By: Aaron Dane
Edited By: Elizabeth Cherchia
While delivering a speech about climate resilience at SAIS on Tuesday, January 30, USAID Administrator Samantha Power was interrupted by a former USAID employee who criticized the Biden Administration’s support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza and called on Power to resign. Later, during the post-speech Q&A session, a current SAIS student who is also a USAID employee questioned USAID and the administration’s moral authority given its “hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy.” The Washington Post reported on the incident the day after the event.
The event took place less than a week after the International Court of Justice ruled in favor of provisional measures calling on Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza.
Power, who previously served as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during President Obama’s second term, is a genocide scholar who has published numerous accounts of American enablement of genocide, including a 2001 essay in The Atlantic and a 2002 book titled “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.”
In her Atlantic piece, Power criticizes the politically cautious rhetoric that U.S. officials at the time used to defend their inaction in Rwanda. Over 20 years after publishing her piece, Power, now a cabinet member defending the decisions of her government, grappled with questions on one of the most politically fraught and morally contentious foreign policy challenges that the Biden administration has faced.
In her response to the audience members, Power regretted the loss of more than 25,000 civilian lives in Gaza and focused on the need to get a “humanitarian pause” that would allow USAID to “dramatically expand the food, medicine and shelter that is desperately needed.” However, she asserted that the “core challenge of the war… is that the people who carried out the attacks on October 7th would do it again in a heartbeat. It makes it impossible for us to look at the situation and say that it can’t happen again.”
However, she seemed to express regret about how the nature of her role requires her to take positions that may clash with her own convictions: “Maybe the only thing that is harder about being in government… [is] wrestling with humility about what positions to take or not take.”
Power is one of a handful of Democratic leaders who have faced scrutiny over the administration’s position on the war. Just a week before Power’s speech at SAIS, protestors interrupted Joe Biden at a campaign event, calling him “Genocide Joe,” and demanding a cease-fire. In October, protestors at the Senate chanted “Cease-fire now!” during a testimony by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.