Let Me Be Clear

In Education, Power repeats her major conclusions from her first book and corrects what she thinks are some mischaracterizations of them. She argues that values and rights should play a more central role than they do in American foreign policy because they are critical to the defense and advancement of interests, and that an ethical foreign policy must consider its associated human costs. Something, she argues, must be done when civilians are being slaughtered. Although many readers of Problem thought that this meant she was advocating for the use of military force, she tells us in Education that this was a misinterpretation of her position. She points to a New York Times article that substantiates her objection to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq before the war as proof that she is not a human rights militarist, and claims that she opposes force much more often than she supports it (p. 133). But, she maintains, something must be done, and it is too easy for the foreign policy bureaucracy to assume that if killings cannot be ended tout suite, then the only other option is to become a bystander. This line of thinking, she writes, ignores the large toolbox of U.S. strategies, ranging from diplomatic censure to military force (pp. 132–33).

If readers of Problem did not pick up on the nuances of her position, it is partly because she writes in the tradition of human rights narratives and advocacy. That is, she writes with conviction, passion, a strong moral voice, and often crafts stories so that the reader can share her outrage. Her prose is, at times, preachy, sermonizing, and moralizing. Like many human rights narratives, it operates through the use of binaries: interests vs. values; power vs. ethics; good vs. evil; right vs. wrong; victims vs. perpetrators; and rescuers vs. indifferent bystanders. Human rights narratives traditionally do not tolerate much complexity, and “A Problem from Hell” is written in black and white. Education, in contrast, works in grays. There is a particularly revealing moment in the book when Power writes that policymakers operate under more constraints and uncertainty than she understood before becoming a foreign policy official (p. 551). This complexity means that she is much less sure of what could or should have been done. Outsiders can write with a certainty and confidence that are unavailable to most insiders.

In 2005, Power came to the attention of the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, and, after a memorable dinner, decided to take a leave from Harvard to join his staff as a foreign policy advisor. Although full of admiration for Obama, her experience was unpleasant because she had no formal role, was thrust into small-minded office politics (there is a particularly painful moment when she accidentally discovers an email chain of hurtful comments about her), and encountered jealousy from the staff because of her special relationship with the boss. She returned to Harvard and, shortly thereafter, joined Obama's foreign policy advisory team when he announced his run for president. Her retelling of this period includes the mortally embarrassing moment when, during the campaign, she was recorded calling Hillary Clinton a “monster,” and as part of damage control, she resigned from the campaign, returning only after a decent interval of time had passed.

She recounts that although she felt excited about the prospect of joining the Obama team, she also recognized that it is one thing to be an activist and quite another to be a foreign policy official, and knew the transition would be difficult. The reality ended up being much worse than she had imagined. She had hoped that as Obama's special assistant and the senior director for multilateral affairs and point person for human rights at the National Security Council, she would have a voice to advocate for human rights causes she found important, but, as it turned out, few wanted to hear from her. Because of her reputation as an activist, she was viewed as suspect in a realist-ridden White House. She writes of daily humiliations and frustrations, and of at times being ostracized. And rather than getting support from the president at critical moments, she recounts how on certain occasions Obama poked fun of her human rights commitments in ways that diminished her standing. Because she ran a functional office, she knew that to have any influence she must work through the more powerful and unwelcoming regional offices. She must learn an odd and gendered bureaucratic discourse. With no preestablished bureaucratic allies and few friends, she felt lonely and questioned whether she was making a difference, periodically contemplating returning to Harvard. Yet she persevered, and in Obama's second term she became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Throughout her eight years in the administration, commentators, friends, and critics alike wondered what would happen when Samantha Power, the advocate for human rights, became Samantha Power, the foreign policy official. Would her values remain intact or would they change? Would she compromise to the point that she became indistinguishable from the realists surrounding her? While she was in the administration, her allies and critics pronounced their judgments. Her defenders said that she was making a difference even if it was not always apparent, and that things were better as a result of her presence. Her detractors criticized her for surrendering her values and legitimating policies that several years before she would have condemned. This was not compromise, they argued, but complicity. Some seemed to enjoy the thought that Power was being taken down a notch or two, was learning that doing something is harder than reporting on it, and was exposing her seeming hypocrisy.Footnote ² Power was, in many ways, in a no-win situation: if she stuck to her principles at all costs, she would be marginalized from the policymaking process; if she left, human rights would lose an important advocate.

