Samantha Power

Samantha Power (born September 21, 1970, London, England) American journalist, human rights scholar, and government official who served on the National Security Council (2008–13) and as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (2013–17) in the administration of Pres. Barack Obama. She later served as administrator of USAID (2021– ) under Pres. Joe Biden.

Power spent her early childhood in the Dublin suburb of Castleknock and moved to the United States with her family at the age of nine (1979), first to Pittsburgh and then to Atlanta. In her youth Power had envisioned becoming a sports journalist, but her plans changed when she watched unedited televised footage of the Tiananmen Square incident (1989) during an internship at an Atlanta affiliate of CBS Sports. After Power graduated with a B.A. in history from Yale University in 1992, she became a foreign correspondent and covered the Bosnian conflict (1992–95), first for U.S. News & World Report and then for various other media outlets, including The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The New Republic. After she returned to the United States, she obtained a J.D. from Harvard University in 1999. In 1998 she had joined the Harvard Kennedy School as the founder and executive director (1998–2002) of a human rights initiative that would become in 1999 the Carr Center for Human Rights. In 2006 Power became the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy and taught at Harvard until 2009.

Power’s experience in the war-torn former Yugoslavia convinced her of the need for the great powers—the United States in particular—to intervene militarily in other countries to prevent genocides. Her 2002 book on the subject, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and became a reference source for discussions of genocide and humanitarian intervention within both academia and government. Power, who was often characterized as a pragmatic idealist, argued that state power should be used to protect individual human rights in extreme circumstances. In her eyes, the lesson of the Holocaust and other genocides was that military intervention on humanitarian grounds was legitimate and necessary when a state committed atrocities against its own people and thereby lost its right to sovereignty. Power did not support all demands for humanitarian intervention but regarded the “immediate threat of a large-scale loss of life” as a criterion for discriminating between such demands. She also stressed the limits of unilateralism and the importance for the United States of acting in concert with others through international institutions. Such standards, Power argued, had been met in the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) but not in the subsequent Iraq War (2003–11). In 2008 she published Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, a biography of the Brazilian diplomat who, like her, sought to enlist governmental power in advancing human rights.

In 2005 Power met with Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, to discuss A Problem from Hell and her views on American foreign policy. This meeting convinced her to leave Harvard to join Obama’s staff as a foreign-policy adviser (2005–06). She was a senior foreign-policy adviser to Obama and actively campaigned for him during his 2008 bid for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. While working for the Obama campaign she met her future husband, Cass Sunstein, a noted constitutional-law scholar who was also advising Obama; the couple married in 2008. Later that year she abruptly resigned from the Obama campaign after making derogatory remarks about Hillary Clinton, Obama’s main opponent in the primaries, for which she apologized.

After Obama’s election in 2008 Power reentered his inner circle as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council, a body charged with advising the president on national security and foreign policy. In those roles, Power was a key proponent of the U.S. decision to intervene militarily with NATO allies in Libya in 2011 through air strikes and the implementation of a no-fly zone, an intervention designed to protect Libyan civilians from the repression of Muammar al-Qaddafi during that country’s civil war. She also spearheaded the creation of an interagency Atrocities Prevention Board in the White House, a group that developed strategies to prevent human rights atrocities and to pursue their perpetrators. In August 2013 Power replaced Susan Rice as ambassador to the United Nations.

After she took office, Power continued to focus on averting atrocities. In 2014 she notably helped secure approval of a UN resolution to send peacekeepers to the Central African Republic, which was the site of violent sectarian fighting. However, she had difficulty gaining support in the Obama administration for adopting measures, such as sanctions, to end fighting in South Sudan. In addition, although she accused Russian forces and Bashar al-Assad’s regime of committing war crimes during Syria’s civil war, U.S. officials were largely reluctant to intervene in the conflict. As ambassador, Power also focused on protecting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. In 2014 she condemned Ugandan legislation that imposed harsh punishments for those engaging in homosexual activities, and she supported the U.S. sanctions that were subsequently imposed on the country; Uganda’s Constitutional Court later annulled the law.

In the final days of her tenure—which concluded on January 20, 2017, with the end of the Obama presidency—Power gave a notable speech in which she accused Russia of undermining the world order, citing its involvement in Syria as well as its annexation (2014) of Crimea and its alleged interference in the U.S. presidential election.

In 2017 Power returned to Harvard, teaching at both its law school and the Harvard Kennedy School. Her memoir, The Education of an Idealist, was published in 2019. In January 2021 President-elect Joe Biden nominated her to serve as administrator of USAID, an international-development agency. She was confirmed by the Senate in April and took office the following month. Her priorities included providing support to countries struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic.