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A review by walkerct
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
5.0
Actually more like a 4.5, but I rounded up because it's a book I think that many people (but especially Americans) should read.
It's been a long time since I've read such a well constructed, well argued, and thoroughly damning analysis of US foreign policy. Samantha Power lays out an accessible, data-rich take on the history of genocide in the 20th-century, focused on American foreign policy decisions, or more frequently the lack thereof. The book is structured chronologically, beginning with the Armenian genocide, progressing through the Holocaust and Raphael Lemkin's creation of the word "genocide" and his tireless work to get the United Nations to pass a convention on genocide, then through the genocides of the Cambodians, Kurdish, Bosnian muslims, Rwandans, and Kosovar Albanians. With the exception of the chapter on the Armenians, which is unfortunately brief, Power breaks down the historical events, and specifically the stages of American reaction to them. She does an excellent job of not lumping together these different situations into one simplistic series of cause and effect. Rather she takes into account the various historical and cultural complexities, and how they combined to produce similar inaction on the part of the US. Her overall thesis is that America's continuous inaction in the face of genocide is not a failure of their foreign policy strategy, but rather the way it is intended to work. She also doesn't lay out a simplistic hindsight vision that the US would have absolutely been able to prevent genocide in every case, but she does argue that the calculations policymakers took into account had little to do with that possibility one way or the other. And when they were doubtful about whether or not they could have affected things positively, it often had more to do with a desire to stay uninvolved, rather than an honest analysis of the situation.
Rather than try to explain in a paragraph what Power's lays out in 500+ pages, I'll leave you a particularly blunt and straightforward quote from her conclusion:
It's been a long time since I've read such a well constructed, well argued, and thoroughly damning analysis of US foreign policy. Samantha Power lays out an accessible, data-rich take on the history of genocide in the 20th-century, focused on American foreign policy decisions, or more frequently the lack thereof. The book is structured chronologically, beginning with the Armenian genocide, progressing through the Holocaust and Raphael Lemkin's creation of the word "genocide" and his tireless work to get the United Nations to pass a convention on genocide, then through the genocides of the Cambodians, Kurdish, Bosnian muslims, Rwandans, and Kosovar Albanians. With the exception of the chapter on the Armenians, which is unfortunately brief, Power breaks down the historical events, and specifically the stages of American reaction to them. She does an excellent job of not lumping together these different situations into one simplistic series of cause and effect. Rather she takes into account the various historical and cultural complexities, and how they combined to produce similar inaction on the part of the US. Her overall thesis is that America's continuous inaction in the face of genocide is not a failure of their foreign policy strategy, but rather the way it is intended to work. She also doesn't lay out a simplistic hindsight vision that the US would have absolutely been able to prevent genocide in every case, but she does argue that the calculations policymakers took into account had little to do with that possibility one way or the other. And when they were doubtful about whether or not they could have affected things positively, it often had more to do with a desire to stay uninvolved, rather than an honest analysis of the situation.
Rather than try to explain in a paragraph what Power's lays out in 500+ pages, I'll leave you a particularly blunt and straightforward quote from her conclusion:
The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to. They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it. The U.S. policies crafted in response to each case of genocide examined in this book were not the accidental products of neglect. They were concrete choices made by this country's most influential decisionmakers after unspoken and explicit weighing of costs and benefits