When Advocate Turns Advisor

Samantha Power (Omnibus Lecture Series)

In telling a Scottish newspaper that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is “a monster,” Samantha Power, who is a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School and a columnist for “Time,” has become a victim of the very politics of personal destruction that Clinton is often accused of practicing and that Sen. Barack Obama has been decrying.

After the Clinton campaign denounced Power, Obama, who has based his campaign on the contention that he can usher in a new era of political hope, harmony and comity, didn’t simply distance himself from her remarks. Within a few hours, he had Power’s resignation in hand. Power, who was considered to be headed for a top government post, not only wounded the Obama campaign, but perhaps also her own career.

But no matter how ill-conceived they may have been, Power’s bellicose words aren’t an aberration. Instead, they highlight the adversarial style of a new generation of Democratic foreign-policy mavens who have more in common with the raucous world of bloggers than the somber, oak-lined environs of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has been notoriously frank with the media, shunning diplomatic circumlocutions in favor of brash assertions.

While top Obama advisor Anthony W. Lake is a descendant of New England aristocracy and prides himself on his self-effacing courtliness, Power is a fierce advocate who relishes confrontation. John Adams may have warned America against seeking out monsters abroad, but Power seems to disagree. She apparently sees monsters everywhere that need to be slain, at home as well as abroad.

Though she is a Harvard professor, Power isn’t even really an academic. She’s an advocate who has taken a starring role in the intellectual wars of the past decade. Not for her slogging away, as did former secretary of state and Clinton chum Madeleine Albright, in the academic trenches writing dense articles about relations between the United States and NATO. Instead, like many in her generation of foreign-policy players, Power, 37, rose to prominence by way of journalism.

Her career testifies to the sway that journalists exercise in foreign policy— in Power’s case, it’s almost as though the English writer and grande dame Rebecca West had signed on to serve as advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. Like West, who traveled widely and wrote a classic work on the Balkans, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” Power garnered attention by covering the Balkans wars in the 1990s, denouncing, not the right, but the liberal Clinton administration for its passivity in both the Balkans and Rwanda. “Slobodan’s Willing Executioners,” was the title of a cover story she wrote for The New Republic. While the right was complaining that Clinton was doing too much abroad, the humanitarian left complained that he wasn’t doing enough.

In short, Power is a humanitarian interventionist. She believed, and continues to believe, that it’s America’s mission to help the afflicted around the globe by emphasizing human rights rather than traditional great power politics and spheres of influence. In her gripping book, “A Problem From Hell,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, Power amplified her critique of U.S. foreign policy all the way back to the Turkish genocide against the Armenians during World War I.

Once again, Power’s approach was simple but powerful—to condemn the West, and the United States in particular, for failing to prevent the murder of helpless innocents. She traced a pattern of indifference in U.S. administrations down to the Balkans, arguing that United States needed to take an interventionist stance, whether it’s in Darfur or the Middle East. As a humanitarian interventionist, then, it’s a second reflex for Power to denounce and decry those who fail to meet her standards.

What Power does admire is crusaders, which is clearly the persona that she identifies Obama with. Her new book about the assassinated U.N. diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello is subtitled the “Fight to Save the World.” Power’s idea of politics is as a battle to the finish for grand ideals. Power wasn’t just writing about what she saw as a great U.N. diplomat, but also revealing how she sees herself—as a crusader for humanity.

Consequently, that could be why she continues to see many Democrats as squishes. Writing in 2006 in The Los Angeles Times (in a piece co-authored with Morton Abramowitz), Power declared that it was time for Democrats to “Get Loud, Get Angry!” According to Abramowitz and Power, “If the Democrats stand any chance of improving U.S. foreign policy in the near term, while also positioning themselves to conduct it in the medium term, it will not be by making nice. It will be by adding another truth to the administration’s absolutist gospels: If you screw up monumentally, you — like those harmed in your wake — will pay a price.”

Now Power has paid the price for getting loud and angry. Very undiplomatic, you might say. But Power may have burnished her own bona fides with the Democratic left by doing what Obama has rejected — come out swinging against Clinton. As Power’s numerous admirers lament her banishment from the Obama camp, she may even come to resemble something she’s only previously written about—a martyr.

Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of “They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons.”