Samantha Jane Power (born September 21, 1970) is an Irish-American journalist, diplomat, and government official who is currently serving as the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. She previously served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017.[1] Power is a member of the Democratic Party.
Power began her career as a war correspondent covering the Yugoslav Wars before entering academic administration. In 1998, she became the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she later served as the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy until 2009. She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008.
Power joined the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008. She served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Council from January 2009 to February 2013.[2] In April 2012, Obama chose her to chair a newly formed Atrocities Prevention Board. As United Nations ambassador, Power's office focused on such issues as United Nations reform, women's rights and LGBT rights, religious freedom and religious minorities, refugees, human trafficking, human rights, and democracy, including in the Middle East and North Africa, Sudan, and Myanmar. A longtime advocate of armed intervention by the United States in opposition to atrocities abroad,[3] she is considered to have been a key figure in the Obama administration in persuading the president to intervene militarily in Libya.[4]
Power is a subject of the 2014 documentary Watchers of the Sky, which explains the contribution of several notable people, including Power, to the cause of genocide prevention. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a study of the U.S. foreign policy response to genocide. She has also been awarded the 2015 Barnard Medal of Distinction[5] and the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize.[6] In 2016, she was listed as the 41st-most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.[7]
In January 2021, Joe Biden nominated Power to head the United States Agency for International Development. Her nomination was confirmed by the US Senate on April 28, 2021, by a vote of 68–26.[8]
Power was born in London,[9][10] the daughter of Irish parents Vera Delaney,[9] a nephrologist and field-hockey international player, and Jim Power, a dentist and piano player.[11][12] Raised in Ireland until she was nine, Power lived in the Dublin district of Castleknock and was schooled in Mount Anville Montessori Junior School, Goatstown, Dublin,[13] until her mother emigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1979.[14]
She attended Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was a member of the cross country team and the basketball team. She subsequently received her B.A. degree in History[15] from Yale University, where she was a member of Aurelian Honor Society, and her J.D. degree from Harvard Law School.[16] In 1993, at the age of 23, she became a U.S. citizen.
After graduating from Yale, Power worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a researcher for Carnegie's then-President Morton Abramowitz. From 1993 to 1996, she worked as a war correspondent, covering the Yugoslav Wars for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The New Republic. When she returned to the United States, she attended Harvard Law School, receiving her J.D. in 1999. The following year, her first edited work, Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact (edited with Graham Allison) was published. Her first book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, grew out of a paper she wrote while attending law school; it helped create the doctrine of responsibility to protect.[17] The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize[18] in 2003. Power's book framed genocide as a problem that the United States was involved in as an onlooker rather than a perpetrator or enabler. She has been a longtime advocate of the use of armed force by the United States in response to genocide abroad.[3]
Her other books include Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008), The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrook in the World (co-edited with Derek Chollet, 2011), and The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (2019).[citation needed]
From 1998 to 2002, Power served as the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she later served as the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy.
