Day: June 6, 2013
Power, Power and Rice
While some are predicting (or hoping for) big changes in American foreign policy in the liberal interventionist/human rights first direction with the appointments of Susan Rice as national security adviser and Samantha Power as UN ambassador, I doubt it.
Both have already left marks on US foreign policy, Samantha through the Atrocities Prevention Board and Susan in the Libya intervention and many other efforts at the UN, including the successful use of its Human Rights Commission to report on atrocities in Syria. I wouldn’t suggest these are enormous departures from the past, but they certainly reflect the view that saving foreigners from mass atrocity has its place in US p0licy and needs to be given due consideration along with more traditional national interests of the military, political and economic varieties.
The main “to intervene or not” issue today is Syria. Susan and Samantha have both already been involved in internal debates on Syria, where President Obama ignored the advice of Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus and Leon Panetta. They all advised a more interventionist stance. It is the president, not the advisers, who is choosing not to try to stop the Syrian civil war, largely because of issues unrelated to Syria: Russian support on the withdrawal from Afghanistan and in the nuclear negotiations with Iran, not to mention the American public’s war weariness and the parlous budget situation. No doubt someone at the Pentagon is also telling him that allowing extremist Sunnis and Shia to continue killing each other in Syria is in the US interest. Read more
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