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samantha power
Analyst Calls for Smashing the US Network That Paved Way for Trump’s Iran War
"This stupid war isn’t just an indictment of the Trump administration, it’s an indictment of the entire machinery of DC warmongering."
Mar 11, 2026
While President Donald Trump is the person primarily responsible for launching an unprovoked US war against Iran, one foreign policy expert argued on Wednesday that the president couldn't have done this without help from a large network of war advocates.
Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), noted in a Wednesday social media post that Trump's decision to attack Iran didn't come out of nowhere.
"This stupid war isn’t just an indictment of the Trump administration," he argued, "it’s an indictment of the entire machinery of DC warmongering, think tanks, journalists, lobbyists, Republicans and Democrats, who have spent decades inflating threats. We need to smash that machinery."
Duss didn't name any specific DC foreign policy power players in his post, although less than an hour later he heaped scorn on Samantha Power, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations under former President Barack Obama and as director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under former President Joe Biden.
Duss reposted a video of Power recently being asked why she didn't speak out more against the genocidal assault that Israel waged against Gaza given that she had written an entire book calling out the US for past inaction to stop genocides in foreign lands.
Power responded that she did her very best to get aid to Palestinians while running USAID, but said that ultimately she couldn't "just get up and decide today what US foreign policy is."
Duss, however, argued that this was a cop-out and said that someone of Power's stature could have made a difference by speaking out.
"Sometimes it is better to work inside to make a bad policy better," he wrote. "But Power is different. She had enormous credibility she could’ve used to sound the alarm on the Gaza genocide. She chose status, and ends as a cautionary tale."
"There are hundreds of people who could’ve run USAID just as well as Samantha Power," he added. "There are few who could’ve made as much of an impact by speaking out publicly."
Duss' critique of the US foreign policy establishment was echoed by Ben Rhodes, a former national security official in the Obama administration, who argued on Wednesday that the Iran war is partly the result of "a few dozen well-funded, oft-quoted, DC Blob 'experts' who have maniacally advocated for this outcome for 15 years."
In a Tuesday post, Rhodes noted that he and other foreign policy experts had long foreseen the negative consequences of attacking Iran, such as the energy supply crisis created by Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and that these predictable disasters were ignored by DC war advocates.
"Nearly everyone I know who opposes this war has predicted these exact consequences for over a decade. Trump decided to listen to Bibi and the most insular, hawkish, dead-enders imaginable," he wrote, using Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's nickname.
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Veterans Group Calls for Grand Jury Probe of Blinken for Enabling Israel's Genocide
"Members of the Biden administration unwilling to rein in Israel and furthering its genocide in Gaza need to go to jail," said the human rights attorney representing Veterans for Peace.
Sep 30, 2024
An organization representing anti-war U.S. veterans urged the Justice Department on Monday to immediately impanel a grand jury to investigate—and, if necessary, indict—Secretary of State Antony Blinken for lying to Congress, unlawfully refusing to cut off American military aid to Israel, and "conspiring to cause genocide of Palestinians."
The call from Veterans for Peace (VFP) comes days after the investigative outlet ProPublica published a detailed account of how the U.S. State Department submitted a report to Congress that contradicted the findings of the department's own experts and those of other agencies.
The Blinken-led State Department's May report concluded that Israel was not "prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance," despite internal assessments from State Department experts and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) arguing that Israel had deliberately impeded American aid shipments to Gaza and that weapons transfers to the country should be cut off in line with Section 620I of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act.
In a letter addressed to the Justice Department's Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section and U.S. District Attorney Matthew Graves, VFP specifically cites ProPublica's reporting and states that "Blinken's failure to implement U.S. federal law and halt weapons shipments to Israel touches upon both domestic and international law."
"Secretary Blinken's lack of candor with the Congress to continue the provision of military aid to Israel meant concealing the existence of the USAID and State Department reports showing repeat violations of aid requirements," the new letter reads. "The concealed reports explicitly recommended the immediate cutoff of military aid to Israel. By allegedly lying to Congress, Secretary Blinken caused ongoing genocidal acts and war crimes against the Palestinians by continuing the supply of weapons and munitions to Israel."