In Education, Power wastes little time in providing her own answers to these questions. In the opening pages, she addresses the critics that see a radical break between what I refer to as “Power I,” the human rights activist, and “Power II,” the Obama official. As she writes: “My standard answer rejected the implication that my past and present selves were in conflict. ‘The old and new Samantha know each other quite well,’ I would reply. ‘They talk all the time. And they agree . . . .” (p. xi). She proceeds to insist that there was no real “education,” in part because she was never really an idealist. Apparently, the book title is meant to be either sarcastic or ironic.

Power vs. Power

Despite Power's pronouncements, her two books appear to have been written by two different people. Power I, author of “A Problem from Hell,” shines a harsh light on foreign policy officials who fail to do the right thing, while Power II, author of The Education of an Idealist, emphasizes the muddiness and uncertainty of the process and defends herself and her colleagues against human rights activists who think they could have done better. Power I makes it sound like compromise is surrender, while Power II defends pragmatism even when it seems it is human rights that do all the compromising. Power I insists that human rights are part of the national interest and should be integrated into American foreign policy, while Power II accepts that human rights can only be advanced when they stay in their lane. Power I praises foreign policy officials who resign in protest when asked to carry out policies that they feel are indefensible and inhumane, while Power II finds reasons to not resign when carrying out quite similar policies. Power I writes a book that is organized around a human rights narrative, while Power II writes the more traditional diplomatic memoir that is part remorse and part justification. Power I is full of vigor and defiance, while Power II sounds defeated, or, perhaps, older and wiser.

Power I and II are fundamentally different in a more profound sense: Power II could never have written “A Problem from Hell,” and if this later Power had been a character in her own earlier book, she would not have considered herself an “upstander”—her phrase for the person who does the right thing despite the personal costs. What happened? Power titles chapter 38 of The Education of an Idealist, in which she discusses the option of resignation, “Exit, Voice, Loyalty,” after Albert Hirschman's famous exit, voice, and loyalty framework, which refers to the options individuals face when they are no longer getting the benefits they expect from a group.Footnote ³ Translated into the context of foreign policy, the question becomes: What do foreign policy officials do when they are asked to implement policies that violate their beliefs?

Having a voice in such an environment, the first option, proved to be considerably difficult for Power. A foreign policy bureaucracy that is stacked with hardheaded realists has little patience or concern for human rights, which it believes to be in tension with national security. As Power quickly discovered, it takes more than a personal connection to the president to have a voice, and her rivals were actually able to use this connection against her, as demonstrated by their claims that she parlayed her celebrityhood into a job she did not fully earn. She felt pressure to self-censor, lest her view be dismissed out of hand because of her reputation as a human rights zealot. And by her account, when she did voice an opinion, she was often ridiculed. She did not know how to maneuver through the foreign policy bureaucracy and had to be strategic about inserting herself into discussions, noting that she had to stay “low under the radar” (p. 305). She describes her time in the White House as rather lonely, almost as if she had been marooned on a strange island, which in many ways was the case.

Trying to incorporate human rights into Obama's foreign policy was a challenge, with few successes and lots of compromises, in part because Obama, who was sympathetic to human rights, was at his core a practitioner of realpolitik. Power describes Obama as cautious, risk-averse, wanting to get all the answers before taking action, and living by the adage “Don't do stupid things.” This passivism was heightened on issues of human rights, exemplified by his refusal to publicly acknowledge that the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1915 was a genocide. One of Power's chapters in Problem is about this genocide. Although when he was a senator, Obama had lobbied Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to acknowledge this “‘widely documented fact,’” when he became president, Obama changed his tune. He said to Power, “You know what. I'm worried about the Armenians too. But I am worried about the living Armenians. Not the ones we can't bring back. I am living in the present, Samantha, trying to help the Armenians of today” (p. 242). Not only did Obama appear to make denying a genocide seem like the moral high ground, he also managed to suggest that the Armenians, who were asking for justice through the simple act of properly naming what had occurred a century before, did not know what was in their best interest. Power, though, sees Obama's decision for what it is—a desire to maintain harmonious relations with Turkey.

Power was unable to insert human rights into the major foreign policy challenges of the day, so she adopted a strategy of “corrective opportunism,” or, in other words, going where human rights matter but where they do not interfere with national security. This allowed her to do constructive work on a range of issues, including helping deploy U.S. military forces to fight the Ebola virus; fighting for LGBTQ rights around the world; creating the Atrocities Prevention Board to ensure that mass killings were no longer orphaned in the policy process; bringing critical attention to the crisis in the Central African Republic; and advocating successfully for U.S. military assistance to protect the Yazidis in Iraq from near-certain extermination.

