President Barack Obama talks with, from left, Samantha Power, former Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, and Ambassador Susan Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, in the Oval Office, June 5, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
President Obama is finishing the assembly of his second-term foreign policy team. In February, Chuck Hagel succeeded Leon Panetta as secretary of defense following sometimes contentious Senate confirmation hearings. The same month, after far less controversy, John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. The president has now named Susan Rice his national security adviser to replace the departing Tom Donilon. Obama has also nominated Samantha Power to succeed Rice as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Power requires Senate confirmation; Rice does not.
Both Rice and Power are Obama loyalists who advised him when he ran for president in 2008. (Power resigned from the campaign after calling Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, a “monster.” ) The pair also has extensive experience in foreign policy. Power and Rice are, by any reasonable standard, well-qualified for their new positions. Indeed, the president had hoped to have Rice succeed Clinton as secretary of state but abandoned Rice’s nomination in the face of Republican opposition. As ambassador to the United Nations, Rice had made comments many in the GOP considered deceptive in the wake of the attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi last September.
It is difficult to say what changes, if any, Obama’s recent picks might have on foreign policy. Both Rice and Power are generally considered “liberal interventionists” who are inclined toward the exercise of U.S. military power on humanitarian grounds. Both, for instance, supported our intervention in Libya in 2011. How one views liberal interventionists depends very much on how one views the wisdom of the military actions they have supported. For supporters, liberal interventionists represent American foreign policy at its idealistic best. For opponents, they are “useful idiots” that give political cover to neoconservatives bent on foolhardy wars. Foreign policy “realist” Stephen Walt is harshly critical. Indeed, he mocks liberal interventionists as “liberal imperialists.”
As someone who opposes deepening U.S. military involvement in Syria, the choice of Rice and Power causes a certain amount of unease. To date, President Obama has proven gratifyingly cautious when it comes to Syria. His approach reflects both the complexity of the situation on the ground — an ugly civil war where it is sometimes hard to distinguish between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” — and the disenchantment of the American public with what appears to be our endless military involvement in the Muslim world. Still, the drumbeat for intervention in Syria continues. And the pressure “to do something” may yet overwhelm any dispassionate analysis of the actual U.S. interests involved. Let’s hope not. And let’s hope that Rice and Power, once in their new positions, prove as wary — and wise — as their boss has been, at least so far.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.