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A Problem from Washington: Samantha Power Enters the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2020

Michael Barnett
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Abstract

In her new memoir, The Education of an Idealist, Samantha Power reflects on her eight years in the Obama administration. Although she claims that the experience did little to change her views, there is a considerable disjuncture between her point of view in her award-winning earlier book “A Problem from Hell,” in which she criticizes U.S. officials for not doing the right thing, and her point of view in The Education of an Idealist, in which she defends indifference of U.S. officials under somewhat similar circumstances during the Obama years. The author of Problem could not have written Education, and the author of Education could not have written Problem. What does this tell us about the possibility for ethics in foreign policy?

Keywords

Samantha Powerhuman rightsgenocideObamaforeign policy bureaucracyrealpolitikethicscompromise
Type
Review Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 241 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

NOTES

1 Power, Samantha, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002)Google Scholar.

2 For examples of this “Power watch” and whether she would live her principles, see the comments in Evan Osnos, “In the Land of the Possible: Samantha Power Has the President's Ear. To What End?,” New Yorker, December 15, 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/land-possible; and Zaid Jilani, “Samantha Power to Receive Prize from Henry Kissinger, Whom She Once Harshly Criticized,” Intercept, May 29, 2016, theintercept.com/2016/05/29/samantha-power-to-receive-prize-from-henry-kissinger-whom-she-once-harshly-criticized/.

3 Hirschman, Albert O., Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

4 Mark Matthews, “State Department Resignations Reflect Dissent on Bosnia U.S. Policy called Weak, ‘Dangerous’,” Baltimore Sun, August 24, 1993. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-08-24-1993236006-story.html.

5 Walzer, Michael, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (Winter 1973), pp. 160–80Google Scholar.

6 Weber, Max, Weber: Political Writings, ed. Lassman, Peter, trans. Speirs, Ronald (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963)Google Scholar; and Herzfeld, Michael, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

7 Cohn, Carol, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12, no. 4 (Summer 1987), pp. 687–718CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Barnett, Michael N., “The UN Security Council, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda,” Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 4 (1997), pp. 551–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 For discussions of theodicy, see Weber, Max, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1948)Google Scholar; Berger, Peter, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 59–80Google Scholar; and Neiman, Susan, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Berger, Peter L., Berger, Brigitte, and Kellner, Hansfried, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Vintage Books, 1974)Google Scholar.

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11 Eric Reeves, “‘The Final Betrayal of Sudan: Obama Administration's Lifting of Economic Sanctions; UN Ambassador Samantha Power Justifying the Move, Claiming a “Sea Change” of Improvement in Humanitarian Access,’” Sudan: Research, Analysis, and Advocacy by Eric Reeves, January 14, 2017, sudanreeves.org/2017/01/14/the-final-betrayal-of-sudan-obama-administrations-lifting-of-economic-sanctions-un-ambassador-samantha-power-justifying-the-move-claiming-a-sea-change-of-improve/; and Somini Sengupta, “In South Sudan, Mass Killings, Rapes and the Limits of U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times, January 18, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/world/africa/south-sudan-united-nations.html.

12 Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 510.

13 Ibid., p. 516.