PanThe Drift... incredibly long, at forty chapters, and not tightly edited. It’s written in flat, workmanlike prose ... One hungers for an unusual insight in its 500-plus pages. Instead, there are passing mentions of mysterious anxiety attacks and a few stalled forays into personal therapy, but these feel like they were grafted on in response to a pointed editor’s note ... Power extracts no real lessons from the most intense foreign policy issues of those eight years [under Obama], which are flatly retold here. It is hard to tell what conclusions she draws from Libya, where she and other humanitarian hawks convinced Obama to intervene in 2011 and overthrow (by way of grotesque murder) the dictator Muamer Gaddafi. The country is wracked to this day by Islamist insurgencies, sectarian violence, and chaos ... She seems to have regarded inaction in Syria as less disgraceful ... Her account of such episodes—among the Obama administration’s worst foreign policy embarrassments—adds little to the public record ... her learned naiveté, ahistorical optimism, and warm embrace of military force could have emerged from no other country ... In the most interesting case studies in Power’s otherwise ultra perfunctory memoir, the Obama administration even made several productive \'humanitarian interventions,\' using 21st century instruments rather than 20th century ideas: The heroic effort to contain Ebola in Africa, for instance, or the air-drops of supplies to Yazidis under siege by ISIS.
