Absolute Power

Tipped as a possible national security adviser should Barack Obama become US president, Irish-born Samantha Power believes it's time to repair American standing abroad, writes Denis Staunton

Tall and willowy, with a translucent complexion and long, flowing, flaxen hair, Samantha Power could have stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting as she appeared before a crowd in Boulder, Colorado last Friday night. There was little romantic about her message, however, as the 37-year-old Harvard professor and senior policy adviser to Barack Obama spoke about mending international institutions, restoring America's global reputation and respecting human dignity worldwide.

With the highest concentration of PhDs of any American city, Boulder is solid Obama territory and Power's audience was a perfect snapshot of the Patagonia-clad, latte-sipping demographic that forms a core element of his base. Power didn't come to Boulder to talk about Obama, but to discuss the life of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the former United Nations human rights commissioner who was killed by a bomb in Iraq in 2003. Power believes that Vieira de Mello's experience of every major conflict since the 1970s, including those in Rwanda, East Timor and Bosnia, offers important signposts for today's uncertain world.

"A lot of countries and a lot of citizens around the world are feeling lost right now because of having to deal with growing violence, growing polarisation and what I keep referring to as brokenness - broken people, broken places. We have very few shepherds and Sergio got a 34-year head start in thinking about these central questions," she says.

Born in Dublin, Power lived in Ireland until she was nine and spent almost every summer after that with relations in counties Cork, Kerry and Wicklow. When she lived in Bosnia during the wars of the 1990s, she would retreat to her family in Ireland for bouts of nurturing.

"The people I most want to like my books are my family in Ireland, and I think perhaps when you go away, especially when you're a kid, I think you've a sense that you disappear from the family," she says. "I think the fact that I was always interested in international things was rooted in the fact that my family was still there, other than my mother and my kid brother."

AS WE TALK over tapas later, Power is at pains to stress the distinction between her own views and those of Obama, who sought her out after reading her first book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Power is one of a handful of advisers in the inner core of his foreign policy team, with unlimited access to the candidate. As Obama moves closer to winning the Democratic nomination, speculation is mounting about what his presidency would mean for the US relationship with the rest of the world.

"I think that prior to the election in 2004, a lot of Europeans were making a distinction between the Bush administration and Americans," Power says. "With the election of 2004, that distinction blurred. I think they were shocked as much as they were horrified by the re-election in the wake of the Iraq war, Guantánamo, all that," Power says. "What an Obama election does, I think, is that it shocks people in the other direction. That Americans are capable of electing somebody with his biography, somebody with his anti-Iraq war credentials, it's exactly the converse, it seems to me, of the 2004 election. I think you see this with every primary he wins, that there's a recovery already going on in terms of the standing of the voters and the standing of the country and the sense that the country has progressed substantively to elect this individual who not only has had this life but has said these things."

Power is uncompromising in her condemnation of the Bush administration's policies on torture, rendition and the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, but insists that condemning Bush cannot be a substitute for taking effective action to confront global challenges.

"To be able to say we're against the war on terror, we don't buy it, has allowed a lot of people - not just in Europe but around the world and in this country - to avoid grappling with what do we do about Afghanistan, what do we do about al-Qaeda. Or even now, what do we do about cleaning up the mess the Bush administration has left not just for the United States but around the world," she says.

I suggest that one reason for European scepticism about multilateral action with the US is that American governments traditionally approach multilateralism as involving the pooling of everyone's sovereignty but their own. Power insists that the mood in the US is changing, citing the emergence of global warming, which Al Gore avoided discussing in 2000, as a consensus issue in the current election.

"Every American politician talks almost in cliche boilerplate terms about global challenges like global warming, public health, proliferation and terrorism and how we can't deal with these challenges alone," she says. "So it seems to me that this is a moment where, for the first time in a long time, Americans recognise that they need others in order to advance their own national interests. So that's an important moment. To take that next step and to acknowledge that in order to take from an international institution, you have to give, is a step that has not yet been taken. It has been taken in some quarters but not across the board.

"The reluctance to sacrifice sovereignty is so deeply felt and so long felt that getting to a place where a majority of Americans realise that you've got to give a little sovereignty here to take a little security and prosperity there is a process and it's going to take time. But I'd stress that, five years ago you couldn't even make the case for pragmatic reasons to go in that direction."

Pointing out that Europeans only embraced pooled sovereignty when the economic benefits became evident, Power suggests there are cultural roadblocks to be overcome before Americans fully embrace multilateralism.

"One of the reasons Obama is so compelling a prospect, and one of the reasons he's so attractive to me as a leader, is that old-fashioned ability to lead - that is, to have an adult conversation which doesn't mean changing generations of American thinking overnight but which does mean making the most persuasive case possible for why burden-sharing is necessary and why adherence to international law like the Geneva conventions is actually going to reduce terrorism. You know, using self-interest to reclaim a relationship to values that are not foreign but that have been shelved," she says.

OBAMA HAS YET to knock Hillary Clinton out of the Democratic race, to say nothing of defeating John McCain in November, but expectations about an Obama presidency, especially outside the US, are already almost out of control. Power maintains that Obama is aware of the difficulties that lie ahead and of the limits of what is possible without the full backing of Congress.

Conservative commentators and websites have already turned a hostile spotlight on Obama's advisers, including Power, whom they claim is insufficiently fervent in her support of Israel. Obama's policy on Israel - and Power's for that matter - is virtually indistinguishable from that of Clinton or McCain and although Obama will talk to hostile leaders, he won't talk to Hamas.

Obama has already said he will not ratify the International Criminal Court (ICC), a decision Power applauds because she thinks US support would undermine the court's work.

"Until we've closed Guantánamo, gotten out of Iraq responsibly, renounced torture and rendition, shown a different face for America, American membership of the ICC is going to make countries around the world think the ICC is a tool of American hegemony," she says.

"If Barack Obama ratified the ICC or announced his support for it on day one, two things would happen. One, it would have the chance of discrediting the ICC in the short term, and two, he would so strain his relations with the US military that it would actually be very hard to recover. There's a whole lot of internal diplomacy, internal conversations about sovereignty and so forth that have to be had before you can think about that."

There is little doubt that Europeans would welcome Obama's election, but Power is sceptical about how much would change in terms of European willingness to send more troops to Afghanistan. She believes that, while intergovernmental relationships are important, Obama may also be able to appeal directly to citizens of other countries.

"The public doesn't have to buy into the idea of the war on terror to have some vague idea that the return of the Taliban would be terrible for people," she says. "An adult conversation surely would entail some discussion not simply of that frame but also of the strategic loss to Europe of letting Afghanistan rot."

Advising Obama, teaching at Harvard and promoting her new book, Power says she is "running on fumes", but the pressure is likely to intensify in the months ahead if Obama wins his party's nomination. Tipped as a possible national security adviser, Power is clearly underwhelmed at the prospect of a move to Washington, but she says that if the call comes, she will serve.

"There are these moments, and that's the chord Obama has struck in so many people who don't even have the privilege of knowing him," she says. "And to walk away from the challenge that I've been a part of proposing - are you ready for the fierce urgency of now? - and then for me to say, 'I've got another book to write, I've got Red Sox tickets', would be really pathetic, I think, and phoney. But I definitely don't relish the thought of having to move from having a white belt in bureaucracy to a black belt."

Chasing the Flame is published by Allen Lane, €37. Samantha Power will give a free public lecture, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, this Thursday at 5.30pm in the Clinton Auditorium, UCD, Belfield, Dublin.

To book a place, e-mail brian.jackson@ucd.ie