The Price of Power

As Samantha Power looked out from the stage at the U.S. Embassy in Jordan this past February, many of the hundred or so American diplomats and humanitarian workers before her were visibly upset. The head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, she was in the region to try to convince Israel to stop holding up humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza. A dozen staff had put on keffiyehs in protest of the administration's Israel policy, and as she spoke, some started to cry. They angrily questioned their boss: Was she pushing for a cease-fire in White House meetings? Where did she stand on the U.S. sending bombs to Israel? What about Palestinian children suffering and dying? "As humanitarians, it's really hard to sit back and watch that," one told her.

She said she couldn't speak to those issues at the town hall. "I'm just glad I get to be in the room where the conversations are happening," Power said, a common refrain of hers. As the town hall wore on, staff grew more emotional and she saw that her remarks were falling flat. "I'm not really satisfying anyone with my answers," she said, "including myself nowadays."

Power represents much more than USAID. For the past two decades, she has been singularly associated with the liberal effort to create a foreign policy that values global human rights at least as much as the national interest. Her formative work, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, argued forcefully to put preventing genocide at the center of foreign policy after atrocities in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s. "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," she wrote. The book lionized diplomats who spoke up to urge Washington to intervene and, in some cases, resigned in protest. "My only regret is that I don't work at the State Department so I can quit to protest policy," Power wrote in her diary as a war reporter in Bosnia.

Where she personally stands on the debate over whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is unclear. Power declined multiple interview requests, and a USAID spokesperson said that "the State Department has said that allegations of genocide are unfounded." What is clear is that she views the responsibility of diplomats such as herself differently than she did in her book. When asked the genocide question in Congress this spring, she said, "I'm not going to answer yes-or-no questions like that. I'm going to do my job, which is focusing on getting humanitarian assistance to people who need it."

"Unlike when I was a journalist or a war correspondent back in the day," she explained to CBS News months earlier, "I get to do something about humanitarian crises and really focus on the tangible needs."

Her diplomatic bearing has led many who work for her to question whether Power still holds the same values she did 30 years ago, when she was a crusading journalist. In the year since October 7, Power's employees have held vigils outside of USAID headquarters in Washington for humanitarian workers and Palestinians killed in Gaza. They wrote to top officials in a private letter in March: "Now is not the time for our leadership to remain silent."

There is no question Power has intimate knowledge of the disaster in Gaza. In a memo sent to the State Department, USAID experts recognized Israel's "arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance," as ProPublica reported. Power has seen that obstruction firsthand, and staff says she reads closely all the Gaza reports that pass her desk. Though at least three staffers say Power's inner circle waters down her talking points, obfuscating Israel's role in denying aid to Gaza. USAID denied these allegations and provided two dozen "factual references concerning Israel's conduct" Power has made. In them, she is careful in her criticisms of the U.S. ally whose cooperation her agency relies on, and she repeatedly calls on Israel "to do more" to alleviate the suffering they are creating.

"She understands the scale" of the disaster, says Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian American physician who met privately with Power at her office this past spring, shortly after volunteering in Gaza where he treated the wounded and dying. Like many others I spoke with, he wishes she would take a stronger public stance against Israel's conduct. "The obvious move would be to resign," he said after meeting her.

Those who have known Power the longest recognize her dilemma. "She believes that there are things that you can do in government that you just cannot do if you're not in government," says Ben Rhodes, who worked alongside Power during her first job in the executive branch in the Obama White House. He has criticized Joe Biden for abetting what he says are atrocities in Gaza and questioned the administration's unconditional arms transfers to Israel. But he hasn't asked Power whether the administration's tight embrace of Israel is weighing on her conscience.

"Sometimes when you're friends with someone, you don't put them on the spot. Like, I'm not gonna call her up and be like, 'Sam, well, you gonna resign or not?'" he says. "To me, it feels like she's committed to being there and to doing this job."

After immigrating to America from Ireland at age 9 with her mom and going on to graduate from Yale, Power got her first job in Washington at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1992. It was a heady year in global affairs. The fall of communism in Europe was rewriting the Continent's political map, violently in the Balkans. Her bosses devoted Carnegie's attention to the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, bringing in eyewitnesses and covering the conflict in its quarterly journal, Foreign Policy. "As I dug into the news reporting and listened to what visitors from the region said, the war started to feel closer," she would later recall. Writing white papers in the face of a sequel to the Holocaust wasn't enough for her.