"The Israeli military continues detonating massive bombs in southern Beirut—bombs they would not possess but for Antony Blinken's repeated violations of federal laws."
The letter also points to the role of U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew in ensuring the continued flow of American arms to Israel even as human rights organizations accumulated overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces were using the weapons to commit horrific war crimes in Gaza. According to ProPublica, Lew "sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel's war cabinet... should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians" and "recommended continuing to provide military assistance."
"The alleged wrongdoing of Secretary of State Blinken of lying to Congress, supported by what looks like willful provision of inaccurate information from Ambassador Lew, combined to save Israel from interruption of U.S. provision of weapons and munitions," VFP argued in its letter. "Thus Israel was able to continue to perpetrate war crimes and genocidal acts."
The group wrote that Blinken and Lew "appear to have violated the objectives of U.S. foreign policy against fomenting war, against allowing war crimes, and against the commission of human rights violations," which "enabled Israel to breach the Genocide Convention and the orders of the International Court of Justice."
Terry Lodge, VFP's human rights counsel, said in a statement Monday that "the Israeli military continues detonating massive bombs in southern Beirut—bombs they would not possess but for Antony Blinken's repeated violations of federal laws aimed at halting human rights and war crimes violations."
"Members of the Biden administration unwilling to rein in Israel and furthering its genocide in Gaza need to go to jail," Lodge added.
VFP's letter came days after the U.S. and Israel reached a deal for an additional $8.7 billion in American military support, even as the Israeli military continues to obstruct aid deliveries in Gaza, bombard the enclave's starving population, and expand the assault on Lebanon.
In an appearance on MSNBC last week, USAID Administrator Samantha Power brushed off host Andrea Mitchell's question about ProPublica's reporting, downplaying her agency's assessment of Israel's aid obstructions as "a report from months ago."
ProPublica reported last week that USAID sent Blinken "a detailed 17-page memo" that "described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine."
Susan Schnall, VFP's president, said Monday that U.S. military aid to Israel amounts to "a theft from millions of Americans who have none of the health insurance every Israeli enjoys; from millions of Americans living in horrific housing while Israel builds thousands of upscale homes on land stolen from Palestinians; from millions of young Americans can't afford college because America's top priorities are weapons and death, not human needs."
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USAID Chief Admits Famine Is Underway in Gaza as US Keeps Arming Israel
"In northern Gaza, the rate of malnutrition prior to October 7th was almost zero, and it is now one in three—one in three kids," said Samantha Power.
Apr 11, 2024
The head of the U.S. Agency for International Development admitted during congressional testimony on Wednesday that famine is already underway in the Gaza Strip, publicly confirming an assessment that her agency's officials outlined in a cable to the White House last week.
USAID Administrator Samantha Power, a well-known liberal interventionist and the author of a famous book on American leaders' failure to act in the face of genocide, answered in the affirmative after U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) asked whether "famine is already occurring" in Gaza, which is under a suffocating Israeli siege and relentless bombing campaign.
"Yes," said Power. "In northern Gaza, the rate of malnutrition prior to October 7th was almost zero, and it is now one in three—one in three kids."
During her opening statement at Wednesday's House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Power said that "nearly the entire population" of Gaza is "living under the threat of famine."
"USAID teams have been working day and night to address the catastrophic humanitarian crisis," said Power, who earlier this year was confronted by current and former USAID officials over the Biden administration's support for Israel's assault on the Palestinian territory, which the United Nations' highest court has deemed a plausible genocide.
The hearing was interrupted by peace activists with CodePink, who pointed to the number of children Israeli forces have killed in Gaza and condemned the USAID chief for "not using her power and influence to end" the assault.
"Will Samantha Power continue to be a bystander and be complicit in genocide? Or will she, in her own words, be an upstander to stop the genocide?" asked Jennifer Koonings, one of the activists who took part in the protest.
