Samantha Power Is The Next US Ambassador To UN, Replacing Susan Rice

Samantha Power, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Security Council aide, was tapped on Wednesday to succeed Susan Rice as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Rice is replacing Thomas Donilon, who resigned as national security adviser amid friction with other agencies over his reputation of being protective of President Barack Obama, the Washington Post reports. The Senate doesn't need to confirm Rice's new appointment.

The Post said in February that Power was a likely ambassador to the UN if Rice left that post. The Irish-born, Ivy League-educated Power won a Pulitzer for her 2002 book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” She worked for Obama when he was a U.S. Senator and was a senior foreign policy adviser on Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008. After that election, she worked for both the State Department and the U.S. Mission to the U.N.

Power is also credited with bringing the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan to Obama’s attention during his Senate term and is credited, along with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Rice, with helping to convince Obama to intervene in Libya. Her track record of intervening in genocidal situations could have implications for how she will handle the Syrian conflict.

Power holds an undergraduate degree from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. As a journalist, she covered the war in Bosnia for U.S. News & World Report, the Boston Globe, the Economist and the New Republic.

Her appointment as ambassador requires Senate confirmation.

The news of Donilon's resignation was first reported by the New York Times.

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