In 2004, Power was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world that year.[19] In fall 2007, she began writing a regular column for Time.[20]
Power spent 2005–06 working in the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama as a foreign policy fellow, where she was credited with sparking and directing Obama's interest in the Darfur conflict.[21] She served as a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, but resigned during the primaries. In 2009 President Obama appointed her to a position on the National Security Council and in 2013 he appointed her as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a cabinet-rank position.[22]
Power was an early and outspoken supporter of Barack Obama. When she joined the Obama campaign as a foreign policy advisor, Men's Vogue described her as a "Harvard brainiac who can boast both a Pulitzer Prize and a mean jump shot (ask George Clooney). Now the consummate outsider is working on her inside game: D.C. politics."[23]
In August 2007, Power wrote a memo titled "Conventional Washington versus the Change We Need", in which she provided one of the first comprehensive statements of Obama's approach to foreign policy. In the memo she comments: "Barack Obama's judgment is right; the conventional wisdom is wrong. We need a new era of tough, principled and engaged American diplomacy to deal with 21st-century challenges."[24]
In February and March 2008, Power began an international tour to promote her book, Chasing the Flame. Because of her involvement in the Obama campaign, many of the interviews she gave revolved around her and Obama's views on foreign policy, as well as the 2008 campaign.[citation needed]
"Armenians for Obama" uploaded a video of Power to YouTube where she referred to Obama's "unshakeable conscientiousness" regarding genocide in general and the Armenian genocide in particular, as well as saying that he would "call a spade a spade, and speak the truth about it".[25]
Power appeared on BBC's HARDtalk on March 6, stating that Barack Obama's pledge to "have all U.S. combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months"[26] was a "best case scenario" that "he will revisit when he becomes president."[27] Challenged by the host as to whether this contradicted Obama's campaign commitment, she responded, "You can't make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January 2009. ... He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator. He will rely upon a plan—an operational plan—that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn't have daily access now, as a result of not being the president."[28] She concluded by saying that "what we can take seriously is that he will try to get U.S. forces out of Iraq as quickly and responsibly as possible."[27] In February 2009, Obama announced that the U.S. would end combat operations in Iraq by August 31, 2010, and withdraw all U.S. soldiers by the end of 2011. The U.S. formally ended its mission in Iraq on December 15 of that year.[29]
In a March 6, 2008, interview with The Scotsman, she said:
We fucked up in Ohio. In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win. She is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything ... if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.[30][31]
Power apologized for the remarks on the night of the March 6 interview, saying that they "do not reflect my feelings about Sen. Clinton, whose leadership and public service I have long admired", and telling Irish TV reporter Michael Fisher: "Of course I regret them. I can't even believe they came out of my mouth. ... in every public appearance I've ever made talking about Senator Clinton, I have sung her praises as the leader she has been, the intellect. She's also incredibly warm, funny. ... I wish I could go back in time."[32] The next day, in the wake of reaction to the remarks, she resigned from the Obama campaign.[33] Soon afterward, The Weekly Standard said that it "might have been the most ill-starred book tour since the invention of movable type."[34]
Following her resignation, she also appeared on The Colbert Report on March 17, 2008, saying, "can I just clarify and say, I don't think Hillary Clinton is a monster ... we have three amazing candidates left in the race." When Power later joined the State Department transition team, an official close to the transition said Power had apologized and that her "gesture to bury the hatchet" with Clinton had been well received.[35] Power attended Clinton's swearing-in ceremony on February 2 and collaborated with her during her four-year tenure as Secretary of State.
After the 2008 presidential election, Power joined president-elect Obama's State Department transition team.[36]
In January 2009, President Obama appointed Power to the National Security Council, where she served as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights.[37]
In this capacity, Power kept the U.S. out of the Durban Review Conference, the 2009 iteration of the UN World Conference against Racism, which in 2001 was criticized for descending into "a festival of Israel bashing."[38]
Within the Obama administration, Power advocated for military intervention in Libya during the Libyan Civil War on humanitarian grounds.[39] With then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN ambassador Susan Rice, Power lobbied Obama to pursue a UN Security Council resolution authorizing an international coalition force to protect Libyan civilians.[40]
Power left the National Security Council in February 2013.[41]
On June 5, 2013, U.S. president Barack Obama announced her nomination as the new United States Ambassador to the United Nations.[42]
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Power's nomination was backed by Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham,[43][44] and former independent senator Joseph Lieberman.[45] Power also received support from U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross,[39] the national director of the Anti-Defamation League Abraham Foxman,[46] Israel's ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren,[47] lawyer and commentator Alan Dershowitz,[48] the director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti,[49] the director of the Israel Project, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs,[50] the President of the Rabbinical Assembly,[51] the Eastern Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,[52] the National Jewish Democratic Council, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach,[53] publisher Marty Peretz,[54] and military writer Max Boot.[55][56][57]
Her nomination also faced some opposition. Former U.S. ambassador to the UN John R. Bolton and a former acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Frank Gaffney, criticized her for a 2003 article she authored in The New Republic, in which Bolton claims she compared the United States to Nazi Germany.[58][59]
Power was confirmed as UN ambassador by the U.S. Senate on August 1, 2013, by a vote of 87 to 10, and was sworn in a day later by the Vice President.[60][61]
Power's advocacy of