Power's remarks to the House panel came after HuffPost's Akbar Shahid Ahmed reported that USAID officials drafted a cable describing the spread of malnutrition in Gaza as "unprecedented in modern history" and warning that deaths from starvation will likely "accelerate in the weeks ahead"—echoing the conclusions of U.N. experts and human rights organizations.
The cable, Ahmed wrote, "shows the Biden administration is aware of the risk that the death toll there will rise dramatically as it continues to support Israel's operation and resist calls for a permanent end to the war."
Last week, hours after Israeli forces killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in a series of targeted airstrikes, The New York Times reported that the Biden administration is pressing Congress to approve a proposed sale of $18 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Israel despite U.S. laws barring aid deliveries to nations committing war crimes and obstructing the delivery of American humanitarian assistance.
In late March, the Biden administration quietly approved weapons packages that included more than 1,800 2,000-pound bombs, which the Israeli military has repeatedly dropped on densely populated areas of Gaza.
"The idea that we have supplied and are continuing to supply 2,000-pound bombs which could wipe out an entire block and other military aid is unacceptable," U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told journalist Christiane Amanpour in an interview that aired earlier this week.
"There is an imminent risk of famine for the majority, if not all, the 2.2 million population of Gaza. This is not a point in debate."
Fears of mass starvation in the Gaza Strip have mounted in recent days as Israel continues to restrict the flow of necessary aid to Gaza, sparking accusations that the Netanyahu government is using hunger as a weapon of war—a grave violation of international law.
"There is an imminent risk of famine for the majority, if not all, the 2.2 million population of Gaza," David Satterfield, the U.S. special envoy for Gaza humanitarian efforts, said Wednesday during a virtual event hosted by the American Jewish Committee.
"This is not a point in debate," he added. "It is an established fact, which the United States, its experts, the international community, its experts assess and believe is real."
A report released earlier this week by the International Crisis Group found that the Israeli government has been directing limited Gaza aid to "big families who agree to embrace its agenda, while targeting those who refuse."
"It has not coordinated military with humanitarian action, endangering aid workers and recipients, and frequently halting convoys," reads the damning report. "It has attacked civilian police, citing links to Hamas, and compelled their retreat, which leaves supplies vulnerable to plunder, whether by profiteers or the desperately hungry. It has tried to work around the international aid system and its protocols for famine prevention and response, doling out assistance on an ad hoc basis in hopes of building a network to administer Gaza on its behalf after the war."
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What a Leaked US Cable Says About Israel's Looming Assault on Rafah
An invasion would have "catastrophic humanitarian consequences, including mass civilian casualties, extensive population displacement, and the collapse of the existing humanitarian response," the cable warned.
Mar 06, 2024
An Israeli invasion of Rafah would have "catastrophic" consequences for the 1.5 million civilians sheltering in the southern Gazan city, a U.S. diplomatic cable has warned.
The cable, written by members of the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), was sent from Jerusalem to the State Department in Washington, D.C. on Monday and reported by The Intercept on Tuesday.
"A potential escalation of military operations in within Southern Gaza's Rafah Governorate could result in catastrophic humanitarian consequences, including mass civilian casualties, extensive population displacement, and the collapse of the existing humanitarian response, multiple relief actors have warned USAID's Levant Disaster Assistance Response Team," the cable reads.
"A 'military incursion' into a tent city of unarmed civilians is a horrifying, psychopathic action."
It comes amid increased protests against a potential Rafah invasion and international calls for a cease-fire in an attack that the International Court of Justice has deemed a plausible genocide. Israel's assault on Gaza has already killed more than 30,000 people, displaced at least 85% of the population, and induced a famine that is killing children through starvation and dehydration.
The Biden administration faces mounting domestic pressure to push for an end to the onslaught. However, the cable was publicized the same day that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with Israeli War Cabinet Member Benny Gantz and did not categorically reject a Rafah invasion. Instead, Blinken reportedly "underscored the need for a credible and implementable humanitarian plan prior to any major military operation in Rafah, given the risks to civilians."
Yet the stark language of the cable belies the possibility of such a plan.
"At present, there appear to be no viable evacuation options for the 1.5 million in Rafah," the cable said.
