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A Problem from Washington: Samantha Power Enters the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2020
Abstract
In her new memoir, The Education of an Idealist, Samantha Power reflects on her eight years in the Obama administration. Although she claims that the experience did little to change her views, there is a considerable disjuncture between her point of view in her award-winning earlier book “A Problem from Hell,” in which she criticizes U.S. officials for not doing the right thing, and her point of view in The Education of an Idealist, in which she defends indifference of U.S. officials under somewhat similar circumstances during the Obama years. The author of Problem could not have written Education, and the author of Education could not have written Problem. What does this tell us about the possibility for ethics in foreign policy?
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
NOTES
1 Power, Samantha, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002)Google Scholar.
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12 Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 510.
13 Ibid., p. 516.