'Powered' Out: Samantha Power Misunderstood Her Role

IN THE closing paragraph of her forward to her memoir, The Education of an Idealist, Samantha Power warns that “Some may interpret this book’s title as suggesting that I began with lofty dreams about how one person could make a difference, only to be ‘educated’ by the brutish forces that I encountered.” However, she writes, “that is not the story that follows.”

Of that, there can be no doubt. From the beginning to the end of this self-aggrandizing book, what is most striking is how little Power’s views have changed from her early days as a freelance journalist in besieged Sarajevo in the early 1990s to her tenure as the United States’ permanent representative to the United Nations during most of President Barack Obama’s second term. She set them out early, when she was barely out of law school, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. It established her reputation in policy circles, transforming her into a favorite of mainstream human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch. It also led to her securing an academic post at Harvard running an institute at the Kennedy School that focused on human rights policy. That post, in turn, would eventually lead to President Obama inviting her to serve in his administration.

In her book, Power argued that throughout the twentieth century, from Ottoman Turkey in 1915 to Rwanda in 1994, the United States had failed, time and again, to prevent genocide. But this was not because of “a lack of knowledge or influence,” Power insisted, “but a lack of will.” Had Washington only chosen to intervene, as it should have both out of moral responsibility and enlightened self-interest, countless lives could have been saved, though unsurprisingly she does not discuss the depredations of the Cultural Revolution in China or the Ukrainian famine since these cases would profoundly complicate the picture of the twentieth century she draws in her book.

Power clearly believes the same can be said of the so-called humanitarian crises—the term itself is so amorphous and sanctimonious as to be a prophylactic against thought—particularly those in Libya and Syria, which occurred during the time she served in the Obama administration.

Power was careful to emphasize that she was not suggesting that military intervention was always the right course, though she complains in The Education of an Idealist that too many readers of A Problem from Hell believed that to be her position, to the point of assuming that she had supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq when in fact she had been one of the few liberal internationalist policy intellectuals to oppose it. But this was where Power’s dissent from the interventionist consensus ends. What she shares with her fellow liberal interventionists, and, doubtless less comfortably, with many if not most neoconservative interventionists, remains far more important: the belief that the betterment of the world is within the grace and favor of the United States—that is to say, a matter of American will or the lack of it. As Michael Massing pointed out in a review of Power’s second book, Chasing the Flame: One Man’s Fight to Save the World, her biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN diplomat who was murdered in Baghdad in 2003, the Power credo is that the United States and only the United States combines the liberal internationalist ideals and the hard and soft power needed to serve as “the guardian of moral behavior in the world.”

WHAT POWER was arguing for in A Problem from Hell was for Washington to make stopping genocide one of the core tenets of its foreign policy. The Education of an Idealist is essentially an account of how she made campaigning to push U.S. foreign policy in that direction the organizing principle of her life, beginning with a trip to Europe after her sophomore year at Yale when she visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and later the Dachau Concentration Camp. It was then, Power recounts, that she first asked herself the question that she would go on to address in A Problem from Hell—namely, why the United States had not done more to try to rescue European Jewry.

The specificity of this question—and its corollaries embedded in counterfactuals, such as what might have happened in World War II had the United States not entered the conflict, soon gave way in Power’s mind to the broader question of how genocide in our own time could be confronted and either prevented or stopped. For Power, the answer was clear: only the United States had both the means and the ideals to take on this gravest of moral responsibilities. In fairness to Power, she came of age and developed her positions during the 1990s—an era that in retrospect appears to have been completely anomalous in its seeming unipolarity. As the sole remaining superpower after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States fought what were presented as being wars of moral necessity, and which were in fact wars of choice in the sense that Washington now had the freedom to act on America’s self-proclaimed moral principles confident going in that it could do so without too much cost to itself. This, at any rate, was the worldview propagated by neocons such as Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, not to mention more than a few liberal hawks. 