Exit was the second option for Power. Although at one point in the book she claims to never have given this serious consideration, she nevertheless references many instances in which she questioned her presence on the team. She could have exited for reasons other than disagreements over policy. These are high-pressure jobs demanding long hours, and burn-out rates are high. She had two small children. If she had said that she was leaving because of family demands, no one would have been surprised. She also notes early in the book how much she admired the four State Department officials who resigned over the Clinton administration's policy on Bosnia, claiming that they could no longer carry out a policy that would not stand up against genocide.Footnote ⁴ When the humanitarian crisis in Syria came along, she found herself in a comparable situation. Demoralized and anguished by the lack of action, she asked several confidantes whether she should resign. They encouraged her to stay, arguing that whereas those Clinton State Department officials were reduced to carrying out policy, she had the ability to influence policy and make her mark elsewhere. She stayed.

The last option was loyalty. Of the three options, I personally have always found the concept of loyalty in government to be the most ambiguous. Does loyalty fully capture those bureaucrats who fail to register their misgivings or exit? Loyalty to whom, to what, and at what cost? How is it produced and maintained? How does the bureaucracy itself change the answers to these questions and the calculations of costs? Power suggests that she stayed because of her loyalty to the cause of human rights and of injecting ethics into U.S. foreign policy, but, perhaps, her loyalty was to Obama. Like many of his staff, she acknowledges his faults and disagreed with him repeatedly, but because of his intellect, integrity, and vision, they believed in him even when they differed with him.

But at what cost? And how might costs be recalculated because of a shift in values? Some in government desire to survive for survival's sake and are willing to do whatever it takes to advance their careers. Others enter wanting to make a difference but quickly become swallowed by the bureaucracy. Those already entrenched in an administration can use the discourse of interests to tame into silence those who might be inclined to speak on behalf of human rights. Naming and shaming can work both ways. Others are simply crushed and demoralized by the process. And many begin to see the process as more important than the outcome. Some will simply mimic the dominant discourse in order to be accepted.

But that is not Power's story. Like many who join the government, she wanted to make a real difference. Those who want to be change makers must accept that they will get “dirty hands.”Footnote ⁵ In other words, they have to compromise, both trivially and substantially. She describes many compromises during her time in government, beginning with the failure to call the Armenian genocide by its name. She notes, however, that she did not lose her “innocence” until her confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when Senator Marco Rubio attempted to trap her into saying something incriminating about the United States and she repeatedly asserted that she is proud of her country, stating that it is the greatest country on earth and a leader in the fight for human rights (p. 340). There are many other compromises she had to make when publicly relating her views on American foreign policy, such as on the crisis in Syria. She recounts an exchange with Senator John McCain, who wondered how she, of all people, could be the face of such an immoral foreign policy. By the end of the book, it is difficult to tell whether this is the same Samantha Power who entered the Obama administration.

Where Have All the Idealists Gone?

Over time, individuals can become socialized into the dominant discourse. This prominent line of thought is most closely associated with Max Weber's “iron cage” and Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil,” but has been articulated by others as well, including Michael Herzfeld in his concept of the “social production of indifference.”Footnote ⁶ Private judgments become replaced by bureaucratic judgments, and individuals begin to operate with diminished responsibility. In her pathbreaking article “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Carol Cohn describes how she went into the Pentagon as a peace activist and slowly discovered that as she became bilingual and learned the language of security politics, she no longer thought about peace.Footnote ⁷ I myself have elsewhere drawn from these literatures to understand the United Nations Security Council's indifference to the Rwandan genocide.Footnote ⁸

Textual evidence of this process at work is on display in Power's heartbreaking chapter on the death of Toussaint, a young boy who was killed by an armored car in her motorcade in Cameroon. She was not informed of the accident until after the fact and turned around to pay her respects to his family. The event clearly haunts her. She concludes the chapter by saying that it forced her to acknowledge that good intentions can lead to “making situations worse.” She goes on to say, “As the weeks passed, however, I began to think about the impact of our efforts differently. Although my sense of responsibility would never abate, I began to take pride in what our delegation had tried to accomplish. Being a public servant requires making decisions every day—decisions that can have unintended outcomes, even life or death consequences” (p. 488). She then shifts the narrative to the risks faced by those American officials who want to do good. At this moment, the suffering has shifted from the victims to the givers.

