Power Play

AUTHOR AND FORMER DIPLOMAT SAMANTHA POWER BRINGS HER A-GAME WITH A CANDID MEMOIR

- Marshall Heyman

When Samantha Power left her post as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2017, she didn’t expect to find herself talking about the state of national affairs on social media. She and her colleagues had “the presumption that we would lie low and give the new administration the benefit of the doubt. We thought the office of the presidency would change Donald Trump more than Donald Trump would change the presidency. We had not expected to be on Twitter doing the kinds of things we ended up doing.”

Calling out the president in an open forum wasn’t the norm a few years ago and certainly not for someone of Power’s stature. “I think while [President] Obama was in office, we had our share of turmoil, chaos, and conflict, but there were stabilizing dimensions,” she says. “We had bedrock alliances with our European friends. We built and solidified community and shared values.” Power notes that now “the U.S. is being very, very unpredictable, and our president may not be telling the truth. It’s very confusing and destabilizing, and many of our closest allies aren’t sure they’re our allies anymore.”