◼ South Sudan, Samantha Power, and the Failure of Liberal Internationalism - Aaron MacLean/Washington Free Beacon
The war has not received much coverage in the American media in part because, in 2014, who can keep track anymore of the violent spasms afflicting the world?
American policy towards South Sudan is a disaster—such that there is a policy at all. When decisions come, they come—as is the case in most conflicts where American diplomats and soldiers are involved today—from the very top, with policy micromanaged from the offices of Susan Rice and Samantha Power. In terms of meaningful action, the policy has involved the levying of travel and financial sanctions on mid-level commanders and suspected human rights abusers, who must have been devastated when word arrived at their swamp redoubts beside the upper Nile that they are no longer permitted to trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
In addition to sanctions, much hope has been invested in the ability of a regional coalition of neighboring states, organized as the Intergovernmental Authority on Development—IGAD, inauspiciously pronounced as Egad!—to broker a deal between the Dinka and the Nuer, the two tribal networks doing the fighting. IGAD includes among its members Uganda, which has troops in South Sudan backing the government-aligned Dinka, and Sudan, which is widely believed to be backing the rebel Nuers in an effort to act as a spoiler in its recently surrendered territory.
In other words, IGAD not only has no chance of stopping the war—it’s even far from clear that its members want the war to come to a negotiated end. But this doesn’t stop the United Nations, and our ambassador in Turtle Bay, Samantha Power, from speaking of IGAD as though it were some meaningful mechanism for achieving peace....
An investment in endless process, in which untrustworthy agents halfheartedly wrangle combatants towards a negotiated peace that no party actually prefers to victory, followed by impotent invocations of a moral commitment to national dialogue and lasting peace.
The killing continues, heedless of the process.
For Power, the manifest ineffectiveness of her vision would constitute a fall from grace, should anyone be paying attention. This is the woman whose book about genocide won her a Pulitzer before she was 33, and who rose to prominence in the liberal establishment on the back of passionate calls for a U.S. foreign policy characterized by a scaling-back of U.S. military involvement and a “mea culpa doctrine” wherein the U.S. was to atone for its Cold War wrongs, combined with a reinvigorated devotion to multilateralism and an unabashed focus on human rights....
A foreign policy premised on the appeal to the better angels of the world’s nature will be forever mugged by the reality that there are no angels available for the appeal. KEEP READING
