Spencer Ackerman on Samantha Power‘s book A Problem from Hell:
Liberalism in the 20th century made two enduring contributions to American foreign policy. Early on, it contended that global stability and prosperity were better guaranteed by architectures of international cooperation than by great-power competition. Later, it brought the human-rights revolution to the center of geopolitics, declaring that state sovereignty provided no excuse for impunity. As the 21st century began, Samantha Power, a journalist barely in her 30s, exposed the hollowness at the core of those contributions.
A Problem from Hell, Power’s first book and her masterpiece, explored the United States’ consistent lack of interest in preventing and stopping genocide, a problem that the foreign-policy establishment did not realize it had. Power, returning from a searing experience of reporting from the Balkans, discovered that respect for human rights was a liberal fiction that did not survive first contact with organized eliminationist slaughter. In a hybrid style that blended historical scholarship, outraged polemicism, and unabashed activism, Power revealed that such indifference was a feature, not a bug. “The system, as it stands now,” she charged, “is working.”