That is probably why the most interesting part of The Education of an Idealist is Power’s account of how she made herself heard and maintained, whether as a journalist, human rights campaigner, writer, or academic, or later, as a senior U.S. policymaker, her belief that when all is said and done she has used these various positions to “help a lot of people out there” in the “broken places” of the world. Such angelism is at once breathtaking and standard within the ranks of the liberal policy establishment. For as Jacob Heilbrunn put it in a brilliant 2011 essay on Power, “Transforming the United States into a knight-errant … is at the heart of liberal internationalism.” And Power’s arguments are best viewed as elaborations of the thesis of the United States as the world’s “indispensable nation” that was coined by the Clinton aide and Lincoln biographer Sidney Blumenthal and popularized by Madeleine Albright, then Bill Clinton’s UN ambassador and later his secretary of state. As President Clinton himself put it in a 1996 speech at George Washington University, “There are times when America, and only America, can make the difference between war and peace, between freedom and repression, [and] between hope and fear”—thus amplifying  George W. Bush’s second inaugural address in which he had promised nothing less than an end to evil in the world.

THERE IS no reason to doubt that Power truly believes herself to be a leading “upstander”—to use a term she herself coined for those who “[try] to prevent or otherwise ‘stand up’” when faced with some horror in the world—rather than the ‘bystanders’ whom she excoriated in A Problem from Hell. But even by her own account in The Education of an Idealist, there was a wide gap between what Power hoped to accomplish and what she actually achieved. The horrors about which Power has been most concerned in her life have been Bosnia, Darfur, the depredations of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, the Armenian Genocide and Turkey’s refusal to assume responsibility for it, Libya, Syria, the Ebola crisis in West Africa, LGBTQ rights, and the Russian annexation of Crimea and sponsorship of the separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine. Power is an avid baseball fan, and at the end of her book, she refers to what she calls “the real-world ‘scoreboard’” of what she accomplished. And in doing so, she is forced to admit that while she might catch herself “feeling satisfied by a powerful speech I had made at the un, or a compelling argument I had put before [President Obama],” she was “measuring the wrong thing. ‘It’s not the inputs that matter,’” she writes, “it’s outcomes.”

Well, yes. But what, exactly, were these outcomes? Before entering government, Power worked as a journalist in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War and reported courageously from the city. Later, she became one of the leading voices campaigning for an end to the slaughter in Darfur, her activism rendered more compelling by the investigative work she and her colleague John Prendergast did on the ground in Sudan. It was as a member of the Obama administration that she worked on the remaining issues. And the stark fact is that only in the cases of the Ebola epidemic and the decision to hunt down the Lord’s Resistance Army can the outcomes be regarded as an unmitigated successes. With regard to LGBTQ, the “scoreboard” is mixed. But concerning the rest, an objective observer would surely conclude that Power was either unsuccessful or that the results of the policies she advocated for have been disastrous. Over her objections, President Obama decided not to provoke a crisis with Turkey over the Armenian Genocide. He declined to intervene in Syria, a decision Power writes left her with a lasting “sense of guilt and frustration at being unable to make a convincing case to do more.” And although Power still considers U.S. military intervention to bring down the Gaddafi regime in Libya a success, even she concedes the aftermath has been a disaster. Finally, despite Power’s rhetorical successes at the un—at least as she relates them—the Russian annexation of Crimea is a fait accompli, while the Russian-backed separatist regime in eastern Ukraine shows no signs of faltering.

So if outcomes are indeed what really matter, Power accomplished precious little at the UN. Somewhere she must understand this, but as La Rochefoucauld said, “no one can stare for long at death or the sun,” and to the extent it is there to begin with, Power does not linger on its implications. Indeed, no sooner has she insisted on the centrality of outcomes then she does a complete U-Turn. It turns out that she doesn’t think the “scoreboard” matters all that much after all. For looking back, she writes, “I now see all that the scoreboard could not capture.” And what does this consist of? The answer is individual stories such as “the relief of a father who has been reunited with his son, newly free of a deadly disease,” or “the persistent attempts—after unforgivable acts—to find the humanity in one’s foe.” As Power puts it in the concluding sentence of her memoir, and here she is clearly speaking about herself and about the colleagues she admires to the young readers she hopes to inspire, “People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change the world, but they can change many individual worlds.”

