理想と現実の狭間で

オバマ政権で国連大使を務めているSamantha Powerさんが今年最後のNew Yorkerで大きく取り上げられていました。12000語を超える長いレポートですが、この長さだから感じ取ることができる情報がつまっています。

Samantha Powerと言えば人道支援のために武力行使も辞さないリベラルのタカ派として有名ですが、オバマ政権は弱腰外交と批判されています。そのあたりの実情を丁寧にレポートしてくれています。Twitterやブログでわかったことを書くのは容易いですが、それを実行に移すのとは別問題です。そのような現実の壁の大きさとともに、希望を安易に捨てることなく格闘していくことの大変さをこの記事は痛感することができます。

PROFILES DECEMBER 22, 2014 ISSUE
IN THE LAND OF THE POSSIBLE
Samantha Power has the President’s ear. To what end?
BY EVAN OSNOS

オバマ大統領とは彼が上院議員だった頃からの付き合いで２００８年の選挙戦も協力しています。彼の著作にも彼女はコミットしていたようです。

In the acknowledgments of “The Audacity of Hope,” published while Obama was in the Senate, he wrote that Samantha Power “combed over each chapter as if it were hers.” At the time, she was a foreign-policy adviser in his office. Eight years later, many aides have left Obama’s Administration, but Power endures, in a role that is roughly equal parts envoy, protector, and, as she puts it, “pain in the ass.

Powerさんのすごいところは理想を声高に叫ぶだけでなく、現実的な実行力もあるところのようです。

Because of youth, gender, or disposition, Power has often been underestimated. Gérard Araud, the French Ambassador to Washington, who previously served at the U.N., told me, “I was expecting this sort of N.G.O. girl, considering her past, considering the book she wrote. Actually, she’s a nice mixture of liberal interventionism and Realpolitik.” A senior Administration official said, “It’s easy in some ways to dismiss someone like Samantha Power. Oh, she cares about the marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed! But what she’s managed to do is link the marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed to core national-security interests of the United States.”

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As Power has risen, she has acquired an eclectic range of contacts. “I don’t know if I will help her more by praising her or attacking her,” Henry Kissinger told me. He had classified her as “one of the liberals who know their emotions better than their analysis,” but, after a series of meals and a Yankees game, he has a different view. “She has an excellent analytical mind, and even on matters where I might have come to different conclusions I respected her analysis. Second, she knew the difference between being a professor and being a policymaker, so, when she analyzed contemporary problems, she and I didn’t differ all that much.”

この記事ではオバマ政権での彼女の役割、彼女の経歴とともに今年秋のエボラ対策で彼女が果たした役割を取り上げてくれています。New Yorkerの彼女の総括は以下のようになっています。

The outlines of her legacy were becoming clear: she had influenced a range of issues outside the center ring, including Ebola and the Central African Republic, but on the most essential crises of her time—Syria and Iraq—she had been forced to accept the limits of her ability to shape events. Power rejects the facile narrative that presents itself—the education, the chastening. “The way that kind of story is told is ‘She wrote the book, she was critical because she didn’t really understand how hard it was,’ ” she said. “And then the assumption is Eliza Doolittle learned how hard it is, and then that makes her less critical, or more accepting of crummy outcomes.” She argued, “You learn in government what the obstacles are. But that’s not so you can go take a nap. It’s so you can figure out how to scale them or work around them. Does one get a better sense about context and about impediments and about trade-offs in government? Absolutely. But those are not alibis—those are problems to be solved.”

「理想を失わずに現実と格闘する」、外野からあれこれいうのは楽ですが、実際に取り組むとなると本当に大変な仕事であることがわかります。