Soon she swiped stationery off the desk of Foreign Policy's editor and impersonated him in a letter to the U.N. in order to secure a pass to report from the Balkans. First stringing for outlets such as U.S. News and World Report and NPR, she would spend the next two years documenting how Serbian forces ethnically cleansed Bosnians. Even so, she found journalism's power to make a difference lacking; at one point, she cold-called Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of State, to advocate for American intervention as the death toll skyrocketed. She would goad Peter Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to neighboring Croatia, to defend what she viewed as indefensible policy. "We spent a lot of time together. She used to harangue me about the failure of the Clinton administration to stop the genocide in Bosnia," he says. Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian politician and academic who also reported from the Balkans, said the lesson was clear for her: "She saw immediately that the key thing was to have access to U.S. power."

For that, she would need a mentor. Power was entranced by Richard Holbrooke, the hard-nosed ambassador who, as Bill Clinton's envoy, was negotiating with Serbian warlords to end the war. The affection was mutual. "He saw a younger version of himself in her, in her drive and her passion and her, well, frankly, brilliance," says Kati Marton, Holbrooke's widow. "Richard was not a modest man."

Power learned from him to work on the issues no one was paying attention to, where one could actually have influence, and to avoid career-killers, like Middle East peacemaking. Marton, herself a former foreign correspondent and the author of ten books, recalled another lesson. "Keeping close to the boss," she told me, as he did with Clinton.

Holbrooke had been troubled by the Vietnam War and believed that, as Marton put it, the U.S. "had to have a values-driven foreign policy." He was hardly consistent. As Jimmy Carter's man in East Asia, he forged compromises with the Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos and had long envied the influence of Henry Kissinger , the exemplar of Realpolitik. "That nexus between power and principle in Holbrooke was influential for Samantha," Igniateff recalls.

In 1995, when Power enrolled in Harvard Law School, Holbrooke was against it. "Why the hell would you do that, when you've been in the Balkans long enough to actually know something about something?" he said . (She dreamed of becoming a prosecutor at the Hague.) As she arrived in Cambridge, Clinton at last ordered the bombing of Serbian military targets. "I remember Samantha roaring into my office saying, 'I have to leave law school, I have to go back to Bosnia,'" says Anne-Marie Slaughter, her professor at the time. "She couldn't imagine not being there." By the end of the year, thanks to the Dayton Accords negotiated by Holbrooke, the war ended.

"I told Holbrooke and Wes Clark that I thought she would be a future secretary of State," Galbraith says, referring to the U.S. general involved in the Dayton negotiations. "And I still think that's how she could end up."

Power stuck around Harvard after law school and co-founded the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where the focus "was how to do humanitarian intervention without making everything worse," says Ignatieff, its first faculty director. She spent much of her time traveling to conflict zones with support from George Soros's Open Society Institute. Drawing on those visits and her experience as a war correspondent, Power secured a book deal.

One issue that didn't seem to come up much in her reporting or at the Carr Center was Israel-Palestine. One of the few times she mentioned Palestinians was in a 2002 interview with a Berkeley public-access television station . During the Second Intifada, Power hypothesized that the U.S. could send a "protection force" in support of Palestinians, though she acknowledged the risks of "alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import," in an apparent reference to American pro-Israel organizations. Nevertheless, Power called for "imposition of a solution" on "unwilling parties." A decade later, these words would come back to haunt her.

Shortly after 9/11, George W. Bush read a summary of an Power wrote about his predecessor's inaction during the Rwandan genocide and wrote in the margin, "NOT ON MY WATCH." Soon enough, the Republican president would cloak his march to war in Iraq in the language of liberal interventionism, justifying the removal of Saddam Hussein not only for his supposed weapons of mass destruction but also for his bloody history against his own people. Power had just published her manifesto for interventionism, A Problem From Hell, turning her into a humanitarian celebrity practically overnight. Time called her the "new conscience of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment" and she played basketball with George Clooney, who shared her passion for stopping the genocide happening in Sudan. In 2003, her book won the Pulitzer Prize. "That definitely shaped a certain generation of people, and I was one of them," says Rhodes.

A Problem From Hell gave Power a platform to take back liberal interventionism from the neocons. She blasted Bush and his illiberal tendencies in the war on terrorism, though she called his note on her genocide a " welcome statement of intent ." In The New Republic, she wrote that there needed to be "a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States." After Iraq, as she wrote in the New York Review of Books, Democrats needed a new foreign policy that would "lay to rest the enduring myth that strong and wrong is preferable to smart and right."

Barack Obama was so impressed by Power that he brought her on to work as a fellow at his Senate office in 2005. She saw Obama as a transformational figure: "Magic he is." She later worked on his presidential campaign and even went out to knock doors in Iowa. "I think she genuinely was like, 'This guy could be a good vehicle for the things that I care about,'" says Rhodes.