One scarcely knows where to begin. On one level, obviously Power is right: one can successfully aid or even rescue individuals even when the general direction of events becomes more and more horrific. And equally obviously, if one is in a position to help, whether directly or in the citizenly sense of pressuring one’s government to help or contributing materially or morally to groups or institutions that are in a position to do, one should. But to present this as a message of hope, as a moral warrant for her claim that idealism “must endure,” is a less considered reflection than it is an exercise in special pleading. Power sits on the board of the NGO The International Refugee Assistance Project, and an obvious counter-example, with which Power certainly must be familiar, would be the efforts undertaken in 1940 by another NGO created to assist refugees, namely the Emergency Rescue Committee that Varian Fry and his colleagues set up to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied France. It was a noble project, and many Jews were rescued. In Power’s sense, Fry unquestionably changed many individual worlds. But Fry himself would have been the first to insist that the rescue of four thousand souls not only in no way mitigated the extermination of six million. As Pierre Sauvage wrote of Fry, his courageous acts “did nothing to reverse the direction in which the world was going.”

At one point in the book, Power alludes to a “Peanuts” cartoon sent to her by one of her mentors, Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat who played a central role in the Dayton peace accords that ended the Bosnian war. Charlie Brown’s baseball team has just lost the game 184-0, and the “Peanuts” character asks: “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?” Charlie Brown or no Charlie Brown, one doubts that Power would take the view that, when her beloved Boston Red Sox baseball team loses a game, the scoreboard has not captured the essence of the situation, or take much solace in the old saying that “it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” To the contrary, describing the Red Sox victorious playoff run in 2007, she recalls how she and her husband Cass Sunstein texted the team’s manager with advice about how to win. And yet when Power takes stock of her time representing the United States at the un, redefining winning becomes her default position. But whether she likes it or not, in international relations as in baseball, the scoreboard is indeed what matters.

In other contexts, though, Power is the first to insist on just that. She writes of advising her staff to “care less about inputs and more about outcomes,” and that her operations team at the U.S. mission had coffee mugs “made with the acronym gsd’ (for ‘Get Shit Done’) on the side.” It was a beloved phrase of Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security advisor and one of Power’s predecessors as U.S. permanent representative at the UN. In her New Yorker profile, Power said that “As time wears on, I find myself gravitating more and more to the gsd people … Principles and positions,” she added, “only take you so far.” This certainly sounds like the view that in the preface to her memoir Power was at pains to deny she had come to espouse—that she had been “educated” to modify her idealism by “the brutish forces” she encountered. But the greater problem is the entirely plastic and amorphous character of so generic an expression as “Get Shit Done.” For it begs two obvious questions: get what shit done and get whose shit done? Only someone who thinks that the United States by and large is going to be dependably on the side of the angels, siding with the weak and powerless against oppressors large and small, could be drawn to such a simple-minded formula.

To be sure, the danger of any political memoir is a descent into solipsism, both national and personal. It is a trap that Power falls into regularly, though doubtless no more so than many other diplomats’ memoirs. But in Power’s case, this is compounded by a curious, Charlie Brown-like childishness, both about her own actions and those of her country. A particularly telling example of this comes when she describes telling her young son Declan how that day in the UN Security Council she had denounced Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, “doing her small bit to stand up to Putin,” as she describes it, and facing down her Russian opposite number on the UN Security Council, Vitaly Churkin. “I told [Declan],” she writes, “that I had made clear that just because Putin had big weapons did not mean he could take what belonged to other people.” But as Power tells it, her son was “focused on the one result that mattered—not who won the public debate, but whether the aggressor had retreated.” Declan, she writes, “had brought me down to earth.” So far so good. But then Power describes her own response, which is anything but earthbound. “Not yet, Dec,” she tells him, “but a Power never gives up, do we?” To which her son replies: “Never … And tomorrow you can try again.”

There is certainly nothing wrong with Declan’s attraction to such fantasies; he’s a child. But Power’s attraction to them dances at the edge of narcissistic absurdity. Why should anyone outside the Power family circle give a toss about whether or not a Power ever gives up? Perhaps a Churkin never gives up either (and given the failure of U.S. tub-thumping to change realities on the ground either in eastern Ukraine or in Crimea, perhaps the Churkins know how to deploy such doggedness to greater effect). The whole question is supremely irrelevant. The issue is what Power accomplished, and the truthful answer to this is not much. The most she can muster is that she managed to secure a vote in the General Assembly rejecting the legitimacy of a planned Russian referendum in Crimea on Moscow’s takeover of the Ukrainian province. This, she claims, citing an Associated Press story, was “a sweeping rebuke of Moscow.”

