Former ambassador Samantha Power credits her young son with teaching her not to be too proud of the speeches that won her prominence as an “impassioned” critic of Russian aggression.
“Did it work, Mommy?” Power’s 7-year-old son, Declan, asked after she described one particularly satisfying United Nations Security Council debate.
Power, 48, recalled the anecdote as an instructive moment in her new book, The Education of an Idealist. A human rights expert who had advised Barack Obama in his earliest days as a United States senator, Power followed Obama into the White House in 2009 before being nominated as U.N. ambassador in his second term — a period that coincided with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. That crisis prompted a series of high-profile clashes with her Russian counterpart, Vitaly Churkin, including one that left her feeling exultant.
“I regaled him with my best lines from earlier in the day,” Power writes of her conversation with her son. “I proudly recounted how Vitaly had seemed to stumble in our back and forth. I told Declan that I had made clear that just because Putin had big weapons did not mean that he could take what belonged to other people.”
Power’s speeches brought her a reputation for toughness at Obama’s expense, as NBC’s Andrea Mitchell credited her with being “more forceful” than the president in responding to Russia’s malign foreign policies. At one point, Power recalls, National Security Council staffers advised her to “dial it back” to avoid embarrassing comparisons to Obama’s impersonal comments, but the president reversed that admonition.
Her son, eating a cheeseburger and fries, was interested in results. “Did Putin leave Crimea?” he asked.
He had not, as a deflated Power had to acknowledge. In fact, Putin surprised even his own U.N. ambassador by expanding the conflict, according to Power. “If we did that, it would only spoil his Crimea victory,” Churkin had told Power prior to Russia’s surreptitious deployment of “little green men,” unmarked special forces, into eastern Ukraine.
Power’s humbling conversation with her son previews the ensuing narrative of her role in the Obama administration’s attempts to constrain Russian aggression. She had limited options, especially since Russia is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council that can veto any resolution. A small success came courtesy of the U.N. General Assembly, which passed a U.S.-orchestrated resolution repudiating the Crimea referendum that Russia had cited as a democratic justification after the fact.
“[A]t least the UN maps would continue to depict Crimea as part of Ukraine,” Power writes. “That was not a lot in light of the gravity of the harm inflicted, but it was not nothing. Putin would not be able to erase his crime, and Ukrainians would know that most of the world supported them.”
At another juncture, she defied orders from Obama to cast the deciding vote against Russia’s bid to take a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council — a defeat she says provided “a tiny measure of accountability” for Putin’s foreign policy.
Power lobbied Obama to nominate her to the post after he was reelected in 2012, but she didn’t go in blind. Richard Holbrooke, a longtime mentor who had also represented the United States at the United Nations, had warned her about “the power and the limitations of the UN,” as she put it.
“As an organization, the UN has at its disposal whatever resources the governments within it choose to provide,” Power writes. “It is the major players — countries like the United States, China, and Russia — that dictate how ‘the UN’ handles crises. … Much of the UN’s dysfunction stemmed from the actions of particular countries, especially powerful ones.”
That dynamic was on maddening display throughout the Syria crisis, as Russia repeatedly vetoed Security Council resolutions targeting Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. And as the relationship between Russia and Western powers soured after the start of the Ukraine crisis, Putin’s team blocked resolutions on unrelated issues that Power had hoped would be uncontroversial.
“Putin saw the world in us-versus-them terms,” Power writes. “If the West was critical of the Bosnian Serbs, then Russia would side with even those responsible for genocide.”
Still, Power touts the value of the United Nations. “Measuring the impact of UN standards and laws on state behavior is difficult, but a world with UN rules or without UN humanitarian agencies would be infinitely crueler,” she writes.
She learned to enjoy more limited victories, such as when her team lobbied for the release of 20 female political prisoners from around the world. The campaign, which highlighted China’s censorship of female activists while Chinese President Xi Jinping was attempting to burnish Beijing’s reputation as a defender of women’s rights, resulted in the release of 14 women.
“We had made only a microscopic dent in a colossal problem,” Power recalls in the book. But as she said to Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire Republican senator who introduced a resolution supporting her campaign, “For each one of these women, and those around them, it is the universe.’’