Power's star continued to rise, posing for Men's Vogue and writing a second book on a famed U.N. diplomat killed in Iraq. In early 2008, while promoting the book in Europe, she talked in her usual blunt style to a reporter about Obama's Democratic opponent for president, Hillary Clinton. Thinking she was speaking off the record, Power called Clinton a "monster," and the reporter printed it. It caused a firestorm back home, leading Obama's campaign to banish her, at least for a little while. Once he had clinched the nomination, she quietly returned to give foreign-policy advice. "To me, what that indicated is someone who was just so hungry to be in the room," Rhodes recalls. "It was humiliating for her, and I say this with admiration."

Tom Malinowski, a friend of Power's who worked as the Obama administration's top human-rights official after working for Human Rights Watch, believes Power learned a critical lesson when she was thrown out of power. "It's better to be in a position where you can make things better than to be in a position where all you can do is write another book," he says.

That summer, she returned to her native Ireland to marry Cass Sunstein, the lawyer and economist. (They bonded while working on Obama's campaign and share the same birth date.) Luminaries from Harvard Law , including future Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, came for a weekend of soccer, hiking, and boating. Holbooke, who had since become Hillary Clinton's foreign-policy adviser, danced the night away, beaming with pride that he had delivered Power a priceless gift. That weekend, he had put her and Clinton on speakerphone and brokered a peace deal that would enable Power to join the Obama administration.

Brought on as a mid-level White House adviser, Power sat on the back bench during National Security Council meetings. "She never hesitated to throw her hand up and participate in the conversation and often offer a point of view that no one else had represented at the table," says Tommy Vietor, who was a White House spokesperson. In her position, she helped write Obama's foreign-policy remarks, including his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Though she was finally in government, Power didn't tame her big personality. "Who are you dating these days?" she pulled aside Vietor to ask in the hallway. On another occasion, when she went in to bear-hug Holbrooke in the White House, he had to inform her with a laugh, "People don't hug in Washington, Samantha."

Obama never let Holbrooke into his inner circle. Instead, the president relegated him to the thankless job of special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan to try to end America's longest war. "Samantha was caught between those two forces, and she never wavered in her support for Richard," says Marton. "There was rarely a day when they weren't on the phone. I mean, they were constantly talking."

In December 2010, Holbrooke died of a torn aorta. At a memorial service, Obama said that Holbrooke's generation "came to know both the tragic limits and awesome possibilities of American power." Inheriting Bush's quagmires, Obama had a higher bar for using American power, favoring the so-called light footprint of targeted assassinations and drone strikes. The sort of interventionism Power favored was out of fashion, until a brief moment in 2011 when Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi ordered the killing of protesters and threatened to massacre many more. She urged Obama to take military action to stop him. He did so, blessing a NATO operation that expanded into helping rebels overthrow Gaddafi. It turned out to be an absolute fiasco, fueling a civil war.

Chastened by Libya, Obama was in no mood to intervene when a much larger atrocity unfolded in Syria. In 2013, two years into a brutal civil war where the U.S. backed rebel forces, Bashar al-Assad dropped sarin gas on thousands of civilians. Power again tried to convince Obama to respond. He refused. "I don't think there was any clear path for a significant use of military force," her future boss, Biden later said . "I think that would have been a mistake."

Power suffered at times by making too strong of a case. The president asked her: "So, what ideals have we betrayed lately?"

Another time: "We've all read your book, Samantha."

Despite their disagreements, Obama nominated Power as ambassador to the United Nations, a potential springboard to becoming secretary of State. She was determined to get confirmed, subjecting herself to a murder-board in a trailer in the State Department's courtyard where Vietor grilled her. When her comments on Berkeley TV about Palestinians resurfaced, she called her old self "rambling and remarkably incoherent." Big names vouched for her, such as Alan Dershowitz and Israel's U.S. ambassador Michael Oren, who said she "cared deeply" about Israel. "I will stand up for Israel and work tirelessly to defend it," she assured senators.

Continuing a long, bipartisan tradition, Power protected Israel at the U.N., such as working behind the scenes to kill a Security Council resolution criticizing Israel after its military campaign in Gaza killed hundreds of Palestinian children in 2014. "There will never be a sunset on America's commitment to Israel's security. Never," she told AIPAC , the staunchly pro-Israel organization.

