Rice and Power: Obama’s new interventionists

last updated 8 January 2015

“Revenge is a dish best served cold. Except when it’s best served hot,” said Jeffrey Goldberg in Bloomberg.com. President Obama named U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice as his national security adviser last week—just a few months after Senate Republicans blamed her for “misleading the public” about the Benghazi attacks and forced her to withdraw from consideration as secretary of state. Rice’s new job requires no Senate confirmation, and brings her into “the innermost ring of power,” with a direct line to Obama on foreign-policy and defense issues. Giving such a critical job to a proven liar like Rice is an act of sheer “defiance,” said David Limbaugh in WashingtonExaminer.com. Worse yet, Obama has appointed as Rice’s replacement at the U.N. the “equally disturbing” Samantha Power—a leftist who has urged America to issue a “mea culpa” for its past crimes abroad. And so Obama’s “apology tour” continues.

On the contrary, said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. Obama has just signaled that he “wants to play offense, not defense.” Both Rice and Power are humanitarian interventionists who will push Obama to adopt a more “pugnacious” stance abroad in defense of human rights. Rice has publicly spoken about how “haunted” she was by America’s inaction over the Rwandan genocide in 1994; Power came to believe in U.S. intervention as a journalist covering the Bosnian war. Together, the pair convinced Obama to commit U.S. aid to Libyan rebels to prevent another genocide. Now the focus will turn to Syria, where at least 80,000 people have died in the civil war. Having spent his first term trying to recast America’s image in the world, Obama could now be “ready to throw a few elbows.”

Not likely, said Max Fisher in WashingtonPost.com. Rice and Power may be interventionists, but they’re also big proponents of acting through international institutions such as the U.N. Security Council and NATO. Neither organization has any appetite for a major military operation in Syria. Even if Rice and Power do push Obama to intervene there unilaterally, he’s already overruled much more senior officials making that same recommendation, including former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and CIA chief David Petraeus. Obama considers Rice and Power personal friends, and trusts them implicitly. But he’s convinced there are no good options in Syria—and they’re not going to change his mind.