Samantha Power began her career as freelance journalist covering the civil war in Bosnia. She has been a vocal critic of both US and UN policies in the past.



Diplomatic is not a word commonly used to describe outspoken Harvard-trained scholar and activist Samantha Power.

In the early 1990s, as a recent college graduate wading into Bosnia’s civil war, she called the Clinton administration immoral for not using military strikes to halt ethnic cleansing. In 2003, she called for a “historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, permitted by the United States.”

In 2008, while advising then-candidate Barack Obama, she described as “extremely disappointing” the new head of the United Nations. Then she got in trouble for calling Obama’s primary rival, Hillary Clinton, “a monster.”

Now Obama has nominated the 42-year-old Irish-born mother of two to represent the United States in one of the most influential diplomatic posts: as ambassador to the United Nations, the very body she has criticized for failing to prevent the untimely deaths of millions of people around the globe.
“She knows the UN’s strengths. She knows its weaknesses. She knows that American interests are advanced when we can rally the world to our side,” Obama said of his former aide on Wednesday, urging her quick confirmation by the Senate. “And she knows that we have to stand up for the things that we believe in.”

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