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Rice Said to Replace Donilon as Security Adviser
President Barack Obama elevated two trusted long-time advisers to fill out his second-term foreign policy team, naming United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice as his national security adviser and Samantha Power, an outspoken advocate of intervening in humanitarian crises, to succeed Rice.
Rice is a “fierce champion for justice and human dignity” still determined “to exercise our power wisely and deliberately,” Obama said today at a White House ceremony. Power, his former human-rights adviser, “knows that we have to stand up for the things that we believe in,” he said.
The choices put at the forefront of Obama’s national security team two women who share the president’s inclination to respond to foreign crises through international coalitions as the U.S. confronts a sectarian civil war in Syria, Iran’s nuclear program, and provocations from North Korea.
Republican critics’ successful efforts last December to block Rice from being nominated secretary of state are now answered by placing her in a potentially more influential role in the administration’s national-security apparatus. In her new post, she will meet with the president daily.
Rice, 48, doesn’t need confirmation by the Senate, though Power will. White House press secretary Jay Carney said the administration didn’t anticipate a contentious process.
Tom Donilon, the current White House national security adviser, plans to leave in early July after more than four years. Obama and Donilon have been discussing his departure since late last year, Carney said, and Donilon was asked to stay as the president put in place a new team, also including Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
[h=2]‘Liberal Interventionists’[/h]Rice and Power, 42, are both “hard-headed liberal interventionists,” said Karl Inderfurth, a senior adviser at the Center for International Studies in Washington. The two women pressed Obama to intervene in Libya to stop atrocities deposed leader Muammar Qaddafi threatened against rebels. Even so, they are unlikely to shift thinking in the White House on intervention in Syria, Inderfurth said.
“While they would be temperamentally inclined to take action in circumstances like that they also know that President Obama is very wary of getting America involved in new foreign interventions with American boots on the ground and uncertain outcomes,” said Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of state who served with Rice on President Bill Clinton’s national security team.
Rice and Power were both on Obama’s foreign policy team when he was an underdog in the 2008 Democratic primaries. Power has been with Obama since his first year in the Senate. Rice broke with the Clinton team to back Obama over Hillary Clinton.
[h=2]‘Monster’ Comment[/h]Both also have postponed personal ambition to deflect controversy from Obama. Power resigned from the Obama campaign after she was quoted calling Hillary Clinton “a monster” by a Scottish newspaper. Rice gave up her ambition to be secretary of state late last year when Republican senators threatened to block the nomination over public explanations she gave for the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.
The announcement may underscore a recent political shift by the president to challenge congressional Republicans more directly as both sides prepare for the 2014 midterm elections.
Yesterday, Obama named three nominees to vacancies on U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and essentially dared Senate Republicans to filibuster their confirmation, accusing the opposition party of obstructionism.
[h=2]Libya Revolt[/h]Rice’s tenure at the UN include supporting the revolt in Libya, a more measured response to the uprising in Syria and negotiating with Russia and China for sanctions on Iran.
Her four years at the UN revealed little of her own views on issues such as cyber-espionage, the administration’s military shift to Asia, and Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“Rice has sometimes shown impatience with Security Council members, including her European allies, that she believes to be posturing or pursuing wrong-headed political strategies,” said Richard Gowan, associate director of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation.
“She’ll be similarly tough on diplomatic nonsense,” whether it’s coming from the U.S. or abroad, Gowan said.
Rice has tussled with Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin. Over the years, Churkin faulted Rice for her “Stanford dictionary of expletives” while she publicly accused him of “bogus claims” that the U.S. sought regime change in Libya. Their duels spilled over frequently into Security Council business.
[h=2]Iran Sanctions[/h]Rice was able to secure only one additional round of sanctions against Iran. Since NATO’s intervention in Libya toppled Qaddafi, a longtime client of the Soviet Union, Russia has vetoed anything that smacked of meddling in Syria, another Soviet and Russian ally and arms customer.
In choosing Power to replace Rice at the UN, Obama is tapping a champion of the interventionist human-rights doctrine known as Responsibility to Protect.
Rice, for her part, said in a December interview that she was sober and realistic about the challenges in the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring revolts.
