[Samantha] Power’s brand of humanitarianism always bore the marks of being confused and cheap. Despite her rigorous inquiry into organized crimes against humanity, and her heartfelt plea for those in positions of “influence” to counter them, Power embodied a striking ambivalence about the stern imperatives of deterrence and the exigencies of power that, if emulated by America’s political leadership, would ensure their repetition. At one point in The Education of an Idealist, Obama muses that Power isn’t “nearly as hawkish” as she is made out to be, though it isn’t clear how he came by that impression. Only an idle or daft reader of Power’s work would have failed to detect that her commitment to the manacles of diplomatic protocol and multilateral cooperation involved her devotion to the humanitarian cause—which is nothing if not a case of emergency and crisis response—in many contradictions.
This bizarre hybrid worldview, in which human rights needed to be the fulcrum of U.S. foreign policy but without the hard power required to defend them against predatory regimes, flinches from the inconvenient truth that, in our unforgiving world, human rights will be upheld by force of arms or they will not be upheld at all. Since this stubborn fact would require an honest humanitarian to advocate either the use of power in making the world a better place or to step down off her pedestal of moral sanctimony and adapt herself to the world as it is, most human-rights activists have simply ignored it.
As the journalist David Rieff showed in At the Point of a Gun, his penetrating 2005 manifesto against the “imperialism of human rights,” Power exemplifies this wishful non-thinking and evasion of responsibility. Rieff condemns Power for promoting a bold campaign on behalf of universal human rights without laying out—for others or possibly even for herself—what that ambitious, if not utopian, project might entail. What on earth did she and others in the human-rights movement, Rieff modestly asked, think that they were doing in calling attention to flagrant violations of human rights in far-off lands? By what mechanism would the villains of their narrative—who sprang from hell to perpetrate rape and torture and murder on a mass scale—be held to account? The unspoken assumption was some combination of the United Nations and Human Rights Watch.
Exit quote: “In the course of a meeting on the mounting humanitarian and strategic crisis in Syria, President Obama, brushing aside Power’s arguments in favor of more assertive action against the Assad regime, grumbled, ‘We’ve all read your book, Samantha.’”