Samantha Power: Human Rights Activist

The top national security people who work in the White House are usually meritocratic appointments, the selection made from people who had been working previously in ever more important positions in either Republican or Democratic Administrations, and so you could count on how they would conduct themselves in office because they were already known quantities. That tradition goes back a long time, John Foster Dulles was the heir apparent for Secretary of State if Thomas Dewey had beaten Harry Truman and he got the office when Dwight Eisenhower won the Presidency four years later. Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk were old Washington hands. The same is true closer to the present. Madeleine Albright was a Democratic fund raiser turned professor of international relations and Condoleza Rice was a student at the University of Denver under Albright's father and she had learned a lot about deterrence theory before she signed on to educate George W. Bush about foreign policy. Colin Powell had been a political general before working in the White House. 

The same was true in the Obama White House. Hillary knew a lot about foreign policy because she monitored what her husband had been up to when he was President and so Obama thought of her as a known quantity when he made the political decision to bring her into the tent rather than keep her outside. Her main assistant was Richard Holbrooke, who would have been Secretary of State if Hillary Clinton had beaten Obama for the nomination and been elected in her own right. Obama’s National Security Advisor was, first, Jim Jones, a retired general, then Thomas Donilon, who had served in the State Department under Bill Clinton, and then Susan Rice, also a person from the Clinton years with a distinguished resume and important prior service, in her case as a Rhodes Scholar followed by a position at MacKinsey and then time in the Clinton Administration in a variety of NSC positions. So she had followed the meritocratic track.

Samantha Power had also followed the meritocratic track. She had been a foreign correspondent and then a Harvard Law School student and then a member of its faculty and had a considerable reputation as a Pulitzer Prize winning author of a book about genocide. She had been well connected ever since she held a Carnegie Endowment fellowship after college, conversing with senior people such as Richard Holbrooke and Strobe Talbott. She served in Obama’s Senatorial office for a while, building up a personal friendship with him and then serving as a surrogate and foreign policy advisor to him on the campaign trail. That led him to offer her a position at the National Security Council  when he was elected, just as it led him to offer a job as chief speech writer and eventual national security honcho to Ben Rhodes, with whom he also liked to exchange ideas. 

Power was a good appointment because she was smart and hard working even if her mastery of foreign policy was largely self acquired. Her strengths had always been to be able to master a great deal of material and get it straight, which is also the mark of a good lawyer, even though she only later became one. What also distinguished her was that she was so invested in human rights and the respose of nations to genocide and more ordinary atrocities. Perhaps Obama wanted to have a voice around to present that point of view because he thought of himself as his own Secretary of State, foreign policy having been his interest ever since he was an undergraduate at Columbia, where he majored in international relations and had imbibed what we might call the neo-realpolitik point of view that nations consult their geo-political self interest rather than anything so broad and amorphous as human rights when making decisions about what to do in the world.  So her presence at the National Security Council and her career after that, eventually becoming Ambassador to the United Nations, can help answer the question of whether the realpolitik mind set of most all of the professional national security people can be altered or whether it is not a cultural thing but the simple recognition of the way international affairs operate.

There are precedents for the role Power might have thought she was supposed to play as house critic, a role Obama clearly thought she occupied. Dean Acheson, the long retired Secretary of State, was brought in to the deliberations of Kennedy’s Executive Committee that was convened to deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he dropped out as soon as it became clear that they were not going to adopt his hawkish views. (He was the one who informed De Gaulle about what Kennedy was planning to do, which was to confront Kruschev but try to avoid war.) George Ball, an Undersecretary of State, had played the role of the house critic of the Vietnam War at meetings of the Johnson war cabinet, never sure whether he was there as window dressing to show that all opinions were being heard, or as a respected voice who contributed to the deliberations. Whatever his policy differences with the Johnson team, Ball shared with them a destain for the anti-war demonstrators who were making life difficult for the President, though I can’t see why, since the demonstrators shared the misgivings about the war which the high officials were just getting around to. So what was the role Power would play: a part of the largely realpolitik team or the tribute paid by hypocrisy to morality?

The great wisdom of realpolitik foreign policy thinkers is that all modern wars and overseas enterprises are motivated by necessity rather than morality. It may be true that wars in the past had been motivated by a desire to grab some land or to shore up a dynasty or just because war was the thing that monarchs did, but that was not true in the modern world, which can be said for these purposes to begin with the Eighteenth Century, the British and French in a struggle that goes back, from then, to the Eleventh Century, even while Frederick the Great was just trying, in the old fashioned way, to increase the territory under the control of Prussia. All American wars have been justified under the label of necessary, even the Mexican War, which was fought so as to determine that there would be only one great power on the North American continent, Benedict Arnold having failed to make Canada the fourteenth original state. The Korean War was fought as part of the to the death quarrel of the Cold War and the Iraq War was fought over the issue of weapons of mass destruction that might be unleashed against the homeland at any moment, the real reasons for that war still a mystery. Acts of good will like the Marshall Plan were justified as ways to keep western Europe out of the hands of Moscow. 