The Rafah Governorate, which it said was comparable in size to Syracuse, New York, has seen its population increase by more than sevenfold since Israel began its assault on Gaza following Hamas' deadly incursion into Southern Israel on October 7. The Israeli military ordered civilians to flee southward for safety, and now those who heeded those calls have nowhere else to go.
"A large portion of those residing in Rafah, including elderly populations, exhausted IDPs [internally displaced persons], and those with reduced mobility, would likely remain in the governorate during the potential military operation due to lack of viable alternatives, heightening the risk of mass casualties," the cable said.
It described the situation in Rafah as already dire. Many people entering Rafah from the north had their belongings seized by the Israel Defense Forces and then had to spend months trying to find basic items like blankets. The services that do exist are overwhelmed.
"The impact of hostilities has stretched the capacity of Gaza's health system beyond its limit," the cable said.
In addition, Israel been ramping up a bombing campaign against Rafah, leading to "escalating panic and increased breakdown of social order," the cable said.
Reacting to the cable, journalist Heidi Moore said on social media that its assessment of a potential Rafah invasion as "catastrophic" was "the only conclusion."
"A 'military incursion' into a tent city of unarmed civilians is a horrifying, psychopathic action," Moore added.
It is unclear how much influence the cable will have with the administration. In addition to the State Department, copies of it were also sent to the National Security Council, secretary of defense, and the CIA.
USAID declined The Intercept's request for comment, but pointed to previous remarks of Administrator Samantha Power, who said in late February that the U.S. could not support a Rafah campaign without a "credible plan to protect civilians" and that it had "seen no credible plan."
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Why Does the US Have No ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Gaza?
Not being able to live up to its own principles when a humanitarian crisis is unleashed by an allied country such as Israel is the last nail in the coffin for a thoroughly failed idea.
Jan 24, 2024
At the height of the “unipolar moment” of the 1990s and 2000s, a popular school of thought argued that the U.S. could use its unchecked power to do good on the world stage. When peace proved elusive after the fall of the Soviet Union, the world saw exceptionally deadly warfare and attempted ethnic cleansing erupt in Karabakh, the Congo, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia. If there was one power that could do anything about this, it was the United States.
The primary ideologue of this push for humanitarian interventionism would become Samantha Power. A journalist and author of the influential book A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, Power argued that the U.S. and other liberal nation states should use military force to halt crimes against humanity in other countries. Nation-states have a responsibility to protect their citizens, and if they are found not be doing this, other states may then step in to do so should the situation continue to deteriorate. This principle was called “Responsibility to Protect,” or “R2P,” and it became so influential that it was adopted into the United Nations Charter in 2005.
Both the Romans and Spanish, more than 1,000 years apart, argued that their bloody conquests in Carthage and Central America would help the world by ending the practice of human sacrifice.
Two decades later, the concept has been shown to be both hypocritical and dangerous. As Israel bombs Gaza to dust, world elites have shown no interest in living up to their apparent responsibility to protect civilians. Contrast this with the response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, in which commentators called for direct intervention to save innocent Ukrainians. And actual examples of R2P have led to disaster, as civilians in Libya can attest. Fortunately, there’s a simple answer to this hellish problem: abandoning R2P once and for all.
Who’s Protecting Who?
Power’s line of argument masked the darker history of so-called humanitarian interventions. Both the Romans and Spanish, more than 1,000 years apart, argued that their bloody conquests in Carthage and Central America would help the world by ending the practice of human sacrifice. In the 19th century, the colonial states of western Europe began to see their maritime expansion abroad not simply in terms of wealth and power acquisition but as an inevitable stage of human moral development. France and Britain in particular dove into Africa with the justification of putting an end to tribal wars and extirpating the slave trade. With economic and technological shifts, the same empires who had once expanded with shackles in hand now came, so they said, as liberators. Yet the result of this “liberation” was little more than violence and famine.
Unfortunately, the lessons of this sordid history didn’t stick. Barack Obama would end up recruiting Power for multiple roles in his administration. While Obama ran explicitly against the disastrous foreign policy of George W Bush in 2008, subsequent events related to the “Arab Spring” would see him continue if not expand these same policies, launching an overt regime change war in Libya (and a covert one in Syria) while intensifying U.S. operations in Yemen.
