Ambassador Samantha Power’s Swan Song at the United Nations

Samantha Power held her farewell press conference as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations on January 13th. She used the press conference to follow up on the themes she had previously laid out in her detailed cabinet exit memo and in her remarks at the Security Council’s January 10th open debate on the maintenance of international peace and security. Ambassador Power trumpeted her view of the importance of the United Nations in addressing global crises and the Obama administration’s purported accomplishments in taking the lead, as she put it in her exit memo, to “leverage UN capabilities in service of international security, making the United States safer and stronger.” In a veiled warning to the incoming Trump administration and to a Congress increasingly disenchanted with the United Nations, Ambassador Power claimed that cutting U.S. funding to the United Nations would be "extremely detrimental" to U.S. interests