The Washington Independent published quite an interesting article about Samantha Power, formerly the top foreign policy adviser to Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama. The main point: Power is a member of a completely different generation of advisers than we’re used to. She “is a fierce advocate who relishes confrontation.” And her “bellicose words” highlight “the adversarial style of a new generation of Democratic foreign-policy mavens who have more in common with the raucous world of bloggers than the somber, oak-lined environs of the Council on Foreign Relations.”

The WI goes on to say that Power “has been notoriously frank with the media, shunning diplomatic circumlocutions in favor of brash assertions.”

Which eventually became her downfall, of course.

Though she is a Harvard professor, Power isn’t even really an academic. She’s an advocate who has taken a starring role in the intellectual wars of the past decade. Not for her slogging away, as did former secretary of state and Clinton chum Madeleine Albright, in the academic trenches writing dense articles about relations between the United States and NATO. Instead, like many in her generation of foreign-policy players, Power, 37, rose to prominence by way of journalism.

Her career testifies to the sway that journalists exercise in foreign policy— in Power’s case, it’s almost as though the English writer and grande dame Rebecca West had signed on to serve as advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. Like West, who traveled widely and wrote a classic work on the Balkans, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” Power garnered attention by covering the Balkans wars in the 1990s, denouncing, not the right, but the liberal Clinton administration for its passivity in both the Balkans and Rwanda. “Slobodan’s Willing Executioners,” was the title of a cover story she wrote for The New Republic. While the right was complaining that Clinton was doing too much abroad, the humanitarian left complained that he wasn’t doing enough.

In short, Power is a humanitarian interventionist. She believed, and continues to believe, that it’s America’s mission to help the afflicted around the globe by emphasizing human rights rather than traditional great power politics and spheres of influence. In her gripping book, “A Problem From Hell,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, Power amplified her critique of U.S. foreign policy all the way back to the Turkish genocide against the Armenians during World War I.

Which wasn’t a genocide at all, of course, but we’ll just ignore that typo.

The WI goes on to describe her as someone who “admires crusaders.” “Power’s idea of politics is as a battle to the finish for grand ideals.” And she sees herself as “a crusader for humanity.”

As such she has many admirers, but also many critics.

For me, let just say that it’s interesting that someone like Power was a top adviser to Barack Obama, in so far that he portrays himself as a pragmatist and as someone who wants to break with partisanship. Power represents a lot, but non-partisanship isn’t one of them.

The article seems to be written by someone who respects Power a great deal, but what I’m getting from it - and I bet that many like me share the feeling - isn’t that Power is a person to be respected: she’s a person who should never be in a position of power. She’s too ideological, and she conveniently ignores reality.

What people like Power forget is that we live in a Hobbesian world. America doesn’t owe the world anything, and the world owes America nothing. We all act in our self-interest.