Power and Rice would favor a more muscular approach to the conflict in Syria than the president does, said Fred Hof, a former U.S. special envoy on Syria and now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group.
Even in their new positions, though, they aren’t likely to sway the president, he said.
“I don’t think the personnel change changes the way the president processes all this stuff,” Hof said in a telephone interview. “He’s really reluctant to use force here, even in the context of stopping war crimes.”
[h=2]Negotiated Transition[/h]Both women “fully support the president’s desire to see a negotiated transition from family rule to rule of law” in Syria, Hof said. “And both of them understand that Assad’s calculation is based 100 percent on the combat situation on the ground, which he thinks he is winning,” he said, referring to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.
“Rice will move smoothly into the job, but don’t assume anything about Syria,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington public policy research organization.
Rice resists a one-size-fits-all policy on intervention. In March 2011, she sought to change Obama’s mind on the need to use military force to oust Qaddafi and helped convince recalcitrant colleagues on the UN Security Council, from rising powers India and Brazil to veto-wielding Russia and China, to abstain on a resolution that allowed for all necessary measures to be used to protect civilians in Libya.
[h=2]‘Power Politics’[/h]“Rice has shown a considerable skill for hard-nosed, big power politics,” Gowan said.
Libya should have been her finest hour, yet that achievement was tarnished barely 18 months later, when she was the front-runner to succeed Clinton as secretary of state.
Her Sunday talk show comments about the Sept. 11 attacks in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens being the byproduct of spontaneous protests rather than an act of terrorism made her a lightning rod for Republican criticism and eventually forced her to step away from a job she had coveted.
Rice is an Africa expert who wrote a thesis on minority-ruled South Africa and, at the UN, shepherded South Sudan’s path to independence.
Her most direct dealings with Asia have been in two rounds of negotiations to tighten sanctions on North Korea -- the first in 2009, when the late dictator Kim Jong Il was in power, and most recently in March in response to a series of nuclear provocations by Kim’s son and successor, Kim Jong-Un.
[h=2]‘Over-Hyped’[/h]“Rice has repeatedly over-hyped the scope of U.S. and UN sanctions achieved against North Korea’s repeated violations of Security Council resolutions,” said Bruce Klingner, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Korea desk and an analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
Both Rice-crafted resolutions, offered as evidence that the new Chinese leadership had turned away from North Korea, were merely incremental and didn’t live up to claims that they were exceptional and would significantly impede North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, he said.
On the Middle East, Rice’s stance has been pro-Israel. She mounted a campaign to stop a Palestinian effort to win non-member observer state status in the General Assembly. Her first veto at the Security Council was against a resolution condemning Israel’s settlements.
[h=2]Twitter Message[/h]On the eve of Obama’s announcement of her new job, Rice sent a message on the Twitter micro-blogging site about attending a gathering of the pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee: “On my way to @AIPAC’s dinner in NYC. Looking forward to speaking about US commitment to #Israel, spanning generations and political parties.”
While Secretary of State Kerry has resurrected a form of shuttle diplomacy to try to resuscitate Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Rice hasn’t emphasized the subject at the UN.
Rice’s relationship with Obama, coupled with White House control of major defense and foreign policy decisions, may give her an advantage over Kerry, who’s more than 20 years her senior, and Defense Secretary Hagel, who was wounded twice in Vietnam before she started kindergarten.
“Obviously I disagree w/POTUS appointment of Susan Rice as Nat’l Security Adviser, but I’ll make every effort to work w/ her on imp’t issues,” Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said in a message posted on Twitter, referring to the president of the U.S.
[h=2]China Talks[/h]Donilon recently returned from China, where he met with officials to pave the way for Obama’s talks in California later this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping on an agenda that will include computer hacking.
Donilon, 58, has been national security adviser since Obama took office in January 2009. Donilon preferred working behind the scenes and focused largely on counterterrorism in the world’s trouble spots, especially in Asia and Africa. He played a key role in the U.S. military raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Donilon more recently waded into the foreign-policy thicket of U.S.-Chinese relations and the allegations of Chinese hacking of Pentagon computers as well as intrusions in U.S. businesses.
