Stanley Kurtz on Obama, Samantha Power & ‘Responsibility to Protect’

Samantha Power, anti-Israel hawk of the far left; married in 2008 to Cass Sunstein

Kurtz’ insignts in National Review Online

President Reticent

March 22, 2011 10:26 A.M.
By Stanley Kurtz

Obama doesn’t tell you what he’s thinking. He keeps his motives to himself. Cherished long-term ideological goals are advanced as pragmatic fixes to concrete problems in the present. Now we’re seeing the familiar domestic pattern in foreign policy as well.

Few Americans realize that Obama has had a longstanding interest in multilateral efforts to combat war crimes and genocide. Obama would like to see a more constraining international legal regime on war crimes, even at the cost of national sovereignty, not to mention the blood and treasure of the countries doing the enforcing. In general, Obama has said little about his larger foreign policy goals. To the extent that he has done so, Obama seems more the “realist” than an advocate of humanitarian intervention.

Yet for years, Samantha Power, a prominent advocate of humanitarian intervention and a key backer of our action in Libya, has been a powerful member of Obama’s foreign policy team. In 2005, Obama contacted Power after reading her book on genocide. There followed a long conversation, after which Power left Harvard to work for Obama, quic‘kly emerging as his senior foreign policy advisor.

continues

Now, to what degree is responsibility to protect a doctrine and to what degree, a facade?

More on Power may also be gained from Chris Queen in NewsRealBlog. Trevor Loudon also points her out as a supporter of normalized relations with communist Cuba, in New Zeal.