No time to go Wobbly, Barack: the international system isn't broken, and you can lead it.

• Author: Hirsh, Michael
• Position: Barack Obama - Cover story

Samantha Power is a tall, rangy redhead with the purposeful gait of the athlete she once wanted to be. She has a husky voice and often speaks in excited rushes of ideas, the words tumbling over each other. What animates Power more than anything else is her Cause, her "dream of American power being harnessed for good." She was haunted by her experience during the Bosnia war in the early 1990s, when, stringing for the Washington Post, she reported on the Serb attack on Srebrenica before the massacre of Bosnian Muslims there, but failed to get a story in the paper. Later she discovered, to her shock, that the tepid and slow response to the Balkans slaughter was in fact our best humanitarian effort ever, "the most robust of the century." The United States--the avatar of freedom, the beacon of human rights, the city upon the hill--"had never in its history intervened to stop genocide," she later wrote.

A sometime journalist, wonk, and professor of government at Harvard University, Power spent the rest of the 1990s propounding the idea that, under the leadership of the United States, the international system would soon advance to the point at which it would no longer tolerate atrocious human rights abuses, especially genocide. Her 600-page book on the subject, "A Problem From Hell," was turned down by nearly every major publisher. But after it won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2003, Power became a celebrity, at least within that intellectual demimonde of policy makers, academics, and think-tankers stretching from Washington to Harvard Square, and points beyond.

Power's Pulitzer was awarded in April 2003, just as the looting began to rage in the streets of Baghdad, providing the first glimpses of the nightmare that Iraq was to become. And as the months passed, Power watched her interventionist dreams turn to dust. In just a few years, she believed, President Bush had squandered the efforts of half a century, in which Washington carefully nurtured an international system and worked its way, fitfully, toward a vague doctrine of global leadership. While Bush talks of freedom, democracy, and human rights, most people see a savage, botched occupation, alignment with Arab autocrats against Iran, and waterboarding in secret prisons. Says Power: "Now we're neither the shining example, nor even competent meddlers. It's going to take a generation or so to reclaim American exceptionalism."

As she watched the 2004 presidential election returns come in, Power found herself sunk in "despondency" over the prospect of another four years of the same. Almost as disheartening as Bush's win was the fact that the Kerry campaign had shied away from forthrightly challenging him on the fundamentals of his "war on terror." For Power, as for so many, the one spark of hope was Barack Obama, whose ringing keynote speech had electrified the Democratic convention. Power was so impressed that she downloaded the speech onto her iPod. "I said, 'God, what does one do now?'" Power recalls. "I guess it's one of three things. One can just accept that all this will continue, one can run for office, or one can become Barack Obama's foreign policy adviser." A friend knew Obama's college roommate. "So I got a short email in early '05: 'Barack likes your book and would like to meet with you.'"

Their first meeting, several months later at a D.C. steakhouse, did not begin auspiciously. "His body language was not good," says Power. "He had no desire to be there at all. It was, 'Who the fuck is this person, this lily-livered Harvard softy, and tell me why I am meeting with her again?'" Still, Obama warmed up--it was supposed to be a forty-five-minute chat, but they ended up talking for three hours. "We sat down, and we started dinner. I was on my best behavior: I didn't, like, order my trademark Jack Daniels. And then we just started talking. It was vintage Obama: question after question after question, starting with, 'Who are you? I don't get it. Bosnia? Whaaa? That's weird.' It ended up being a very personal discussion, oddly enough, but everything led to policy. That's the way he comes to policy: What's your story, and why do you tick the way you do? ... He's what everybody says he is." Before long, Power says, she had "drunk the Kool-Aid" on Obama. "At the end of the dinner, we're walking out, and I said, 'I'd love to help you in any way I can.' He said, 'That'd be great, maybe we could do some big think on a smart, tough, and humane foreign policy.' I heard myself saying, 'Why don't I take a year off?'"

It wasn't as if Power didn't have other ways to spend her time. But for her, Obama represented nothing less than a chance to achieve her dream--to allow America to act as a force for good in the world--by rethinking the entire international security structure from the ground up. The Bush administration's lethal mixture of arrogance and incompetence, she believed, had so squandered American credibility and alienated potential allies that the old system, based on a combination of American military dominance and deference to multilateral decision-making bodies, was no longer viable. With Obama, she might begin to figure out a new one.

Of course, Power is too smart and nuanced a thinker not to recognize what was valuable about the old system. "Obama and I talked a lot about the phenomenon of throwing the baby out with the bathwater," she says. Power is finishing up a second book on a martyr to the dying dream of internationalism--Sergio Vieira de Mello, the rising United Nations star whose death by bombing in Iraq in August 2003 spelled another early disaster for the U.S. occupation. She says that one of the objects of her book is to "rescue the institutional memory" of successful international intervention efforts over the last twenty-five years of de Mello's extraordinary career. "But we're so despised around the world that when we show up at international institutions we're not listened to, even when we now bring good-faith arguments, like on intervening in Darfur," she says. "Whoever takes over in 2009 is inheriting this degree of contempt in the world. And that same person is going to be making a case for a wholly different approach to diplomacy and international institutions."

Anthony Lake reached a similar conclusion from a very different place, and a different generation. In many ways, Lake is Power's opposite: soft-spoken where she is impassioned, and so bland he seems to disappear into the woodwork. Lake went to Vietnam as a young Foreign Service official, and he describes himself as very like Alden Pyle, the dangerously idealistic protagonist of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, set in Vietnam during the 1950s. He was, in other words, a young proto-interventionist before the thirty-six-year-old Power was a gleam in her Irish mother's eye. It was Lake who, as President Clinton's national security adviser, conceived the closest thing the Clinton administration ever came up with to a post-cold war doctrine, declaring in a 1993 speech, "The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement--enlargement of the world's free community of market democracies."

Lake first heard of Obama in 2002, when the former Clintonite was in Chicago giving a speech. "Afterwards one of the people there said there was a young guy running for the Senate. He probably had no chance, but could I talk to him?" Like Power, Lake was simply bowled over. "You can't quote this, because it would sound like I'm gushing," he told me, before proceeding to gush over Obama's abilities (and later giving me permission to quote him). Most of all, however, he sees Obama's "new face" as a way of moving to a more "fundamental" reordering of the global system. The UN-dominated structure that rose after World War II is "something we can live without," he says. "We need to rethink the premises."

There's no doubt that Obama has the intellectual curiosity and self-confidence--not to mention the ideal public persona--to fundamentally reconsider American foreign policy. But at this point, for all his promise, he's still, in some sense, a cipher. After eight years in the Illinois Senate and two in Washington, his foreign policy thinking, unsurprisingly, remains largely unformed. That Power and Lake--both hard-bitten political veterans, not starstruck newcomers--each found themselves gravitating toward Obama on the basis of a speech, a dinner, or a phone call suggests the level of despair to which both had sunk. Bush, it...