But was it really? Power comes close to acknowledging the marginal importance of what her diplomacy engendered when she writes that her success “did not mean I could answer Declan’s question in the affirmative. Putin had not left Crimea and was unlikely to do so. In fact, despite having denied his forces were there, the Russian president soon signed a treaty annexing the province.” But Power insists that “this was not nothing.” Why? Because “un maps would continue to depict Crimea as part of Ukraine,” and that “Putin would not be able to erase his crime” while “Ukrainians would know that most of the world supported them.”

However sincere these claims may be, Power does nothing to help her readers see why they should be taken seriously. Despite her pious assertions to the contrary, and her detailed descriptions of her diplomatic efforts, nothing Power “accomplished” at the UN with regard to relations with Russia or China amounted to much outside the hothouse that is the United Nations. This is because the UN is basically a talking shop, and while Power is an eloquent and at times inspired orator, such rhetoric has been shown time and again to be largely, and in many cases, particularly when the permanent members of the Security Council are involved, wholly irrelevant to what goes on outside UN headquarters on Turtle Bay.

Presumably, Power would reply that it is vital to fight the good fight whatever the outcome. And she would be right in doing so. The question she doesn’t ask—one wonders if it has ever occurred to her—is whether the words “fighting the good fight” and “a representative of the United States of America” belong in the same sentence. Her confidence suggests that the issue is not whether U.S. power is moral but rather whether or not the United States has the moral fiber to use that power. “If the United States steps back from leading the world,” she writes, “[whether] because of exhaustion, disillusionment, or internal division—American ideals, American prosperity, and American security will suffer.” Of course, Power may well be right that U.S. hegemony is good for American prosperity; all empires have prospered from their dominant position. The issue of security is far more debatable as arguably it is America’s presence everywhere in the world that makes U.S. citizens preferred targets. But American ideals? Power simply does not seem to be able to imagine, even if only to refute it, that American hegemony might be a betrayal of American ideals, not a fulfilling of them.

ONE OF the curiosities of A Problem from Hell was that there was virtually no discussion of whether the United States should intervene to prevent or halt genocide where and as it can. Power simply takes it as read that it should. Completely absent from her account, even if only to refute it, is any recognition of the American anti-interventionist tradition that dates back to John Quincy Adams—and that is unpersuaded that the United States has the capacity to do good abroad, whether by military or by other means. After all, when Adams in his famous oration of July 4, 1821, insisted that America had rightly “abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings,” and warned the new republic must not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” he was not denying that those monsters were, well, truly monstrous, just as the génocidaires in Rwanda or the Assad regime in Syria are truly monstrous. Rather, Adams was saying that with the very best of intentions—and it is important to remember that Adams believed wholeheartedly in American exceptionalism, just not in its modern corollary, American interventionism—the United States would “insensibly change from liberty to force” and find itself “dictatress to the world.”

A recent biographer of Adams, James Traub, has argued that such “realism” is “too chastened a doctrine—perhaps too selfish a doctrine—for a nation of idealists.” Like Power, Traub is a liberal interventionist, and it is presumably in Traub’s sense of an idealism that, as he puts it, “summons [Americans] to great global commitments” with which she identifies herself. But there is another name for this and it is imperialism, which is just what Adams meant when he spoke of America as dictatress. To be sure, Power’s vision is more mundane. She speaks of the necessity of American leadership and, doubtless reflecting her love of sports and tropism towards sports metaphors, of the United States as the captain of the global “team.” But delve beneath Power’s folksy rhetoric and you find that Power’s justifications for U.S. hegemony are almost identical to those John Stuart Mill used in his defense of the British empire. For like Mill’s justification of imperial legitimacy, Power’s justification of America’s global hegemony, or “leadership” as she tends to call it, is the project of global improvement. It is at these moments where The Education of an Imperialist would have been a more appropriate title than the one Power elected to use.

It is not clear whether or not Power is it all troubled or has even noticed the similarities between her views and the more moderate and lucid defenses of the Pax Britannica, though as an Irish immigrant one might reasonably have expected her to be particularly sensitive to them. And yet just as Mill believed that nobly-intended interventions, provided they had a good chance of being successful, were entirely justifiable, so Power argues that without the leadership of the United States, though of course preferably in concert with allies, and not necessarily using military force, such improvement is rarely if ever possible. For example, looking back on her time at the un, Power writes that “On issue after issue, either the United States brought a game plan to the table or else the problem worsened.” At times, her rhetoric grows so sanctimonious that it can seem as if her vision of the United States is that of a vastly powerful humanitarian NGO if it had an army, or what Human Rights Watch would be if it were a state.

