Power may well prove to be the most controversial figure in the Obama administration. That a woman of her views should have the ear of the president is alarming, reminiscent as they are of the notorious conspiracy theories of yet another Harvard academic, Stephen Walt, and his co-author John Mearsheimer. Like them, she accuses the "Israel lobby" of manipulating US foreign policy for the benefit of the Jewish state. In a 2002 interview, she advocated "alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import" [ie American Jews] by ceasing to "service Israel's military" in order instead to "invest in the new state of Palestine".

In a New Statesman interview during the presidential campaign, Power said: "So much of it is about: ‘Is he going to be good for the Jews?'" So Power's priority within the NSC is to undermine US support for Israel. Bizarrely, she once advocated landing a "mammoth protection force" of US troops in Israel to save the Palestinians from "genocide". "You have to go in as if you're serious," she declared in 2002. She was deadly serious then. What about now?

The implications go far beyond the Middle East for, despite her claim to be a "humanitarian hawk", Power's rejection of "the so-called War on Terror" is not merely pragmatic, but principled. She believes that the Bush administration has cost America much more than its military reputation. "As my colleague Steve Walt has put it," she said, "we also no longer look like the country that put the man on the moon."

Power believes that America needs to be multilateralist and "European". Her latest book, a biography of the UN envoy to Iraq who was killed by Islamist terrorists, is subtitled Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World.