style While Serving As Ambassador To The United Nations. “As the most powerful and inspiring country on this earth, we have a critical role to play in insisting that the institution meet the necessities of our time. It can do so only with American leadership. It would be an incomparable privilege to earn the support of the senate and to play a role in this essential effort, one on which our common security and common humanity depends. Thank you.” [CNN Transcripts, 6/5/13]
Power Cited The International Community’s Approach To The 2014 Ebola Outbreak As A Positive Example Of Humanitarian Intervention. “But the response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic proved that the same scramble-the-jets approach America used for warfare could be–and should be–deployed for humanitarian purposes. “So few threats stay confined within any one country,” she says, that it’s simply pragmatic to work with other countries to nip crises in the bud, even if it doesn’t initially seem to be in America’s national interest.” [TIME, 9/5/19]
Power Admitted That Under Her Watch, The American Stance In Yemen Made U.S. “Complicit In Systemic War Crimes.” “Power admits when pushed that her favorite job was at the U.N. Her successes there were not, on the surface, enormous. She did not broker peace in Syria, and she acknowledges that the Obama Administration backed the wrong horse in Yemen, which became even more of a human-rights travesty after President Trump took office and doubled down on that bet. “We are complicit in systematic war crimes,” she says of the situation there.” [TIME, 9/5/19]