And in this, she has been largely but not wholly consistent. When President Obama nominated her to be U.S. permanent representative to the un, her Senate critics, notably Florida senator Marco Rubio, unearthed an essay Power had written in The New Republic in 2003 in which she had argued that, “We need a historical reckoning with crime committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States,” and that “instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors.” Then, more radically still, she used an analogy to Nazi Germany, writing that, “When [German Chancellor] Willy Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto, his gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and cathartic for Germany.” And she concluded: “Would such an approach be futile for the United States?”

Power writes of how in advance of her confirmation hearings she was coached on how to avoid entering into a debate with Senator Rubio and her other critics on the substance of what she had written in that essay. Asked by one of her tutors whether or not she wanted to be confirmed, she replied in the affirmative, but not, she added, “at the expense of becoming a Washington asshole.” But anyone reading the transcript of her exchange with Rubio or even her account of it in her memoir will see that this is exactly what happened. America, she repeated over and over again, is “the greatest country on Earth,” “the leader in human rights,” and “the leader in human dignity,” adding that not only would she “not apologize for America,” but “we have nothing to apologize for.” Unlike during the confirmation hearing, or in the New Yorker profile of her that appeared in 2014 after she had assumed her UN post, now that she is out of government, she was under no obligation in her memoir to prevaricate in the name of the greater good of getting confirmed. But instead, she seems to have gone out of her way to reiterate in the book what she told the New Yorker’s reporter, Evan Osnos, in the profile, that everything she said during the hearing felt “deeply true to me.” If that is really the case, and she is not just staying in full “Paris is worth a mass” mode, perhaps in the hope of serving in a future Democratic administration, then she will believe anything.

In fairness, her New Republic piece was an anomaly for her even at the time. Power may have conceded that the United States had committed crimes in the past, but nothing in either her subsequent writing suggests that she understands, that in many parts of the world and on many issues, the United States remains a perpetrator of crimes, or an accessory to them, rather than being their vindicator.

Willy Brandt or no Willy Brandt, Power’s portrait of the United States is as lopsided as those who view Washington as responsible for all the world’s ills. Looking back at her time in government, she offers what she doubtless views as a courageously balanced view of its successes and failures. “Sometimes, we moved the needle positively,” she writes. “Sometimes, we believed we had no effect whatsoever, and only months or years later learned that our actions offered encouragement to those deciding whether their struggles were worth enduring.” And, she concludes, “Sometimes, we saved lives.”

But a genuinely balanced view would have offered some obvious counter-examples. Surely, Power’s steadfast support of Israel at the un, despite one abstention in a Security Council vote condemning the Jewish state, which was daring only in the context of Washington’s history of absolute support for Israel, amounted to moving the needle negatively. And if U.S. involvement in overthrowing the Gaddafi regime in Libya doesn’t call for concluding after the fact how destructive American actions had been, it is difficult to know what would, as Power flirts with admitting in the book before shrinking back from doing so. As for American actions costing lives, although once out of government Power has condemned the Saudi/uae war in Yemen, she ran interference in the Security Council for America’s material support for the Saudi air war as U.S. permanent representative to the UN. It would be one thing had Power adduced these as examples of the “brutish realities” of the world to which she had been forced to bend, but her stated premise in her memoir is that this is not what she experienced.

GIVEN THE fact that Power is a policy insider, writing as she does of the United States would seem to be the height of disingenuousness. The alternative explanation, which is that she has never been willing or able to think rigorously rather than romantically about her adopted country, is hardly an improvement either intellectually or morally. This kind of moral squinting, reminiscent as it is of nothing so much as the attempt to keep one’s eye on a beautiful building that is situated in a largely polluted landscape, tempts one to retort with a line uttered by one of the characters in Henrik Ibsen’s play, The Wild Duck, “Don’t use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.”

