The most interesting member of the team is Irish born Samantha Power, every step the idealistic academic, wearing her heart on the sleeve. She came to the Obama campaign in 2008 via the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard in 2008; the future president took note of the Pulitzer Prize Winner’s book, Genocide: A problem from Hell. In office, she engaged in the Boko Haram kidnapping, trying locally to negotiate. Juggling the care for her two young children with the demand of her position, she seems to be eternally patient. But she also was a fierce adversary of her Russian counterpart at the UN, whom she attacked for the invasion of the Ukraine, and the annexation of the Crimea. John Kerry is much more the classic diplomat, who can be sometimes be a little pompous. Having served in the Vietnam War, he is still “no pacifist”, and one has to believe him. Kerry has a rather ambivalent position on the Asian territories he helped to invade as a soldier. For example Laos, where the US dropped more bombs during a “dirty”, six year long war in the late ’60s and early ’70s, than the combined load dropped on Germany and Japan in WWII combined. But Kerry has also learned from recent history: when criticised about the lack of military intervention in Syria, he explained that any lasting settlement would have meant a long-term occupation of the country – something which has failed in Iran and Afghanistan.
Ben Rhodes emerges the most pragmatic of Obama’s advisers. He is foremost a journalist, and used to showing critical situations in a more positive light. Always trying to find a positive opening, he sometimes clashes with Power, who is more (self)critical. But Rhodes is also a good team player who does not let his side down. Susan E. Rice has been an Obama confidant since their time in local politics in Chicago. Heavily (and unjustly) attacked by Republicans for her role in the Libya disaster, which ended with the death of the US ambassador, she kept her cool with dignity. Her work on the change of the US Cuba politic cannot be underestimated. On the night of Trump’s triumph, the reaction was very different: Rhodes was so shattered, he could hardly speak and simply gasped for air. Obama, like a teacher, spoke about “history not being a linear development, but an up-and-down process”. Power was all resistance “Well, there is no going quietly into the good night”. How true that turned out to be. AS
ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 19 JANUARY 2018