Some of Samantha Power’s old articles are circulating again following the news that she will replace Susan Rice as ambassador to the U.N. This 2003 New Republic article offers some insights into what is so very wrong with her thinking. She wrote:

After the squeamish moral relativism of the ’90s and the worrying ascent of copperhead isolationism within the Republican Party [bold mine-DL], there were two attractive aspects to Bush’s approach: He saw that evildoers littered the planet; and he saw that, like it or not, if the United States didn’t become police chief of the world, Americans, too, would pay a price.

Some of Power’s article went on to criticize Bush administration actions and U.S. foreign policy in potentially useful ways. Here I’m more interested in how someone could look back on the U.S. foreign policy debate in the ’90s and perceive either “squeamish moral relativism” or “copperhead isolationism.” The ’90s were a period of almost untrammeled American confidence in the superiority of our system and a widespread conviction that our political and economic models were valid and appropriate for the entire world. The ’90s also saw a great surge in moralistic foreign policy arguments. Clinton’s foreign policy was marked by relatively frequent military interventions in foreign countries that were usually justified in terms of “values” rather than interests. It tells us a lot about how completely Power sees the world in absolutist terms that she thinks that “squeamish moral relativism” was prevalent at that time.

As insulting epithets go, “copperhead isolationism” is a wonderful, historically illiterate two-fer. It implies treachery and disloyalty at the same time that it flings the tired “isolationist” insult. Of course, no such thing existed then. What was the reality of Republican foreign policy in the ’90s? For the most part, it was characterized by criticism of Clinton for being insufficiently aggressive in handling foreign threats and by mostly reliable support for Clinton’s decisions to take military action. There was some Republican resistance to intervention in Kosovo in the House, but it’s impossible to separate that from the general Republican anti-Clinton mania of the period and the constitutional objections to the lack of Congressional approval for the war. Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate were typically agitating for more aggressive measures in the Balkans and elsewhere than Clinton was willing to approve.

Power’s misreading of the ’90s is worth remembering because she places so much emphasis on remembering the past in her advice for improving future policy-making. If one wrongly believed that the great dangers in America during the ’90s were too much moral relativism and “isolationism,” one would be much more inclined to favor a foreign policy that was even more obsessed with “militant moralism” and meddling in the affairs of other nations. In fact, the ’90s were a period of hyper-activism on the part of the U.S., and the following decade continued and exacerbated that hyper-activism. If Power’s interpretation of that period is so far off, how could she possibly correct for its real errors?