In an exit interview hosted by Foreign Policy magazine Thursday, editor-in-chief Ravi Agrawal did not waste time asking USAID Administrator Samantha Power what was really on everyone’s minds. He turned first to her 2002 book, “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”:
“In a Problem from Hell, the book I just mentioned, which made a strong moral case for using American power to prevent human rights crimes around the world, you wrote, and I quote, ‘when innocent life is being taken on such a scale, and the United States has the power to stop the killing at a reasonable risk, it has the duty to act.’ You wrote that in 2002 I believe, and you’re in a position of power now. So I have to ask, why haven’t you done more to stop the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, much of which have been committed with weapons funded by U.S. taxpayers?”
It would be a major surprise if Power hadn’t anticipated that question, having made her entire career out of a massive scold of the Washington foreign policy establishment for not sending the military in to stop the genocide on Rwanda in the mid-1990’s. She developed an entire doctrine — Responsibility to Protect — that emboldened humanitarian interventionists with the imperative to use American power to intercede in crises and shamed those who did not concur. ….more
