Originally appeared at The American Conservative.
Samuel Moyn reviews Samantha Power’s memoir to devastating effect. He begins his essay with a withering observation and never lets up:
At her first dinner with future president Barack Obama, a forty-five-minute meet and greet that turned into a four-hour mindmeld, the then senator from Illinois told Samantha Power he admired her first book, “A Problem from Hell”, an already classic study of genocide prevention. But, he added, it “seemed like malpractice to judge one’s prospects by one’s intentions, rather than making a strenuous effort to anticipate and weigh potential consequences.”
Power went on to serve as a National Security Council staffer for multilateral affairs and human rights during Obama’s first term. During his second, she became America’s ambassador to the United Nations. But her recently released memoir, The Education of an Idealist, reveals that she never learned her boss’s first lesson.
Interventionists rarely anticipate and weigh potential consequences, because if they did that it would be much harder for them to get the interventions they want. Advocates for military action routinely minimize the risks and costs of war in order to reduce opposition to it, but “humanitarian” interventionists have another incentive to downplay negative consequences and preferably to ignore consequences in their entirety. If a “humanitarian” intervention creates worse conditions than existed prior to the intervention, it has to be declared a failure on its own terms. That is why “humanitarian” interventionists go to such lengths to turn a blind eye to the destructive effects of their interference. After all, they see themselves as defending the legitimacy of “humanitarian” intervention and preserving the possibility of future interventions. To admit that one of their interventions failed and made things worse, especially when it was one that they sold so aggressively as “good” and successful, would be to bring discredit on the entire project.
Continue reading “The ‘Well-Meaning’ Warmongers”