Power presents herself as self-aware regarding whether she has compromised to the point that she has sold out or become complicit. Such moments of personal conscience come when she feels as if she is becoming an accessory to evil through sins of omission. But, strikingly, she avoids self-incrimination through various coping mechanisms. Theologians have a word for this: “theodicy.” Theodicy is the existence of a radical, inexplicable disjuncture between the suffering and evil that exists in the world and the faith that the world is moving toward perfection or progress.Footnote ⁹ As Max Weber wrote, “The more the development [of religious ideas] tend toward the conception of a transcendental unitary god who is universal, the more there arises the problem of how the extraordinary power of such a god can be reconciled with the imperfection of the world.”Footnote ¹⁰ It is not just religious communities that exhibit theodicy. So, too, do secularized communities, such as human rights activists. In place of God, there is humanity. Yet, massive suffering is often caused by the very ideologies of progress that were supposed to produce a better world, and those who are supposed to confront evil frequently fail to do so. How do they cope?

Power's memoirs provide several possibilities. There is the reliance on discourses of humanity and progress. She recalls: “While Syria brought only grim news, Obama refused to allow it to dictate his overall outlook on human's capacity for change over time. He professed a distinct optimism about what the future held for the world . . . . His hopeful disposition often became intertwined with a belief that the US government could do best by avoiding foreign policy mistakes of the kind it had so often made. His memorable mantra for how he evaluated options in this arena became ‘don't do stupid shit’” (pp. 508–9). How exactly do foreign policy officials square the circle between not “doing stupid shit” and the conviction that progress depends not just on human capacity but on human action, on doing something? Without providing an answer to this question, Power seems prepared to accept this cover for inaction.

Her account of events also shows a tendency to displace responsibility. Power, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton are widely credited in other accounts with helping to convince Obama to use force to protect civilians in Benghazi. But, in Education, Power insists that her role was minimal. Indeed, she says that she was quite worried that things would go wrong. She also notes that the U.S. failure to do much in the “post-conflict” period is due to Obama sending an “unintentional signal to his senior national security team that he felt the United States had already done its share” (p. 310). She concedes that once it became clear that Libya was falling apart, the United States did have some strategic tools, but they remained untouched inside the toolbox. Although Libya continues to fall apart, her second-to-last sentence on the subject is: “Libyans should determine the country's future” (p. 311). Power might be right that there was little to be done, but this is a shockingly cold-hearted send-off.

Syria provides another example where the foreign policy process leads to the displacement of responsibility, particularly in the case of Obama's failure to carry out his threat to bomb the country if Assad used chemical weapons. Power makes clear that she would have made different choices as she recounts a process that she believes led to the White House's negation of its agency. Obama announced his famous red line on August 20, 2012, promising to use force if Assad used chemical weapons. But then Assad did exactly what Obama warned him not to do. Would there be consequences? Power says that up until that point Obama was opposed to using force, but now, for the first time, he was willing to do so. But he decided that he did not want to proceed without Congress's backing. Power does not convincingly explain why Obama felt the need to get congressional approval, or why, more bizarrely, he thought that Congress would somehow put the national interest above petty partisan politics. In any case, according to Power, he did want its backing, and even more incredibly, the White House was surprised when it failed to get the votes to approve a strike. My own conclusion at the time was that this was a simple matter of buck-passing; Obama was constantly worried that even the modest use of force might lead to a slippery slope, and so he used Congress as a way to escape his red line. In any event, Power consoles herself with the Security Council's decision to dismantle the weapons program. She reflects that on the occasion of the decision, she could not “shake the concern that the Council was implicitly licensing other kinds of attacks on civilians” (p. 389). The Council? This is a moment when Power moves from individual to collective responsibility, thereby denying the agency that she and the Obama administration had at this critical moment. In her last sentence in the chapter, she notes that the “costs . . . would continue to grow” (p. 390). Power, the human rights activist, might have mentioned the millions of displaced, the hundreds of thousands dead, an entire country destroyed. But Power, the ex-government official, condenses these horrors to this: “the costs . . . continue to grow.”

After discussing this event, she does not bring up the topic of Syria again until toward the end of the book. The occasion is a tongue lashing she gave at the UNSC directed toward Russia, Syria, and Iran, the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, from which she proudly quotes the following statement:

I remember feeling grateful, at the time, of this dressing down, pleased that an Obama official was prepared to break with diplomatic decorum and publicly denounce the Russians, Syrians, and Iranians for their crimes. But rereading this statement in the context of a memoir that shows how principles get sacrificed in favor of not doing “dumb shit” one senses a redirection of the harsh light of naming and shaming. One can easily imagine Power I directing this vitriol at the Obama administration for its inactions in Syria. There are certainly important differences between sins of omission and sins of commission, but bystanders are supposed to feel shame, too. At least that is what Power I wrote.