In a speech in March, Donilon said China’s campaign of cyber-espionage threatens to derail Obama’s goal of improving ties. He warned that it was time to hold the country accountable for “a growing challenge” to economic relations.
[h=2]Timetable[/h]Donilon is staying on until Obama completes his meetings with the Chinese president, attends Group of Eight meetings of industrial powers in Ireland, travels to Germany and completes a trip to Africa by early July.
Power left the White House in February after four years as special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights at the National Security Council.
Senators will have a chance to press Power for her views on such issues as Syria, Mali, the Sahel, and Iran during her confirmation hearing. “They clearly will not have that opportunity with Ambassador Rice,” Conley said.
At the White House, Power was a public advocate of government efforts to halt human-rights abuses and pressed Obama for U.S. intervention in Libya on humanitarian grounds. She called for limited military force to achieve humanitarian ends in cases such as Bosnia and Rwanda. She opposed the war in Iraq, in part because the U.S. didn’t make an issue of Saddam Hussein’s human-rights record.
[h=2]Pulitzer Prize[/h]Power won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for her book “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” which examined U.S. foreign policy toward genocide in the 20th century.
She’s a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. She was a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she taught courses on U.S. foreign policy, human rights and extremism, and where she was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
She was a columnist at Time magazine and reported from such places as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
To contact the reporters on this story: Mike Dorning in Washington at [email protected]; Flavia Krause-Jackson in New York at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Steven Komarow at [email protected]
Enlarge image
[h=3]Obama Picks Rice as National Security Adviser; Power Named to UN[/h]
President Barack Obama speaks as former aide Samantha Power, left, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, right, and incumbent National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, second left, listen during a personnel announcement at the Rose Garden of the White House on June 5, 2013 in Washington, DC.
President Barack Obama speaks as former aide Samantha Power, left, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, right, and incumbent National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, second left, listen during a personnel announcement at the Rose Garden of the White House on June 5, 2013 in Washington, DC. Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images
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[h=3]Donilon Said to Leave, Rice to Take National Security Role[/h]
President Barack Obama makes a point during one in a series of meetings in the Situation Room with National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
President Barack Obama makes a point during one in a series of meetings in the Situation Room with National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
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Rice Said to Replace Donilon as Security Adviser
President Barack Obama elevated two trusted long-time advisers to fill out his second-term foreign policy team, naming United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice as his national security adviser and Samantha Power, an outspoken advocate of intervening in humanitarian crises, to succeed Rice.
Rice is a “fierce champion for justice and human dignity” still determined “to exercise our power wisely and deliberately,” Obama said today at a White House ceremony. Power, his former human-rights adviser, “knows that we have to stand up for the things that we believe in,” he said.
The choices put at the forefront of Obama’s national security team two women who share the president’s inclination to respond to foreign crises through international coalitions as the U.S. confronts a sectarian civil war in Syria, Iran’s nuclear program, and provocations from North Korea.
Republican critics’ successful efforts last December to block Rice from being nominated secretary of state are now answered by placing her in a potentially more influential role in the administration’s national-security apparatus. In her new post, she will meet with the president daily.
Rice, 48, doesn’t need confirmation by the Senate, though Power will. White House press secretary Jay Carney said the administration didn’t anticipate a contentious process.
Tom Donilon, the current White House national security adviser, plans to leave in early July after more than four years. Obama and Donilon have been discussing his departure since late last year, Carney said, and Donilon was asked to stay as the president put in place a new team, also including Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
[h=2]‘Liberal Interventionists’[/h]Rice and Power, 42, are both “hard-headed liberal interventionists,” said Karl Inderfurth, a senior adviser at the Center for International Studies in Washington. The two women pressed Obama to intervene in Libya to stop atrocities deposed leader Muammar Qaddafi threatened against rebels. Even so, they are unlikely to shift thinking in the White House on intervention in Syria, Inderfurth said.
“While they would be temperamentally inclined to take action in circumstances like that they also know that President Obama is very wary of getting America involved in new foreign interventions with American boots on the ground and uncertain outcomes,” said Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of state who served with Rice on President Bill Clinton’s national security team.
