Samantha Power spent her professional life arguing for a more assertive American response to atrocities
Dey Street Books; 592 pages; $29.99. William Collins; £20.a devastating chemical-weapons attack on the Damascus suburbs killed some 1,400 people. Faced with a clear breach of the red line he drew a year earlier, President Barack Obama had to decide what to do. He blinked. Rather than ordering reprisals against the regime of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, he opted to ask for Congress’s permission first. And Congress, it turned out, was not keen.
The same question returned with a vengeance when, after Yale and an internship at a Washington think-tank, Ms Power became absorbed by the deepening crisis in the Balkans. She chronicled its horrors as a freelance journalist in Bosnia, for this newspaper among others. In 1995, back in America and on her way to Harvard Law School, she cried with relief on hearing thatOne killing spree was over, but not Ms Power’s obsession with the subject. Friends joked that she was “all genocide, all the time”.
Her friendship with Mr Obama survived the embarrassment she caused during his presidential run when, in an unguarded moment, she called his rival, Hillary Clinton, a “monster”. Through the campaign she met her husband, Cass Sunstein, a law professor and author. After Mr Obama’s victory she got the chance to apply her activism in government, first handlingThe second half of Ms Power’s memoir is an insider’s account of foreign-policy-making, and an intensely personal one.
Despite the frustrations, Ms Power can claim that her wins mounted up. Many were low-key, such as a hands-on campaign to free a number of women political prisoners or the successful defence of benefits foremployees in same-sex marriages. A bigger deal—though its impact is questionable—was the agreement she helped negotiate with Churkin to remove Syria’s chemical-weapons stocks. Better, involvement in the Central African Republic “led some to claim that we helped avert a genocide”.
The activist-turned-diplomat regrets that America did not do more on Syria. But she firmly believes in the power of American diplomacy to do good: “On issue after issue, either the United States brought a game plan to the table or else the problem worsened.” Through it all is her abiding sense of wonder: that this girl from Dublin could be sitting behind the “United States” sign at the
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