The “effectiveness trap” provides another way to cope with the disappointments and the possibility that one is merely contributing to greater harm. This is a term coined by James Thomson, who resigned from the State Department to protest President Johnson's Vietnam policy. It is the rationalization that by staying in an organization or administration one might effect some good (pp. 514–15). Power reacquaints herself with this argument when discussing with her friends the possibility of resigning. But apparently the trap does not apply to her, or at least not then. She accepts the advice from a close friend that while she cannot make a difference on Syria, she can make a difference in other areas—and that leaving would also not change Syrian policy, but it could mean that other bad things will happen. It would seem that because there is always someplace that a high-ranking official might make a difference, there can never be a reason to resign in principle.

And then there are the omissions. All books have to leave things out, but it seems curious that Power has little to say about two of the big humanitarian emergencies that occurred during her tenure. She has almost nothing to say about South Sudan or the Rohingya. Her reporting helped to bring the genocide in Darfur to the attention of the American public, and by the time she entered the White House, the attention had shifted to South Sudan's independence. In 2011, the country voted for independence and, almost immediately thereafter, devolved into a humanitarian nightmare. Whether Obama might have staved off the devastating consequences of the postindependence fight for power or the humanitarian consequences is a big if, but Power has nothing to say on the matter.Footnote ¹¹

The Rohingya get brief mention. Power recounts how in October 2012 she made a visit to Rangoon, Myanmar, to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition, who had endured years of house arrest and had recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. Power was unable to make progress on her two big agenda items. She had intended to lay the groundwork for Obama's planned visit to Myanmar, but Suu Kyi was steadfastly opposed to the visit, believing that it would legitimize the junta. Power also hoped that Suu Kyi would make a statement defending the rights of the Rohingya, but she refused, leaving Power to wonder how this great human rights activist did not seem to “care that much about humans” (p. 317). She ends this chapter with Obama's eventual visit, which occurred soon after his reelection. On the flight home, Obama asked her what role she would like to play in the second term, thus beginning the backstage politicking that lead to her being appointed U.S. ambassador to the UN. But we never hear about the Rohingya again, even though the violence against them became increasingly severe starting in 2015 and the more intensive phase of ethnic cleansing started before Trump took office.

Grading on a Curve

The best way to compare Power I and Power II is through the respective conclusions of each book. I do so not to hoist Power on her own petard but rather to reenforce my earlier points: Power II could never write “A Problem from Hell” and Power I would have unkind things to say about Power II.

“A Problem from Hell” is adamant that American officials take responsibility for the prevention and ending of genocide. Ignorance is no excuse; they know what is happening. U.S. officials do not act because they do not want to. They weigh the costs and benefits of acting, and often decide that not acting is preferable. They spend more time on managing optics and giving the appearance that they care when they really do not. They have influence even if they do not want to use it. All this indifference and impression management signals to the perpetrators that they have a green light to do what they will. In the end, government officials are free to be indifferent because there are no mechanisms of accountability. None of them fear that “they will pay a price for their sins of omission.”Footnote ¹² Power closes the book by reminding future policymakers that past policymakers were wrong: “How many of us do not believe that the presidents, senators, bureaucrats, journalists, and ordinary citizens who did nothing, choosing to look away rather than to face hard choices and wrenching dilemmas, were wrong? And how can something so clear in retrospect become so muddled at the time by rationalization, institutional constraints, and a lack of imagination? How can it be that those who fight on behalf of these principles are the ones deemed unreasonable?”Footnote ¹³ These are excellent questions.

Here is how Power II concludes The Education of an Idealist: “During my time in government, I came to better appreciate the constraints that stand in the way of making positive change. Even the most conscientious government decision-makers operate with shrouded and shifting fields of vision, decking among wholly imperfect options” (p. 551). Still, people must act, even for modest victories of decency. Power writes that one reason she decided to leave her position at Harvard and go to Washington is because she was “tired of being a professional foreign policy critic, opining and judging without ever knowing whether I would pass the moral and political tests to which I was subjecting others” (p. 201). She never does tell us how she scored herself after eight years. My hunch is that while Power II would say she deserved a “B”, Power I would call this grade inflation.