And even where Power should find herself on solid ground, as in the critique of the Trump administration that she offers toward the end of her memoir, it turns out to be at least partly an exercise in denial. “We need to show the rest of the world,” she writes, “what it means to respect the rule of law, and put one’s country over one’s particular political preferences.” Is Power serious? Does she truly not recognize the myriad occasions in which the United States has defied international law, from the cia’s covert and ultimately successful attempts to influence the French and Italian elections in the late-1940s, through the Washington-sponsored coups in Latin America, from Guatemala to Chile, to America’s repeated vetoing of UN resolutions condemning Israel’s countless violations of international law?

Echoing Joan Didion’s celebrated line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Power writes in her introduction that, “We make sense of our lives through stories.” It is a revealing moment. For at best, both Didion’s and Power’s formulations occlude as much as they clarify. That is because not all of the stories we tell ourselves are true, and in Power’s case the stories she tells herself and now retails to her readers more often than not are prophylactics against understanding. Repeating that the United States is the world’s greatest nation when it has the lowest social mobility of any developed country, or that it is a leader in human dignity when it has the highest incarceration rates in the world and is the only OECD country besides Japan and South Korea to have the death penalty, not to mention an undemocratic system for electing presidents and politics hopelessly corrupted by money—all phenomena that long predate Donald Trump’s presidency (Power belongs proudly to the “Trump is an aberration” school)—is absurd. And saying that America has nothing to apologize for is to enter the realm of fantasy.

At one point, as she discusses her abiding grief for a small child named Toussaint who was struck and killed by one of the cars in her motorcade during a visit she made to Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria so that she could observe firsthand the fight these countries were waging against the Boko Haram jihadists, Power concedes that “Toussaint’s death forced me to more directly confront a charge often made against the United States—that even when we try to do right, we invariably end up making situations worse.” But as it turns out, Power soon concludes that far from doing more harm than good, there is a way to look at what took place in a more hopeful light. “Although my sense of responsibility for the accident would never abate,” she writes, “I began to take pride in what our delegation had tried to accomplish.” After all, “being a public servant requires making decisions every day—decisions that can have unintended outcomes, even life and death consequences.” And then, astonishingly, Power adds: “After the accident, people in the region had gone out of their way to thank us for being there.” In human terms, it’s a disgraceful evasion: merely writing as she does shows that Power’s sense of responsibility has indeed “abated.” All that’s missing are the balloons and the “proud to be collateral damage” buttons.

THE GRAHAM Greene of The Quiet American—that is, the Greene at his most contemptuous of America’s love affair with its own innocence—could not have come up with such a damning illustration either of American moral preening or of American callowness. And while Power claims that while “the road to hell is paved with good intentions … turning a blind eye to the toughest problems in the world is a guaranteed shortcut to the same destination,” she is forced to concede, though only in a footnote, that “progress against Boko Haram has been uneven since [her visit] in 2016.”

Elsewhere, Power writes of “the need for humility about one’s judgments.” But her account of her efforts while at the UN to establish personal ties with as many of her fellow UN permanent representatives as possible is everything except humble. On the contrary, the portrait she draws of herself bears an alarming resemblance to the caricatural Lady Bountiful in the Restoration drama, The Beaux’ Stratagem, devoting herself to the betterment of her less fortunate neighbors. She recalls: 

“My personal relationships [with them helped] turn ambassadors into advocates for our causes. And it was a two-way street. They introduced me to challenges their countries were facing that I would not have known about otherwise. This information allowed me to reach out to my colleagues at the State Department to see if the United States could be doing more to lend a hand.”

Again we are back in Quiet American country and Greene’s line about Aiden Pyle, the eponymous American of the book’s title, that “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

Like Pyle, Power’s good intentions are not at issue. But like so many well-meaning servants of the Pax Americana before her, Power profoundly misunderstands her own role. Cicero wrote of Cato that he “gives his opinion as if he were in Plato’s Republic, not in Romulus’ cesspool,” and that is Power’s error as well. For when she writes extensively about America’s successes and failures but never of America’s crimes and complicity in crimes, she is engaged in an exercise in idolatry, and idolatry of a particularly exasperating and mediocre kind: self-idolatry. Power is well aware of the dangers of imperial overreach, but she writes as though she remains insensible to the dangers of imperialism itself. This, it seems, is what passes for idealism in the Washington policy establishment these days.

David Rieff is the author of At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice and Money in the Twenty-First Century; and, most recently, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies.

Image: Reuters