It must have seemed like a problem from hell: When Samantha Power served as Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, she tirelessly highlighted the depredations of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, publicizing his various barbarities—his indiscriminate killing of civilians, his use of chemical weapons, his astonishing cruelty to children. And yet Ambassador Power served a president who steadfastly refused to do anything to counter those outrages, a president who stood idly by as the Syrian tyrant dropped chemical weapons and barrel bombs on innocent civilians. Indeed, Barack Obama would have fit quite well into A Problem From Hell, Power’s terrific 2003 book, which trained a gimlet eye on America’s all-too-common indifference to genocide and mass killing.
Since her retirement from government service, Power has kept up the fight, tweeting prolifically about the carnage in Syria. Indeed, on April 4, 5, and 6 she tweeted repeatedly about the Assad regime’s apparent chemical assault in Idlib—the very attack that spurred Donald Trump to enforce Barack Obama’s red line and hit back at the Syrian dictator with a missile attack on an air base.
And then she went strangely silent.
Indeed, Samantha Power hasn’t tweeted once since the attack, an apparently unprecedented pause in tweeting. I also contacted her at her private email address, asking for comment on President Trump’s decision. Power ignored my request.
It’s certainly understandable that Power would not want to publicly berate her former boss—or indeed, to publicly praise his successor. And it must be odd for her—as it is for all of us—to see the one-time quasi-isolationist Trump morph into a proponent of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine espoused by Power.
Update: Power broke her Twitter silence earlier Thursday to share her excitement about teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and School of Law, and to complain about reports that the U.S. anti-semitism envoy’s office will remain unstaffed. She has yet to tweet about the attack on Syria.
