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BOOKS
‘The purpose of foreign policy is not to provide an outlet for our own sentiments of hope or indignation; it is to shape real events in a real world.’—JOHN F. KENNEDY
The Making
Of a Cosmopolitan
Culture
BYBARTONSWAIMT
HE SUBTITLE of
Samantha Power’s
“The Education of
an Idealist” calls
the book a “mem-
oir,” but it is properly termed an
autobiography, beginning as it
does with the author’s childhood
and recounting each life-phase
up to the present. Ms. Power
served in the Obama administra-
tion, first as a member of the
National Security Council and
from 2013 to 2017 as ambassa-
dor to the United Nations. The
book is too long. Unless you’re a
gifted writer, which Ms. Power is
not, the job of U.N. ambassador
does not justify an account of
this size.
There are some memorable
moments, mainly at the book’s
beginning. Ms. Power was born
to Irish parents and raised until
age 6 in Dublin; her father was
brilliant but hopelessly addicted
to alcohol, and her mother left
him for a new life in America
in 1979, bringing Samantha and
her brother with her. Her recol-
lection of last seeing her father—
a little drunk but calling for Sam
to come back—is very moving.
Ms. Power recalls remarkable
experiences of working in Bosnia
during the region’s civil war in
the 1990s, and important figures
populate the chapters of the book
covering her years in the White
House. But I doubt many readers
will care much about how the
federal government’s human-
resources department initially
assigned Ms. Power the wrong
salary tier (the mistake was soon
corrected, you’ll be relieved to
know) or about what she and her
husband, Harvard law professor
Cass Sunstein, did on their first
night in the U.N. ambassador’s
residence at the Waldorf Astoria.
(They ordered takeout from a
Szechuan restaurant and watched
the season finale of “The Killing.”)
But “The Education of an Ideal-
ist” is more than an exercise in
vanity. It’s also, fundamentally, a
defense of the author’s reputation.
Ms. Power achieved renown with
the publication of her first book,
in 2002, “ ‘A Problem From Hell’:
America and the Age of Geno-ingness to help out students and other artists,
especially those in difficulties. Pauline in her
later years took up composing and teaching;
having in her stage career revived interest in the
then-neglected music of Monteverdi, Cimarosa,
Handel and others, she wrote a standard textbook
on the interpretation of the vocal repertoire.
She nurtured hundreds of pupils, two of whom
created the first major roles in works by Debussy
and Richard Strauss. Her husband Louis, though
not himself an artist, continued to produce many
volumes of scholarship and criticism about
European civilization, as well as drawing up
guidebooks to several recently founded public
art museums.
In the 1870s Turgenev’s devotion to Pauline
dwindled somewhat. Readers of his shorter
fiction can’t help noticing the tendency of his
male protagonists to lose their way with women,
declining to press home their attempts at court-
ship, so that marriage evaporates into thin air.
Turgenev never con-
cealed his fear and
hatred of his mother, a
deeply embittered and
tyrannical woman mar-
ried by a much younger
man for her money.
Dogged by a feeling of
abandonment, Turgenev
craved Pauline’s love,
and she obviously of-
fered it, though without
the intensity and des-
peration of his affection
for her. But even as their liaison waned he found
an astonishing new role as a literary Janus figure
between Russia and the West.
Turgenev in his final decade or so became a
sort of two-way agent for French and Russian
authors. Among those he represented in Russia
were Maupassant, Daudet and Jules Goncourt;
despite some initial misgivings, he championed
“War and Peace” when few in Western Europe
would touch it; he translated Heinrich Heine and
Walt Whitman into Russian. Above all Turgenev
and Flaubert grew very close, not only as friends
but as prose artists too, as anyone may judge
who compares Turgenev’s shorter fiction to
Flaubert’s “Three Tales.” Turgenev translated
these pieces into Russian, but the truly great one,
“A Simple Heart,” was rejected by an editor
for fear of offending the imperial censor in
St. Petersburg.
Meanwhile centrifugal forces were growing
in Europe. Wars fractured the continent, in
particular the Franco-Prussian War of 1870,
which devastated the charmed circle of Turgenev
and the Viardots, then based in the German spa
town of Baden-Baden. Especially in Germany
and Russia, cultural nationalism was gaining
adherents, notably among musicians, and a
number of Jewish composers were repeatedly
pelted with bigoted epithets. When Wagner
penned a harangue against “Jewishness
in Music,” aimed in part at the composer
Giacomo Meyerbeer, Pauline, a Wagner supporter
who was fond of Meyerbeer and had starred in
his opera “Robert le Diable,” was aghast:
she responded with a letter to Wagner that
became public.
