WASHINGTON – Samantha Power becomes more emotional towards the end of the 2014 documentary, Watchers of the Sky, which traces the origins of the legal definition of genocide. At the time, Ms. Power was President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations and, she said, had “great insight into much of the pains” in the world.
To prevent mass atrocities abroad, one had to “consider what we can do about it in order to exhaust the tools at your disposal,” Ms. Power said in the film. “And I always think of the privilege of being able to try – just to try.”
Little doubt about Ms. Power’s zeal – given her career as a war correspondent, human rights activist, academic expert, and foreign affairs advisor – even if it meant advocating military violence to stop widespread murders.
Now, as President Biden’s candidate to lead the US Agency for International Development, she is preparing to re-enter government as administrator of soft power and oppose the use of weapons as a deterrent and punishment against the urged her in the past.
A Senate committee is expected to vote on her nomination as head of one of the world’s largest distributors of humanitarian aid on Thursday.
If confirmed, Mr Biden will also put her on the National Security Council, where during the Obama administration she pushed for military inventions to protect civilians from government-sponsored attacks in Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2013 which declined 2003 invasion of Iraq.)
The fact that she will sit at the table again on the council – and will almost certainly again debate whether American forces should be drawn into ongoing conflict – has worried some officials, analysts and think-tank experts, the military reluctance of the Biden administration demand. Mr Biden seems to be leaning like this: He has embraced economic sanctions as an instrument of hard power and is expected to announce a full withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan by September 11 to end the longest war in the United States.
“When you are talking about humanity, famine and war, natural causes aside, war is the leading cause of famine around the world,” Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul told Ms. Power last month at her Senate confirmation hearing. “Are you ready to admit that the Libyan and Syrian interventions you advocated were a mistake?”
Mrs. Power didn’t. “When these situations arise, it’s almost about less evils – that the decisions are very challenging,” she said.
The US aid agency naturally has a long-term view of the world compared to the immediacy of military action. In addition to the humanitarian aid amounting to around 6 billion US dollars, which it is making available this year for disaster-stricken countries, the agency is trying to prevent conflict at its roots, largely strengthen the economy, counteract state corruption and democracy and promote human rights.
This mission is central to Mr Biden’s foreign policy and may nowhere prove more important than in his global competition with China.
Last month, Foreign Minister Antony J. Blinken reassured allies that they would not return to a “us-or-you” decision with China as the two superpowers vie for economic, diplomatic and military advantage.
Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey and former Deputy Secretary of State for Democracy and Human Rights of Obama, described in his loan and development projects the “perception that China exports corruption”.
For example, a February study by the International Republican Institute, a private not-for-profit group that receives government funding and promotes democracy, concluded that Panama’s decision in 2017 to sever diplomatic relations with Taiwan “appeared to be due to disbursements” from China was driven. It was also noted that Nepal regularly revoked the legal status of Tibetan refugees after becoming economically dependent on Beijing.
The American aid organization alone cannot keep up with the resources that China has deployed in developing countries. But Mr. Malinowski said his support for journalists, legal advisors and legitimate opposition groups could “expose and combat” caustic foreign leaders who had benefited from Beijing’s financial aid and playbook to stay in power.
“There is a problem that has come to the fore in this government and that it is very focused on, which is fighting corruption,” Malinowski said of Ms. Power. “And USAID may play a very important role there.”
At her confirmation hearing in March, Ms. Power told the senators that she had been moved to pursue a career in foreign affairs following the 1989 massacre of Tiananmen protesters in Beijing. She described China’s “coercive and predatory approach that is so transactional” in dealing with developing countries that ultimately become dependent on Beijing through what she called “debt-trap diplomacy”.
“I think it’s not going so well, and that opens up the United States,” Ms. Power told Indiana Republican Senator Todd Young.
The mostly harmless nudge of Democrats and Republicans during the hearing showed how fighting China has become a rare, if reliable, non-partisan issue in Congress. “I think it is absolutely essential that our development funds are used to advance our geostrategic priorities,” said Young.
The aid agency and the State Department have budgeted around $ 2 billion for programs to promote democracy, human rights and open governance abroad in fiscal 2021 – a third as much as funding humanitarian aid.
It’s an area that Ms. Power is expected to expand into. The Biden government’s first budget released on Friday alleged it was committing an unspecified but “substantial increase in resources” to advance human rights and democracy while thwarting corruption and authoritarianism.
The spending plan will also support another of Ms. Power’s priorities: fighting corruption, violence and poverty in Central America to curb the influx of thousands of migrants who travel to the southwestern border each year. The Biden government is betting on a $ 4 billion strategy through 2025 – including an initial tranche of $ 861 million proposed this year – to help stabilize the region.
In El Salvador, for example, killings fell 61 percent after a USAID attempt to reduce violence from 2015 to 2017, Ms. Power told senators, and the agency’s programs in Honduras have produced similar results. In addition to assisting local prosecutors, the programs brought together government officials, businesses, and church and community leaders to distract young people from gangs through professional training, tutoring, and artistic activities.
She met with some skepticism.
Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman noted that the number of Central American children on the border has increased steadily since January, despite the fact that the United States has spent $ 3.6 billion on similar efforts over the past five years.
“The results are not impressive,” said Portman. “It’s primarily an economic problem” and “people will still try to get to the US.”
Explaining foreign policy decisions to the American people and making them relevant to their lives is a driving theme for the State Department under Mr. Biden. Ms. Power can draw on her own experience as an immigrant from Ireland and as a storyteller to help alleviate the border crisis by attacking its root causes.
“That’s part of the job – you have to be a salesperson, you have to go out and tell people, ‘So we need more resources to do this job, and this is where USAID can be an incredibly important partner,” said John Prendergast, a longtime veteran Human rights and anti-corruption activist and close friend of Ms. Power.
“There is so much that can be done between bombing and nothing,” said Prendergast, paraphrasing Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court featured in the same genocide documentary as Ms. Power. “And all of Samantha’s work and life was between those two extremes.”
Gayle Smith, who ran the aid agency for Mr Obama and is now the State Department’s coronavirus vaccine envoy, put it more clearly.
“It’s not that USAID is going to break into anyone,” she said.
