Is the United States going to become more interventionist during Obama’s second term? This might seem like a slightly odd question. Obama on foreign policy is known for withdrawing from Iraq (although that was already well underway) and is on the way to withdrawing from Afghanistan. He also was ‘leading from behind’ on Libya, let the French do the work in Mali, and is dragging his feet on Syria. So far he is hardly an interventionist President. Indeed there have been suggestions that Obama is an isolationist president who is moving away from world affairs or at the very least is a ‘buck passer’ who prefers to drop the world’s problems onto someone else’s lap. For a slightly less all powerful United States this seems to be a good strategy; draw down the United States’ global commitments in line with is decline in relative power and hopefully force the rising powers to contribute a bit more to global peace and security. Yet President Obama’s current nominations appear to show that there may be a rethink in order. Susan Rice has been nominated to be Obama’s new national security advisor and Samantha Power to replace Rice as the US ambassador to the UN. This gives two interventionists much more power in the administration than they had previously. Rice was a member of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council at the time of the Genocide in Rwanda. As with other people in power at the time she has been accused of turning a blind eye to the massacre – but like others she is therefore affected by the ‘never again’ mentality that took hold as a result. Rice has since said “There was such a huge disconnect between the logic of each of the decisions we took along the way during the genocide and the moral consequences of the decisions taken collectively… I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.” So the Rwandan Genocide may well have influenced Rice to take the view that some form of intervention to prevent genocide may well be necessary and in the US interest (or at least more so than doing nothing.) Samantha Power is equally known for being an interventionist – the quote from Rice above came from one of her articles – and has written a Pulitzer Prize winning book “A Problem from Hell” on the subject in which she asks why the international community does not act when there is an ongoing genocide, generally seen as a call for ‘liberal interventionism’. She, along with Rice, was in favour of intervention in Libya. It is perhaps not surprising that her nomination has received praise from Senator John McCain who himself is a long term advocate of a more active policy in Syria. The result of the two nominations is two voices to use America’s power abroad. As Andrew Davis says “Especially considering that Rice will serve as the primary conduit through which the president is educated on virtually all national-security threats, her potential bias towards intervention along with Power’s aggressive United Nations diplomacy could combine to make humanitarian interventions more politically tenable, and therefore more frequent”. Even if the new team does not mean a shift towards interventions Rosa Brooks argues this represents a shift in generations in the National Security apparatus from a group shaped by the cold war to one focused on the “challenges posed by climate change and emergent viruses, or the transformation of global discourse by human rights norms, or global poverty and human development”. Such a shift, if it results in policy changes (remember too that both need to get past the Senate first), could be even more important for the world than any new interventionism. Debatabase debate ‘This House believes democracy can be built as a result of interventions’ idebate.org/debatabase/debates/international-affairs/house-believes-democracy-can-be-built-as-result-of-interventions newyorker/online/blogs/closeread/2013/06/what-susan-rice-and-samantha-power-learned.html policymic/articles/46643/susan-rice-and-samantha-power-is-obama-gearing-up-for-more-interventions blog.foreignpolicy/posts/2013/06/05/5_highlights_from_susan_rice_s_diplomatic_career_national_security_advisor foreignpolicy/articles/2013/06/06/transnational_security_advisors_rice_power
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:43:48 +0000
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