It was in the Libya war that Power would see her dream fulfilled, when R2P was explicitly invoked to protect Libyan civilians in rebel-held areas from retaliation by the government of Muamar Gaddafi. This operation resulted in widespread state failure, a collapse of central authority, a massive refugee crisis, a resurgence of extremism in that country, and, most gallingly of all, the return of slave markets along the North African coast. It turned out that there are worse things out there than oppressive governments.
The current Gaza War is, by all the standards usually cited by humanitarian interventionists, a perfect case for invoking R2P.
R2P’s reputation took a hit and receded from the discourse, at least until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gave it life once more. Some members of the press called for no-fly zones over the country, and politicians in NATO states debated if such ideas were feasible. Ultimately, they decided that it was not, given Russia’s conventional capabilities, particularly in the field of anti-aircraft weaponry. There was also the inconvenient fact of Moscow having nuclear deterrence. Any attempts to create a safe area for Ukrainians using NATO military forces risked a level of escalation deemed unpalatable by most in the alliance. This clearly showed that R2P was only ever really meant to be used by great powers against smaller countries that could not defend themselves. It never had any utility against more robust foes. Interestingly, Moscow had picked up on the trick and justified its invasion of Ukraine using explicitly R2P-flavored rhetoric about protecting lives in the Donbass.
The Gaza Challenge
The current Gaza War is, by all the standards usually cited by humanitarian interventionists, a perfect case for invoking R2P. Rhetoric from some actors inside the Israeli state suggests that some form of population displacement is at least being considered. The incredible population density of the Gaza Strip means civilians bear the brunt of the violence. Lack of access to medicine and food exacerbates all of these problems.
Samantha Power is the current head of USAID in the Biden administration. One cannot help but wonder what she thinks of the war currently unfolding in Gaza while she coordinates food shipments through Egypt’s Sinai that are often held up at border checkpoints. For one so adamant that the U.S. must intervene whenever war disproportionately hits a civilian populace, she has been strangely silent.
Meanwhile, Yemen’s Houthis explicitly cite their own version of R2P to justify their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. This shows the true future of R2P, if it is to have any—one of selective applications by great powers that muddy the waters around their wars in an attempt to gain media approval from within their alliance networks. As the world’s balance of power inevitably moves into its more normal state of multipolarity, governments further undermine claims of ethical conduct in foreign policy, as states now have constant incentive to claim that their foes have a monopoly on human rights abuses. Inevitably, this will lead to all such claims being met with greater and greater skepticism by the global public, regardless of their factuality.
Far from the centers of great power rivalries, the utility of R2P seems to be declining, as crises such as Myanmar and Sudan are assiduously ignored by the countries expected to be intervening, likely out of fear of being sucked into another Syria or Iraq and giving one’s foes more opportunities to indirectly strike at stretched-thin tripwire forces.
It is a trite observation to point out that great powers have different moral standards for their allies and their enemies, but R2P is a foreign policy doctrine entirely based on moralist claims. Not being able to live up to its own principles when a humanitarian crisis is unleashed by an allied country such as Israel is the last nail in the coffin for a thoroughly failed idea. We can only hope that a silver lining of this difficult moment in history is that we never have to hear about the Responsibility to Protect again.
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US Diplomacy and Interventionism in the Age of Endless War
Is the United States on the verge of enshrining humanitarian intervention as a bedrock principle of foreign policy?
Oct 03, 2016
While the mainstream media focuses on losers and winners in the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a largely unreported debate is going on over the future course of U.S. diplomacy. Its outcome will have a profound effect on how Washington projects power--both diplomatic and military--in the coming decade.
The issues at stake are hardly abstract. The United States is currently engaged in active wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. It has deployed troops on the Russian border, played push -and-shove with China in Asia, and greatly extended its military footprint on the African continent. It would not be an exaggeration to say--as former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry has recently done--that the world is a more dangerous place today than it was during darkest times of the Cold War.
