Samantha Power had been waiting her entire adult life for this moment. “To the Assad regime, Russia, and Iran, your forces and proxies are carrying out these crimes,” the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations thundered from her seat at the United Nations Security Council briefing as Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, succumbed to a brutal and bloody siege by government forces. “Your barrel bombs and mortars and airstrikes have allowed the militia in Aleppo to encircle tens of thousands of civilians in your ever-tightening noose.” Then Power dropped the hammer: “Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you? Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin, that just creeps you out a little bit? Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify?”
It’s not that Power was wrong. Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been able to continue to carry out its slaughter thanks to Russian airpower (and diplomatic cover) and reinforcements from Iranian terror proxies. But the key part of Power’s speech came a few lines earlier, when she said: “Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later. Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, now, Aleppo.”
The line makes for a fitting epitaph for Power’s own time in President Barack Obama’s Cabinet. The problem is that she spoke these words on December 13, 2016, five weeks before the end of the Obama presidency—and three and a half years into her tenure as America’s UN ambassador. Before she entered Obama’s service in 2009, she had devoted her meteoric career to heaping shame on America’s history of standing aside, hands in pockets, as mass murders occurred. She has famously and publicly called out individual officials as “bystanders to genocide” while lauding those who resigned in protest of the same.
Power, who at 42 became America’s youngest-ever ambassador to the UN, has now become that bystander. It is her particular contribution to genocide scholarship that illuminates the frustration and despair engendered by her toleration of Obama’s dithering. “It is daunting to acknowledge, but this country’s consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective,” she writes in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2003. “The system, as it stands now, is working. No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.”