Rice and Power were both on Obama’s foreign policy team when he was an underdog in the 2008 Democratic primaries. Power has been with Obama since his first year in the Senate. Rice broke with the Clinton team to back Obama over Hillary Clinton.
[h=2]‘Monster’ Comment[/h]Both also have postponed personal ambition to deflect controversy from Obama. Power resigned from the Obama campaign after she was quoted calling Hillary Clinton “a monster” by a Scottish newspaper. Rice gave up her ambition to be secretary of state late last year when Republican senators threatened to block the nomination over public explanations she gave for the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.
The announcement may underscore a recent political shift by the president to challenge congressional Republicans more directly as both sides prepare for the 2014 midterm elections.
Yesterday, Obama named three nominees to vacancies on U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and essentially dared Senate Republicans to filibuster their confirmation, accusing the opposition party of obstructionism.
[h=2]Libya Revolt[/h]Rice’s tenure at the UN include supporting the revolt in Libya, a more measured response to the uprising in Syria and negotiating with Russia and China for sanctions on Iran.
Her four years at the UN revealed little of her own views on issues such as cyber-espionage, the administration’s military shift to Asia, and Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“Rice has sometimes shown impatience with Security Council members, including her European allies, that she believes to be posturing or pursuing wrong-headed political strategies,” said Richard Gowan, associate director of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation.
“She’ll be similarly tough on diplomatic nonsense,” whether it’s coming from the U.S. or abroad, Gowan said.
Rice has tussled with Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin. Over the years, Churkin faulted Rice for her “Stanford dictionary of expletives” while she publicly accused him of “bogus claims” that the U.S. sought regime change in Libya. Their duels spilled over frequently into Security Council business.
[h=2]Iran Sanctions[/h]Rice was able to secure only one additional round of sanctions against Iran. Since NATO’s intervention in Libya toppled Qaddafi, a longtime client of the Soviet Union, Russia has vetoed anything that smacked of meddling in Syria, another Soviet and Russian ally and arms customer.
In choosing Power to replace Rice at the UN, Obama is tapping a champion of the interventionist human-rights doctrine known as Responsibility to Protect.
Rice, for her part, said in a December interview that she was sober and realistic about the challenges in the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring revolts.
Power and Rice would favor a more muscular approach to the conflict in Syria than the president does, said Fred Hof, a former U.S. special envoy on Syria and now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group.
Even in their new positions, though, they aren’t likely to sway the president, he said.
“I don’t think the personnel change changes the way the president processes all this stuff,” Hof said in a telephone interview. “He’s really reluctant to use force here, even in the context of stopping war crimes.”
[h=2]Negotiated Transition[/h]Both women “fully support the president’s desire to see a negotiated transition from family rule to rule of law” in Syria, Hof said. “And both of them understand that Assad’s calculation is based 100 percent on the combat situation on the ground, which he thinks he is winning,” he said, referring to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.
“Rice will move smoothly into the job, but don’t assume anything about Syria,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington public policy research organization.
Rice resists a one-size-fits-all policy on intervention. In March 2011, she sought to change Obama’s mind on the need to use military force to oust Qaddafi and helped convince recalcitrant colleagues on the UN Security Council, from rising powers India and Brazil to veto-wielding Russia and China, to abstain on a resolution that allowed for all necessary measures to be used to protect civilians in Libya.
[h=2]‘Power Politics’[/h]“Rice has shown a considerable skill for hard-nosed, big power politics,” Gowan said.
Libya should have been her finest hour, yet that achievement was tarnished barely 18 months later, when she was the front-runner to succeed Clinton as secretary of state.
Her Sunday talk show comments about the Sept. 11 attacks in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens being the byproduct of spontaneous protests rather than an act of terrorism made her a lightning rod for Republican criticism and eventually forced her to step away from a job she had coveted.
Rice is an Africa expert who wrote a thesis on minority-ruled South Africa and, at the UN, shepherded South Sudan’s path to independence.
Her most direct dealings with Asia have been in two rounds of negotiations to tighten sanctions on North Korea -- the first in 2009, when the late dictator Kim Jong Il was in power, and most recently in March in response to a series of nuclear provocations by Kim’s son and successor, Kim Jong-Un.