Tracking the outlines of this argument is not easy, in part because the participants are not always forthcoming about what they are proposing, in part because the media oversimplifies the issues. In its broadest framework, "realists" represented by former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Harvard's Steven Walt, and University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer have squared off against "humanitarian interventionists" like current UN Ambassador Samantha Power. Given that Power is a key advisor to the Obama administration on foreign policy and is likely to play a similar role if Clinton is elected, her views carry weight.
In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Power asks, "How is a statesman to advance his nation's interests?" She begins by hijacking the realist position that U.S. diplomacy must reflect "national interests," arguing that they are indistinguishable from "moral values." What happens to people in other countries, she argues, is in our "national security."
Power--along with Clinton and former President Bill Clinton--has long been an advocate for "humanitarian intervention," behind which the United States intervened in the Yugoslav civil war. Humanitarian intervention has since been formalized into "responsibility to Protect," or R2P, and was the rationale for overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Hillary Clinton has argued forcibly for applying R2P to Syria by setting up "no-fly zones" to block Syrian and Russian planes from bombing insurgents and the civilians under their control.
But Power is proposing something different than humanitarian intervention. She is suggesting that the United States elevate R2P to the level of national security, which sounds uncomfortably like an argument for U.S. intervention in any place that doesn't emulate the American system.
Facing Off against the Kremlin
Most telling is her choice of examples: Russia, China, and Venezuela, all currently in Washington's crosshairs. Of these, she spends the most time on Moscow and the current crisis in Ukraine, where she accuses the Russians of weakening a "core independent norm" by supporting insurgents in Ukraine's east, "lopping off part of a neighboring country" by seizing Crimea, and suppressing the news of Russian intervention from its own people. Were the Russian media to report on the situation in Ukraine, she writes, "many Russians might well oppose" the conflict.
Power presents no evidence for this statement because none exists. Regardless of what one thinks of Moscow's role in Ukraine, the vast majority of Russians are not only aware of it, but overwhelmingly support President Vladimir Putin on the issue. From the average Russian's point of view, NATO has been steadily marching eastwards since the end of the Yugoslav war. It is Americans who are deployed in the Baltic and Poland, not Russians gathering on the borders of Canada and Mexico. Russians are a tad sensitive about their borders, given the tens of millions they lost in World War II, something of which Power seems oblivious.
What Power seems incapable of doing is seeing how countries like China and Russia view the United States. That point of view is an essential skill in international diplomacy, because it is how one determines whether or not an opponent poses a serious threat to one's national security.
Is Russia--as President Obama recently told the UN--really "attempting to recover lost glory through force," or is Moscow reacting to what it perceives as a threat to its own national security? Russia did not intervene in Ukraine until the United States and its NATO allies supported the coup against the President Viktor Yanukovych government and ditched an agreement that had been hammered out among the European Union, Moscow, and the United States to peacefully resolve the crisis.
Power argues that there was no coup, but U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt were caught on tape talking about how to "mid-wife" the takeover and choose the person they wanted to put in place.
As for "lopping off" Crimea, Power had no problem with the United States and NATO "lopping off" Kosovo from Serbia in the Yugoslav War. In both cases local populations--in Crimea by 96 percent--supported the takeovers.
Understanding how other countries see the world does not mean one need agree with them, but there is nothing in Moscow's actions that suggests that it is trying to re-establish an "empire," as Obama characterized its behavior in his recent speech to the UN. When Hillary Clinton compared Putin to Hitler, she equated Russia with Nazi Germany, which certainly posed an existential threat to our national security. But does anyone think that comparison is valid? In 1939, Germany was the most powerful country in Europe with a massive military. Russia has the 11th largest economy in the world, trailing even France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Brazil. Turkey has a larger army.
Power's view of what is good for the Russian people is a case in point. Although one can hardly admire the oligarchy that dominates Russia--and the last election would seem to indicate considerable voter apathy in the country's urban centers--the "liberals" Power is so enamored with were the people who instituted the economic "shock therapy" in the 1990s that impoverished tens of millions of people and brought about a calamitous drop in life expectancy. That track record is unlikely to get one elected. In any case, Americans are hardly in a position these days to lecture people about the role oligarchic wealth plays in manipulating elections.