"She felt very strongly about protecting Israel at the U.N.," says a former State Department official. And privately, Power struggled with American Jewish Establishment groups criticizing her for not being pro-Israel enough. "How can people say that to me? I understand their plight. I am fighting for them," the former official remembers Power saying.

By this point, Power's grandiose ambitions to reinvent American foreign policy had shrunk. She remade herself into a pragmatist in the mold of her old mentor. In her U.N. office, the only photo not of Power's family — she and Sunstein have two children — was of Holbrooke. Though he died years earlier, she continued to draw on his example and often cited him in speeches around the city. And as he had done, she played host at the U.N. ambassador's palatial Waldorf-Astoria residence. During one Christmas party, Aryeh Neier, co-founder of Human Rights Watch, walked in while she was helping Kissinger put on his coat. "I was pretty startled to see him because she had been highly critical of him in her earlier writing," Neier says of the accused war criminal. She even kibitzed with Kissinger at Yankee Stadium, as an ESPN reporter tagged along. "She's a pragmatic person who enjoys sparring with historic figures," Marton says. "The man had an astonishing record, and a history, and also, he was very funny."

Power's closeness with the former secretary of State gave her a certain armor from being attacked as a bleeding-heart liberal. In 2016, the American Academy in Berlin, which Holbrooke founded, honored Power with the Kissinger Prize . "Our appearance here together doesn't gloss over any differences," she said in her address where she explained how Kissinger's Realpolitik might be updated for the 21st century, though perhaps she had already been doing that in her entire career.

During her political wilderness in the Trump years, Power returned to Harvard to teach and work on her memoir. I spent one academic year alongside her at the Radcliffe Institute, where we were both fellows. Undimmed as a foreign-policy star, students competed to work as her researchers, and they waited in droves outside her standing-room-only panels and lectures. In brief hallway conversations with me, she was friendly and self-deprecating about the challenges of writing about herself, once joking, "I'm not even comfortable using the word I with my therapist."

Power seemed to be searching for new answers to the big questions that had driven her career. "How do we think about American leadership in an era of diminished power?" she asked the journalist George Packer at a 2019 event for his Holbrooke biography at the New York Public Library. "Can we do good? Will we even try to do good?"

In The Education of an Idealist, published later that year, she moved briskly past the trickiest moments of the Obama years, brushing over contradictions between her time in government and her stance in A Problem From Hell. Palestine was mostly absent, except for her playing basketball with Israeli and Palestinian girls on a Middle East visit. "I don't think she ever addressed the Israel-Palestine situation in any significant way," Neier says. "To the degree that she wanted to be a politician, to rise politically, the one third rail that she had to avoid would have been being identified in some way as anti-Israel."

At Harvard, she also co-taught a course with her husband called Making Change When Change Is Hard , itself an indication of how much government had changed her. The course explored the idea "Big problems are rarely resolved with comparably big solutions, but instead are better met with small acts of reform."

Power was passed over by Biden to be secretary of State, a job that went to his loyal aide, Tony Blinken. Instead, she accepted a position as USAID administrator and secured a seat on the National Security Council. Biden called her a "a world-renowned voice of conscience and moral clarity — challenging and rallying the international community to stand up for the dignity and humanity of all people." She had never overseen such a vast bureaucracy, but the staff were excited that she would lend her star power to their quiet, technocratic work.

Founded by JFK alongside the Peace Corps, USAID is considered something like the State Department's little sibling with an annual budget of more than $27 billion. Her first year in office was largely focused on pandemic relief and her second year on sustaining Ukraine. She urged Biden's team to prioritize Sudan, whose civil war is considered to be the world's most dire humanitarian crisis and one that gets little notice, and helped get $1.6 billion of aid committed there. In between, she sought to recruit the private sector for humanitarian work and tackling climate change . "She has a broader vision than the classic development perspective. That's a really good thing," says Slaughter, who runs the New America think tank.

A week after the war between Israel and Hamas began, Power dispatched a task force to work to establish a humanitarian corridor into Gaza. Almost immediately, Israel imposed harsh restrictions and arbitrary inspections of truckloads of relief, hampering aid the U.S. pledged toward Palestinians. In response, the U.S. military built a pier to bring aid into Gaza directly. Mocked by experts as humanitarian theater — established land crossings already existed — the pier channeled 20 million pounds of assistance over 20 days until harsh weather knocked it out.

In February, Power saw the problem firsthand. Wearing a USAID track jacket, she visited towering pallets in a World Food Program warehouse in Jordan where the aid was stuck thanks to Israeli restrictions. She scribbled in a notebook, a habit from her correspondent days, as she listened to U.N. officials. "That assistance has to reach people in need," she said in front of a giant truck. "And right now the bureaucratic bottlenecks and inspection delays have to get resolved. The number of access points into Gaza has to grow significantly." That week, Israel had only permitted an average of 96 truckloads per day to enter Gaza, compared to about 500 per a day before the war.

