Though her appointment was rumored in Washington for weeks, Biden’s transition team officially confirmed it on Wednesday. Power is best known for her “humanitarian” interventionism advocacy. As an aide at the Obama White House, she championed US intervention in Syria and Libya – where US-backed Islamist militants sought to overthrow secular governments – in the name of stopping “genocide.”
She went from teaching human rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008, and almost derailed her government career by calling his primary rival Hillary Clinton a “monster.” The off-the-record remark during an interview, which resulted in her resignation from the campaign, didn’t refer to Clinton’s foreign policy but campaign shenanigans, and Power was soon back in Obama’s good graces as a staffer on the National Security Council.
In 2013, after Clinton left the State Department to focus on her upcoming second bid for the presidency, Power was promoted to UN envoy. She took her advocacy to East River, repeatedly accusing Russia of aiding and abetting “atrocities” against the US-designated “moderate rebels” in Syria. One such exchange, in December 2016, saw her claim Russia, Syria and Iran were perpetrating “conquest and carnage in Aleppo.”