Speaker

Samantha Power

Samantha Power

American diplomat, journalist, and academic. She served as US Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017, becoming the longest-serving woman in that role, and as a member of President Obama’s cabinet. She later served as Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under President Biden.

Before entering government, Power covered the Bosnian war as an NPR correspondent in the early 1990s and later as a journalist, an experience that shaped her career-long preoccupation with genocide and the failure of outside powers to prevent it. Her first book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002), won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and reoriented American thinking about the obligation to respond to mass atrocities. She is also the author of The Education of an Idealist (2019), a memoir tracing what she learned across those careers about how to make a lasting difference.

Core positions

Power sits within the liberal internationalist tradition — the view that US power is best exercised through multilateral institutions and in defence of universal human rights norms, rather than through unilateral military action or disengagement. She argues for humanitarian intervention (the use of force by outside actors to halt atrocities inside another state’s borders) as sometimes justified, but with a high bar: the harm must be severe and imminent, international legitimacy matters greatly, and the complexity of the target society must be honestly assessed. She is candid that Syria was the most vexing case of her career — a humanitarian trigger as high as any since Rwanda, paired with factional complexity that made confident prescription impossible.

On China, she treats its incarceration of the Uyghur population as a contemporary atrocity that has been insufficiently criticised, and its systematic effort to rewrite UN human rights norms toward state consent as a structural challenge to the international system. Her response to both is not American retreat but the assertion of democratic values as a comparative advantage.

Her institutional prescription runs consistently toward diplomacy over military force: the imbalance between US diplomatic capacity and military capacity she regards as a core strategic failure, one that its own generals acknowledge.

In the wiki