The View from China
The Chinese are intolerant of internal dissent, but Washington's argument with Beijing is over sea lanes, not voter rolls.
China is acting the bully in the South China Sea, but it was President Bill Clinton who sparked the current tensions in the region when he deployed two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Taiwan Straits in 1995-96 during a tense standoff between Taipei and the mainland. China did not then--and does not now--have the capacity to invade Taiwan, so Beijing's threats were not real. But the aircraft carriers were very real, and they humiliated--and scared--China in its home waters. That incident directly led to China's current accelerated military spending and its heavy-handed actions in the South China Sea.
Again, there is a long history here. Starting with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1860, followed by the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and Tokyo's invasion of China in World War II, the Chinese have been invaded and humiliated time and again. Beijing believes that the Obama administration designed its "Asia pivot" as to surround China with U.S. allies.
While that might be an over simplification--the Pacific has long been America's largest market-- it is a perfectly rational conclusion to draw from the deployment of U.S. Marines to Australia, the positioning of nuclear-capable forces in Guam and Wake, the siting of anti-ballistic missile systems in South Korea and Japan, and the attempt to tighten military ties with India, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
"If you are a strategic thinker in China, you don't have to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to think that the U.S. is trying to bandwagon Asia against China," says Simon Tay, chair of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs.
Meanwhile in Latin America...
As for Venezuela, the U.S. supported the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez and has led a campaign of hostility against the government ever since. For all its problems, the Chavez government cut poverty rates from 54.5 percent of the population to 32 percent, and extreme poverty from around 20 percent to 8.6 percent. Infant mortality fell from 25 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000, the same as for Black Americans.
And the concern for the democratic rights of Venezuelans apparently doesn't extend to the people of Honduras. When a military coup overthrew a progressive government in 2009, the United States pressed other Latin American countries to recognize the illegal government that took over in its wake. Although opposition forces in Venezuela get tear-gassed and a handful jailed, in Honduras they are murdered by death squads.
Power's view that the United States stands for virtue instead of simply pursuing its own interests is a uniquely American delusion. "This is an image that Americans have of themselves," says Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, "but is not shared, even by their allies."
The "division" between "realists" and R2P is an illusion. Both end up in the same place: confronting our supposed competitors and supporting our allies, regardless of how they treat their people. Although she is quick to call the Russians in Syria "barbarous," she is conspicuously silent on U.S. support for Saudi Arabia's air war in Yemen, which has targeted hospitals, markets, and civilians.
The argument that another country's internal politics is a national security issue for the United States elevates R2P to a new level, sets the bar for military intervention a good deal lower than it is today, and lays the groundwork for an interventionist foreign policy that will make the Obama administration look positively pacifist.
Looking Toward November
It is impossible to separate this debate on foreign policy from the current race for the White House. Clinton has been hawkish on most international issues, and she is not shy about military intervention.
She has also surrounded herself with some of the same people who designed the Iraq war, including founders of the Project for a New American Century. It is rumored that if she wins she will appoint former Defense Department official Michele Flournoy as secretary of defense. Flournoy has called for bombing Assad's forces in Syria.
On the other hand, Trump has been less than coherent. He has made some reasonable statements about cooperating with the Russians and some distinctly scary ones about China. He says he is opposed to military interventions, although he supported the war in Iraq (and now lies about it). He is alarmingly casual about the use of nuclear weapons.
In Foreign Affairs, Stephen Walt, a leading "realist," says that Trump's willingness to consider breaking the nuclear taboo makes him someone who "has no business being commander in chief." Other countries, writes Walt, "are already worried about American power and the ways it gets used. The last thing we need is an American equivalent of the impetuous and bombastic Kaiser Wilhelm II." The Kaiser was a major force behind World War I, a conflict that inflicted 38 million casualties.