Among the Great Powers cross-border hatred
was mounting. By August 1914 the notion of a
common culture, accompanied by a pacific
pan-European debate about equality, justice
and economics, was moribund. It was never again
to be realized in practice, with Russia and its
satellites remaining cordoned off to the east.
Ethnic animosities were proving a far more
effective means of mobilizing people than
reformist or conservative social ideas.
In a couple of asides, Mr. Figes discloses his
personal attachment to the idea of Europe as a
shared “cultural space,” noting that in response
to Brexit he has, together with his sister,
reacquired German citizenship. Nietzsche, he
reminds us, was a particularly eloquent pioneer
of transnational “Europeanness.” An enemy of
nationalism, which he called “the sickness of the
century,” Nietzsche advanced the countervailing
ideal of “the good European.” For Europeans
of this sort, for readers in general, Mr. Figes’s
magisterial work will surely come as a welcome
vivification of a splendid if vanished way of life.Mr. Hofstadter’s books include “The Love Affair
as a Work of Art” and “Falling Palace:
A Romance of Naples.”ContinuedfrompageC7By August 1914
the notion of
cultural
globalization
was eclipsed
by that of
global war.HEAVENLY Ary Scheffer’s 1851 portrait of Pauline
Viardot as St. Cecilia, patron saint of musicians.BRIDGEMAN IMAGESThe Education
of an Idealist
By Samantha Power
Dey Street, 580 pages, $29.99Tough Love
By Susan Rice
Simon & Schuster,
531 pages, $30cide,” in which she indicted global
powers, especially the U.S., for
failing to act against the slaugh-
ters of entire peoples: Armenians
during and after World War I;
Jews in the 1930s (until Hitler
made war inevitable); Cambodians
in the 1970s; Tutsis and Bosnians
in the 1990s.
When Mr. Obama nominated
Ms. Power to be U.N. ambassador,
observers had every reason to
expect that she would bring to the
job the uncompromising moral
earnestness for which she had
become famous. She did in some
respects, but not when it mattered
most. In August 2012, a year
before Ms. Power took the U.N.
job and at a time when the Syrian
civil war was heating up, Mr.
Obama was asked what actions by
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad
would lead the U.S. to intervene
with military force. He replied
that the use of chemical weapons
would be a “red line” and threat-
ened Mr. Assad with “enormous
consequences.”
Exactly one year after that
warning, with Ms. Power at the
U.N., the Syrian president
launched a chemical attack on
Damascus suburbs that killed
1,400 people. Instead of exacting
any “enormous consequences”—
the episode is painfully recounted
by Ms. Power in chapters 29 and
30 of her book—Mr. Obama dith-
ered. At first he determined to
hit Syrian military installations
but held off until U.N. inspectors
could get out. Then he decided,
bizarrely, to seek congressional
authorization he didn’t need. Con-
gress was on recess, time passed,
the Syrian atrocity faded from the
headlines, and in the end Mr.
Assad got away with it.
And what did Samantha Power,
scourge of American ditherers, do
or say about Mr. Obama’s vacilla-
tions in the face of mass killing?
She urged him to reconsider, she
agonized, she regretted. But on
the evidence of her autobiog-
raphy, she didn’t seriously con-
sider resigning. I’m not sure why.
Many other public officials have
resigned when they could no
longer serve in good conscience—
Jim Mattis and John Bolton in
recent months. But by this point
in the book, after many reverent
accounts of Mr. Obama and reci-
tations of the author’s conversa-
tions with him, it’s apparent that
she couldn’t have resigned even if
she thought she should. She was
too in thrall to her boss.
