EU-DIGEST: USA: Two Liberal Voices for Intervention, but Not in Syrian War

6/5/13

USA: Two Liberal Voices for Intervention, but Not in Syrian War - by Mark Landler

In naming Susan E. Rice and Samantha Power to key national security posts, President Obama has turned to two prominent advocates of liberal interventionism, a foreign-policy credo that calls for the United States to act aggressively to defend human rights – by military means, if necessary.

Both are veterans of his 2008 campaign and have strong personal relationships with Mr. Obama. But they will be working for a president who has consistently resisted intervening in the most dire human-rights calamity of the day, the civil war in Syria. Given Mr. Obama’s fixed views, it is not clear whether even Ms. Rice and Ms. Power could prod him into action.

Ms. Rice, who is becoming national security adviser, and Ms. Power, who is replacing Ms. Rice as American ambassador to the United Nations, teamed up in 2011, along with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to persuade Mr. Obama to back a NATO-led intervention in Libya that was designed to head off a slaughter of the rebels in Benghazi.

In her new role, Ms. Rice in particular will be able to exert even more influence, occupying a West Wing office down the hall from a president who has already concentrated foreign policy decision-making in the White House.

But as Mr. Obama and his aides have long argued, Libya is no Syria. The first was a clear-cut case in which air power could prevent Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from killing thousands of rebels in their stronghold; the second, a sectarian struggle, pits a regime with sophisticated air defenses against rebels scattered throughout the country.