“If they’re allowed to bully they just bully more.”

If you can believe it, that's a quotation from Samantha Power.

Kyle Smith doesn't much care for a new movie about the "Final Year" of Obama diplomacy.

Actual events don’t align with the Rhodes-Obama rhetoric. Vladimir Putin, frustratingly, keeps failing to be bent by the Arc of History (™) and doing whatever he wants, seizing Crimea and abetting Bashar al-Assad. Perhaps he notices the nonstop signaling from the White House that there’s a new sheriff in town, and said sheriff thinks crime-fighters have been way too tough on outlaws. “The error that we may have made is Putin doesn’t seem to pursue Russia’s national interests. He pursues Putin’s interests,” Rhodes says. In other words, surprise! — Putin doesn’t share a liberal American Democrat’s vision about what’s best for Russia. Only liberal American Democrats would need seven and a half years to figure this out. Power, riding in the back of a car, marvels at Russia’s naughtiness: “If they’re allowed to bully they just bully more.” Funny how that works. Kerry, after Russia breaks the ceasefire in Aleppo in 2016: “It’s just so frustrating because we really had an agreement that could have worked. And unfortunately we have some people who didn’t want to cooperate.”

So The Final Year is about the Obama Doctrine, also known as hashtag diplomacy, also known as leading from behind, also known as voting “present” — also known as hands-off. That a lot of people can get killed while you’re wringing them is the movie’s unintended lesson. Summing up, I give you none other than Samantha “Soft” Power herself, who near the end of the doc says in a moment of sudden clarity: “My world is a world where you have 65 million displaced. Yemen and Syria and Iraq, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad, Central African Republic, Burundi, South Sudan, Darfur, you know, the list, Afghanistan, of course, Venezuela imploding . . . There are concerns about terrorism and there is a fear of the other and . . . all the trendlines — on democracy, right now, at least — are going in the wrong direction.”

If only she or her friends had held positions of authority, maybe they could have done something about some of that.