Ms. Power tries hard to make
Mr. Obama’s indecision on Syria
look like something other than the
disaster it plainly was, failing even
to mention the substantive reasonfor the president’s sudden change
of heart—Iran. Mr. Obama and his
secretary of state, John Kerry,
badly wanted an agreement on
nuclear weapons with Iran, the
Iranians opposed the deposition
of Mr. Assad, and that was that. In
the end, Ms. Power lamely por-
trays the administration’s worst
foreign-policy blunder as a quali-
fied success: The U.S. negotiated
with Russia on a joint plan to
force Syria to destroy “a whop-
ping 1,300 tons of chemical agents
that Assad would otherwise have
had at his disposal.” Great! Hoo-
rah for civilization! But of course
the point was to get rid of all of
Syria’s chemical weapons, not a“whopping” proportion of them.
Mr. Assad was not, in fact, re-
lieved of all his chemical weapons,
as he proved by using them again
on innocents in April 2017.
Ms. Power dwells on the Syria
episode in the book’s preface, at
length in the aforementioned
chapters, and once again in a later
chapter. And for good reason: Her
career is defined, tragically and
indelibly, by her failure to respond
to Mr. Obama’s failure to respond.
Susan Rice’s “Tough Love”
bears striking resemblances to
Ms. Power’s book. Both include
long passages about career moves
and relationships that no one out-
side a small group of devotees can
possibly be interested in. Both
complain repeatedly about “right-
wing” commentators and websites
and, especially, Fox News. And
both books, though purporting to
tell the stories of their author’s
lives, are manifestly intended to
set the record straight about
specific charges. In the case of Ms.
Rice’s book, you have to endure
chapter after chapter of platitudes
and long, detailed accounts of the
author’s bureaucratic maneuver-
ing and policy views before you
get to the point.
Few ordinary people would
now remember Susan Rice’s name
if it weren’t for one incident, and
you don’t get to it until page 306.
On Sept. 16, 2012, she appeared on
all five Sunday news shows and
relayed the Obama administra-
tion’s account of the attack on the
American consulate in Benghazi,
Libya, that killed four Americans,including the ambassador. The
attack, she said, was the outcome
of a spontaneous riot in which
locals were outraged by an Ameri-
can-made video denigrating Islam.
This was untrue. The “riot” was a
calculated terrorist attack. In fact,
the administration had known it
was a terrorist attack for several
days but disliked that charac-
terization, evidently because Mr.
Obama would face an election a
few weeks later and someone in
the White House thought it would
jeopardize the president’s bid if
Americans thought that terrorism
was again a pre-eminent issue.
Ms. Rice disputes this interpre-
tation at length, repeating her
allies’ longstanding claim that she
was only passing on talking points
circulated by the intelligence com-
munity based on a flawed early
assessment. But the talking
points, later made public, said
nothing about the video; and Ms.
Rice neglects to mention an email
she received just before the
Sunday shows from Ben Rhodes,
a White House national security
aide—the email emerged as the
result of a freedom-of-information
request—in which Mr. Rhodes
reminded her “to underscore that
the protests are rooted in an
Internet video, and not a broader
failure of policy.”
It’s easy to sympathize with
Mr. Rhodes’s impulse: If Ms. Rice
had conceded that the Benghazi
tragedy was a result of terror-
ism, Republicans would have
used it, perhaps unfairly, to claim
that the administration had
failed to protect U.S. diplomats.
But that doesn’t excuse Ms.
Rice’s deception.
Ms. Rice relays a few other,
lesser-known charges against
her—chief among them that she
“unmasked” the identities of
Trump campaign officials in
White House intelligence docu-
ments—and in each case she
insists on her own irreproacha-
bility and her critics’ mendacity.
Indeed, she broadly implies that
one of her fiercest critics, Lindsey
Graham, is a racist.
What’s most offensive to this
reviewer, however, is her decision
to place these narrow self-vindica-
tions within a 500-page book full
of family anecdotes and hokey
adages and tedious renditions of
policy views. Both Ms. Power’s
and Ms. Rice’s apologias might
have worked well, shorn of banal-
ities, as 5,000- or 6,000-word
essays for the New Yorker or the
Atlantic. But an essay doesn’t
slake the thirst for vainglory.Mr. Swaim is an editorial-page
writer at the Journal.The Fog of Policy
TRANSITIONBarack Obama, Susan Rice and Samantha Power at the White House on June 5, 2013, after the president nominated Ms. Rice to
be the national security adviser and Ms. Power to succeed her as ambassador to the United Nations.ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
When Power was
U.N. ambassador,
Syria launched
chemical attacks.
Obama dithered, but
Power did not resign.