Humanitarian missions, on the other hand, are justified as luxuries, as actions that America can undertake even if it doesn’t have to because it is acting as a Good Samaritan, looking out for the stranger so as to enhance its moral sense of itself--that is, so long as there is no great danger involved. So we did not press the Soviet Union too hard about human rights because they were a very powerful adversary, while we could pressure small places like Cuba about human rights because they were weak or, worse, were lined up against us in the Cold War. 

The consequence of this distinction is that wars are undertaken as defensive and as thrust upon us by circumstances and so to be judged by the morality of them available at the time of their inception rather than by the consequences that would flow from intervention, which is what is the case with purely humanitarian ventures. Churchill knew that surrendering to Germany meant the end of english liberty and Chamberlain had presumed that Hitler had indeed been invoking his own necessities when he wanted the reunion of all Germanic people under his banner, a reasonable excuse for belligerent action which was not given the lie until he invaded the decidedly non-Germanic Poland. But to Chamberlain and to many German generals, German expansionism was unnecessary. It risked too much for non-modern reasons and could lead to an unnecessary disaster.

And now we come to Samantha Power, who thinks humanitarian concerns should be weighed in when considering foreign action, the presumption being that we can afford such adventures at little risk and in the contemplation of future benefits to the people on whose behalf we intervene rather than because there is any necessity on our side to do so. What was the impact of that point of view in the way Obama handled the Libyan Crisis early on in his administration, which was before he became comfortable with his new role as President?

What Power tells us, in her recently published memoir “The Education of An Idealist”, about  the Situation Room deliberations about Libya, which she attended as a backbencher, suggests that there was no attention to how foreign policy decisions were tied to deep convictions about the nature of foreign policy. Rather, those party to the discussions raised a number of immediate considerations. What would happen to those living in Benghazi if Khadaffi’s army entered the city? Would a no-fly zone do the job of containing him?  Would Russia veto any Security Council Resolution or simply abstain (which is what it did)?

To the extent that human rights issues play a part, it was that the mind set of the Administration by that time was to support the efforts of those who had brought about the Arab Spring to bring about changes in their national fortunes, the underprivileged and the democratic middle class perhaps about to overcome their authoritarian regimes, though that did not materialize. Power had, in fact, been working on an inter-agency memo on how to respond to the Arab Spring in general, though one might suggest that such was to confuse human rights, which concern actual atrocities,  with the replacement of a less humane form of government with a more humane one, and so taking part in the gradual globalization of Western structures rather than deal with particularly inhumane actions by governments, a concern recognized by Thucydides, who is the founder of the realpolitik school of foreign policy. 

What the meeting on Libya in the Situation Room shows is that that memo on the Arab Spring was just so much paper churning and that the real deliberations consisted of senior people giving their gut reaction about what the United States should or should not do in a particular situation. So when Power was called on to put in her two cents she reaffirmed the Susan Rice position that a serious intervention was called for because a siege of Benghazi might be long and very bloody and that even the Arab League wanted us to do something. So, I would conclude, her argument was that the argument was not whether to go in, but what might be the reasons for not doing so. Her points were specific but her argument was rhetorical, in that it did not proceed from premise to evidence but by shifting from one question to another. And this in a White House which was supposed to cultivate careful and deliberate evaluations of alternative sets of consequences. If this is the way it goes in a careful White House, Obama the college professor who has more insight into the situation than his staff, then one cannot begin to imagine the level of discourse (or lack of it) that goes on in the Situation Room when Trump is in charge.

Power’s account of the meeting also brings to mind how flabby is human rights reasoning when it comes to actual decision-making. Realpolitik argues from necessity and so the facts needed to decide are already there rather than a matter of speculation. Human rights, on the other hand, is about what has already happened, like Belsen or Srebrenica, and so how to punish people for crimes already committed, or else it is speculation about what bad things might happen, and so it is difficult to get information about this even if the mindset in the Situation Room on the day of the Libya deliberations was already human rights motivated. Would Kaddaffi go through with his threats? Would the rebels be massacred or put up a resistance that would further the overthrow of the Libyan dictator? No one knew or could know. Better to consult facts than opinions, which is what Obama did later in his career when he decided not to get involved in Syria because he had too little a handle on how aid to the Syrian Resistance would play out, given that they were mostly Islamists. Stay out even if that means Assad puts down his internal rebellion (with Russian assistance) because otherwise you are entering into another unending war. Realpolitik is prudent, while human rights, however well intentioned, is not.