Whoever wins in November will face a world in which Washington can't call all the shots. As Middle East expert Patrick Cockburn points out, "The U.S. remains a superpower, but is no longer as powerful as it once was." Although it can overthrow regimes it doesn't like, "it can't replace what has been destroyed."
Power's framework for diplomacy is a formula for a never-ending cycle of war and instability.
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US Pushes Russia Towards War
“The United States has intervened in too many countries without paying a high enough price.”
Jun 24, 2015
This columnist recently said that "Russia Wins" in its handling of America's attempt to eviscerate its influence and its economy. At the time those words were written Secretary of State John Kerry met with Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Russia. The meeting appeared to be an admission that the imperial power grab was not working out as Washington hoped. Among other things, Kerry was concerned that the Ukrainian tail was starting to wag the American dog.
In a public statement he warned Ukrainian president Poroshenko, who threatened to retake Crimea and the Donbass. "We would strongly urge him to think twice not to engage in that kind of activity, that that would put Minsk [accords] in serious jeopardy. And we would be very, very concerned about what the consequences of that kind of action at this time may be." Barack Obama promptly tossed Kerry under the bus upon his return home.
Kerry's subordinate Victoria Nuland and the United Nations ambassador Samantha Power repeated the very words that Kerry warned against and contradicted everything he said. Power went to Kiev to sing the praises of the Ukrainians in person. She didn't have to mention Kerry by name, her presence alone said that he and any talk of diplomacy were on the outs. Of course the meeting between Kerry and Putin had to have been approved by president Obama, but just one month later it appears to have been a figment of the world's imagination.
"Russia has every right to arm its own territory."
In the battle to stay on top of the world and remain in control of it, Washington inevitably lurches back and forth in its policy decision making. Now they and their scribes in corporate media have settled back into comfortable territory, simultaneously vilifying the Russian government and endlessly repeating anti-Russian propaganda.
A recent New York Times editorial with the grandiose title, "The Fantasy Mr. Putin is Selling," claimed that president Putin has a "willingness to brandish nuclear weapons." There was no mention of America's unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002. Not content to tell one lie the Times then criticized Putin for "aggressive behavior, including pouring troops and weapons into Kaliningrad, a Russian city located between NATO members Lithuania and Poland." Of course, Russia has every right to arm its own territory.The Times also neglected to mention that the American military are positioning weapons and holding training exercises in Ukraine, Poland, Romania and the Baltic states that border Russia. It seems that those provocations are not deemed worthy of mention.
The New York Times and its counterparts always play this role. They cozy up to president Obama as they have with all his predecessors and support any and all of their mischief. Far from being a voice of information for the public, they do the bidding of the powerful and are accessories to their crimes.
"Antagonizing Russia is riskier than paying jihadists to take over Libya."
The Obama administration is in the process of killing the Minsk accords which were shepherded by France and Germany. This is the only process which can defang the beast, and that is why it is being sabotaged. The United States has intervened in too many countries without paying a high enough price. It is like a serial criminal who remains at large and thus thinks of himself as invincible. This county is responsible for carnage in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria and that is the list of victims only since 2001.
One has to ask where and when the straw will break the camel's back. American military power has allowed it to run rough shod over humanity, but antagonizing Russia is riskier than paying jihadists to take over Libya.
Not only does the United States have the most and the biggest guns but it has the corporate media at its disposal, parroting every word as if they were gospel truth. Americans who think of themselves as well informed will be in for a shock if Moldova turns out to be the flash point for open warfare that was instigated by their government.
"Russia will never be beholden to America."
Everyone knows that an assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 pushed the world into war. In 2015 the signs are ominous that something terrible may happen because of an incident in Transnistria or Donetsk or some other locale Americans know nothing about.
The process of marginalizing Russia began as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed. While the Warsaw Pact disbanded, NATO grew at Russia's expense. But Russia will never be beholden to America. There is no puppet they can place in the Kremlin. These fantasies have put the world on the brink.
Obama and his friends in NATO may not want to start a war but they may get one all the same. Of course the president is concerned about his legacy. He ought to be. If he continues as he has done since 2009, his legacy may be that he was head inmate in the asylum when the last war began.
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