Samantha Power, leader of USAID during the presidency of Joe Biden, is used for disappointment and gloomy powerlessness.
Dubbed the 'genocide chicken', she tried to stop the tide of cruelty that would be unimaginable if it didn't happen every day.
Reporter at the front line of the Bosnian genocide, the youngest ever UN ambassador under Barack Obama, and until days ago, coordination of American foreign aid.
But nothing prepared her for the desk that she spent the past three years of her career with the flurry of Donald Trump's female, just a few days after her usual dismissal on January 20.
Power, married to the former Obama administration officer and Washington Post -Columnist Cass Sunstein, was once an idealist, an aspiring sports reporter drove to the foreign policy by viewing the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.
Only a few years later she was in Sarajevo, Bosnia, because it was besieged for years by genocidal Serbian troops.
Writing about the horrors she saw were not enough -she needed a more hands -on -role, such as sending war criminals to The Hague.
She moved back to the US and obtained a diploma at Harvard University, on schedule to become a human rights lawyer.
While she was on the law study, she wrote a newspaper that came to define for the rest of her life and produced a whole doctrine for foreign policy.
Samantha Power speaks in a Security Council of the United Nations and Meeting about the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict in 2014, while UN ambassador
Her paper, written in 2000, was extended to her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won a Pulitzer prize.
Power was standing against the American tolerance of unspeakable atrocities, often committed in clear picture 'and argued for rapid American military intervention to stop genocide.
She became an influential player of foreign policy at night, even though she was 'caricature like the Ivy League Joan del Arc'.
'No nuts, the fingers and the arms always flash in the air and a voice that goes from a whisper to a scream. She was Puur Theater, “Former Council for Foreign Relations, President Leslie Gelb told an extensive New Yorker profile of her speaking in public.
The book ended up an important role in Obama's presidential campaign, which lasts for a spectacular abuse in the primaries.
During an interview with the Scotsman, for a moment to make a phone call from a campaign colleague and she vired over their opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“We are in Ohio. In Ohio they are obsessed and Hillary goes to the city because she knows that Ohio is the only place they can win, “she said.
“She is also a monster – that is outside the plate – she bends for everything.”
Power hugs her son Declan after he has searched the confirmation of her Senate Foreign Relations Committee about her appointment as an American ambassador at the United Nations
Despite a humiliating, crawling apology, she was almost immediately fired and left in the professional wilderness.
“It was such a Rookie error … Suddenly to fall professionally flat in such a very public way and not to have a job … I was just like a roaming person,” she told the Guardian years later.
'All my dreams of the future, all the campaigns I was going to do and the fundraisers I was going to organize and the help I started to give this great team and this great candidate.
“It was suddenly an empty calendar.”
The parallels with the abrupt downfall of USAID are clear.
During the same interview she discussed how she was struck by sudden and intense anxiety attacks, in combination with horrible back pain, for most of her adult life.
Nicknamed 'Lungers' by an ex-boyfriend, they let them crave breath and study to get air in her lungs.
The power did not stay in the wilderness for long, when Obama forgot her and appointed her in the National Security Council as soon as he took office.
She spent his first term as a special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights, where she lobbyed for intervention in Libya.
Power is mentioned in the recognitions of Obama's book The Audacity of Hope as 'combed over each chapter as if it were her'.
Power (second from the right) stands for a mass grave in the Gisozi Genocide Memorial in Rwanda
Power visits a Community Hospital in Bangui on December 19, 2013 in the Central African Republic of Violence
Then in 2013 she was nominated the American ambassador in the United Nations – an unconventional choice and at 43 the youngest ever.
Tom Nides, a former deputy State Secretary, told her that her chance to be confirmed in the UN ambassador was at his best 20 percent.
But confirmed that she was, and from the gate was strongly critical about the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the use of chemical weapons on citizens.
“The actions of the Assad regime are morally reprehensible and they violate clearly established international standards,” she said.
Power pushed hard for the US to attack Syria and remove him from power and to provoke an intense debate in the Obama government.
This was one of the many times in her career when her idealism was careful in the practical reality of the government.
Obama could also not stick to a campaign team to finally recognize the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.
“I am very sorry that in our time in the Obama administration we have not recognized the #armenian genocide,” she wrote in a series of tweets after leaving her post at the end of Obama's term.
'Almost every Armenian-American family was somehow touched by the genocide. The constant Turkish denial makes the genocide an open wound.
'Thinking of Armenians everywhere on the Armenian genocide Remembrance Day. 102 years ago, the Ottoman authorities started a slaughter that [would] Dead 1.5 m. '
Power speaks to the media as she visits the Nagorno-Karabach help center in the border village of Kornidzor, Armenia
The power was back in the government in May 2021, when Biden tapped her to be the USAID manager.
Although she felt that she was doing more well than ever, an older, more pragmatic version force was again forced to tackle the reality of geopolitics.
No one was grim more than when she experienced an open rebellion because of a number of her employees, who stopped protesting against Biden's policy on the invasion of Gaza of Israel and her own possible balanced vision of the power over the conflict.
“You wrote a book about genocide and you still work for the administration: you have to resign and pronounce,” hundreds of her during a public event.
“The US -funded genocide in Gaza really has not been able to be moral leaders about climate change and all other urgent development and humanitarian issues that work among us at USAID CARE,” another asked.
“How do you lead us to take into account and overcome this hypocrisy in the US foreign policy?”
Now with USAID in Tatters, Power is playing defense again when Trump and Elon Musk went so far that the agency called a 'criminal organization'.
She noted that almost $ 20 billion of the $ 38 billion that USAID spent last year was for health programs around the world.
“The agency that I just described does not seem like the 'radical links' and 'criminal' Phantom that Mr. Trump dead,” she wrote on Thursday in an exciting defense in the New York Times.
To point out the importance of USAID for the objectives of the US foreign policy, she warned that Russia and China would fill the void of the US.
“I think USAID is the super power of America. It is often not -announced, perhaps not so well understood in certain circles, '' She told Politics.
'The best proof of USAID's contribution is the increase of propaganda supported by PRC and supported by Russia that USAID and our work around the world are malignant.
'And it has really been picked up a lot in the last year and a half. We counted 81 malignant and false propaganda campaigns, really devoted campaigns, aimed at denigrating USAID and our reputation.
“So we do something that comes on their nerves.”
But even in her defense, she regretted what she and the Biden administration could not achieve.
“I wish we could have ended the war in Gaza much earlier and certainly did more to bring more hostages home and do more to end in the hell that the people of Gaza have experienced.”
