The World

There has been a certain amount of sniggering about the fact that it was Obama’s female advisers who were most prominent in pressing for military intervention in Libya, while the men hung back. Amongst the interventionists were the evocatively-named pair of Power and Slaughter – that is Samantha Power on the National Security Council and Anne-Marie Slaughter, who recently stepped down as head of the Policy Planning staff at the State Department and tweeted effectively from her new perch at Princeton. And then there was Susan Rice, the US ambassador at the UN and, finally (and decisively), Hillary Clinton.

The implication of all this is that it was the women who turned out to be the real men – prepared to get tough – while the men were wusses, who hung back. In this account, Obama is cast as the hesitant king, with Hillary as Lady Macbeth, hissing – “Infirm of purpose, hand me the dagger.”

Yet, if you re-examine this story, the sexual stereotypes hold up quite well. The female advisers who were pushing for intervention were not doing so because they were eager to see blood spilled; on the contrary, they feared that if the West did not intervene there would be a massacre in Benghazi. Samantha Power has written a prize-winning book called “A Problem from Hell”, all about America’s successive failures to stop genocides around the world, from Armenia to Rwanda. In her book, she criticises, Susan Rice (who was on Clinton’s NSC) for considering the effect on the mid-term elections of any American decision to intervene in Rwanda. But, this time around, Rice and Power were on the same side – pressing for action over Libya.

So it was the liberal interventionists, with women prominent amongst them, who exhibited the so-called “female” virtues – wanting to help those in distress. By contrast, the men who were most prominent in expressing scepticism about a Libyan intervention – Bob Gates, the defence secretary and Thomas Donilon at the NSC – were sceptical not because they are opposed to using military power, but because they are wary of expending resources in a conflict, in which the US has no direct, national-security interest. In other words, they were displaying not squeamishness, but indifference. So they are real men, after all. That’s a relief.