When the International Criminal Court prosecutor urged judges to issue arrest warrants for Hamas and Israeli leaders, he accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister of withholding humanitarian assistance and starving civilians as a weapon of war. Neier, a Holocaust survivor, has gone further, writing that the blocking of aid is tantamount to genocide. (The International Court of Justice is currently hearing a case brought by South Africa against Israel, accusing it of genocide.) While Israel denies such accusations, USAID experts in the spring had determined that it had been deliberately obstructing U.S. assistance from reaching Gaza. They advised in a memo to Blinken to pause on weapons transfers to Israel. Power was deeply involved in the process, according to one USAID staffer who said she was in the document while it was being written and edited. Biden continued to rush military aid to Israel.

Few in the U.S. government have as clear a view into Gaza as do the staff of USAID, confronted daily and sometimes hourly with reports of schools and hospitals being bombed while they push, often feebly, for more aid to get through. One staffer described members of Power's team as "frustrated and angry" at the circumstances, sometimes coming into the office crying. "The exasperation is very, very clear and evident," the staffer told me. At the town hall, Power assured upset staffers that the administration was doing everything it could to cajole Israel into letting more aid into Gaza. "President Biden believes that maintaining the relationship is the best way that we can leverage more humanitarian access," she said, adding that Israel "must do much more to facilitate this work."

More than a dozen USAID employees told me that the assistance was insufficient, and all of them agreed that it amounted to little without a sustained cease-fire. They are frustrated and expressed a desire to quit. Around this time, the White House dispatched Power to Dearborn, Michigan, to defend Biden against a protest vote organized by Arab and Muslim voters incensed over his support for Israel. In a closed-door meeting with community leaders, one attendee described to me Power's "moral pain" about the situation in Gaza but said that in their view, "she just is powerless."

"Knowing her and following the situation in Gaza, I can only imagine the sleepless nights that she's having," says Marton. "I can't imagine that it's anything but excruciatingly painful for her to be associated with the Netanyahu regime's absolute imperviousness to basic human rights."

When Power met with Netanyahu in March, she pleaded for him and members of his war cabinet to allow more relief into Gaza, to no avail. She visited Israel in July, this time with another ask: Stop killing humanitarian workers. Nearly 300 have died so far in Gaza, according to the United Nations , including seven World Central Kitchen aid workers by an Israeli air strike this past spring. "I just feel lucky that I'm in the government, in the room, engaging the Israelis, working with the team that's pushing for a cease-fire," she told PBS Newshour in late September. "Because fundamentally that's what's needed most of all. Because, clearly, none of us can be satisfied with the way things are in Gaza."

Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama diplomat who runs the Center for American Progress, defends her relative silence. "She's judicious about what she says in public as she ought to be as a senior member of an administration," he says. "I have not seen her move her compass."

It's too easy to comb through her memoir for contradictions, though. She went into the Obama administration because "I knew I was tired of being a professional foreign-policy critic, opining and judging without ever knowing whether I would pass the moral and political tests to which I was subjecting others."

Ignatieff sees her perseverance as a sign of maturity for Power, who turned 54 last month. "She's learning. She's experiencing the dilemmas of power," he says. "So she's bound to think more complex and nuanced and ambiguous thoughts than she would have thought when she was the young person I knew 20 years ago."

The bleak prospects of a cease-fire mean there will almost certainly be a new American president before the war ends. If Kamala Harris succeeds Biden, Power could be a contender to replace Blinken, a Biden loyalist, or return to the U.N. in a high-level capacity. If Trump returns, it's easy to see Power seeking refuge at Harvard. "We hope she will come back," Kathryn Sikkink, a professor of human-rights policy at the Kennedy School, says. If that happens, it's unlikely she would have students lining up to speak to her so much as protesting her over Israel.

Recently, a senior USAID leader filed an internal report following a visit to Israel and the West Bank that again referenced "obstacles to reliable and secure humanitarian access in Gaza" as the war approached its first anniversary. Power, meanwhile, is wearily watching Lebanon, caught in the middle of a war between Israel and Hebzollah. "If this were to spiral further out of control," she told PBS , "it will only be civilians who pay the price."

Marton, who has known Power for almost her entire adult life, is left asking the same question that her own husband confronted. "At what point does the diplomat have to draw the line? I don't know."