[h=2]‘Over-Hyped’[/h]“Rice has repeatedly over-hyped the scope of U.S. and UN sanctions achieved against North Korea’s repeated violations of Security Council resolutions,” said Bruce Klingner, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Korea desk and an analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
Both Rice-crafted resolutions, offered as evidence that the new Chinese leadership had turned away from North Korea, were merely incremental and didn’t live up to claims that they were exceptional and would significantly impede North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, he said.
On the Middle East, Rice’s stance has been pro-Israel. She mounted a campaign to stop a Palestinian effort to win non-member observer state status in the General Assembly. Her first veto at the Security Council was against a resolution condemning Israel’s settlements.
[h=2]Twitter Message[/h]On the eve of Obama’s announcement of her new job, Rice sent a message on the Twitter micro-blogging site about attending a gathering of the pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee: “On my way to @AIPAC’s dinner in NYC. Looking forward to speaking about US commitment to #Israel, spanning generations and political parties.”
While Secretary of State Kerry has resurrected a form of shuttle diplomacy to try to resuscitate Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Rice hasn’t emphasized the subject at the UN.
Rice’s relationship with Obama, coupled with White House control of major defense and foreign policy decisions, may give her an advantage over Kerry, who’s more than 20 years her senior, and Defense Secretary Hagel, who was wounded twice in Vietnam before she started kindergarten.
“Obviously I disagree w/POTUS appointment of Susan Rice as Nat’l Security Adviser, but I’ll make every effort to work w/ her on imp’t issues,” Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said in a message posted on Twitter, referring to the president of the U.S.
[h=2]China Talks[/h]Donilon recently returned from China, where he met with officials to pave the way for Obama’s talks in California later this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping on an agenda that will include computer hacking.
Donilon, 58, has been national security adviser since Obama took office in January 2009. Donilon preferred working behind the scenes and focused largely on counterterrorism in the world’s trouble spots, especially in Asia and Africa. He played a key role in the U.S. military raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Donilon more recently waded into the foreign-policy thicket of U.S.-Chinese relations and the allegations of Chinese hacking of Pentagon computers as well as intrusions in U.S. businesses.
In a speech in March, Donilon said China’s campaign of cyber-espionage threatens to derail Obama’s goal of improving ties. He warned that it was time to hold the country accountable for “a growing challenge” to economic relations.
[h=2]Timetable[/h]Donilon is staying on until Obama completes his meetings with the Chinese president, attends Group of Eight meetings of industrial powers in Ireland, travels to Germany and completes a trip to Africa by early July.
Power left the White House in February after four years as special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights at the National Security Council.
Senators will have a chance to press Power for her views on such issues as Syria, Mali, the Sahel, and Iran during her confirmation hearing. “They clearly will not have that opportunity with Ambassador Rice,” Conley said.
At the White House, Power was a public advocate of government efforts to halt human-rights abuses and pressed Obama for U.S. intervention in Libya on humanitarian grounds. She called for limited military force to achieve humanitarian ends in cases such as Bosnia and Rwanda. She opposed the war in Iraq, in part because the U.S. didn’t make an issue of Saddam Hussein’s human-rights record.
[h=2]Pulitzer Prize[/h]Power won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for her book “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” which examined U.S. foreign policy toward genocide in the 20th century.
She’s a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. She was a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she taught courses on U.S. foreign policy, human rights and extremism, and where she was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
She was a columnist at Time magazine and reported from such places as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
To contact the reporters on this story: Mike Dorning in Washington at [email protected]; Flavia Krause-Jackson in New York at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Steven Komarow at [email protected]
Enlarge image
[h=3]Obama Picks Rice as National Security Adviser; Power Named to UN[/h]
President Barack Obama speaks as former aide Samantha Power, left, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, right, and incumbent National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, second left, listen during a personnel announcement at the Rose Garden of the White House on June 5, 2013 in Washington, DC. Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Enlarge image
[h=3]Donilon Said to Leave, Rice to Take National Security Role[/h]
President Barack Obama makes a point during one in a series of meetings in the Situation Room with National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza