One of our leading Smart Diplomats, Samantha Power, earned widespread ridicule with this insight from a recent speech:

Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, hoped that a team of UN investigators — many of whom, presumably, have a longstanding relationship with Iranian leaders -- could write a report that would convince Iran to abandon its ally at the behest of the United States.

"We worked with the UN to create a group of inspectors and then worked for more than six months to get them access to the country on the logic that perhaps the presence of an investigative team in the country might deter future attacks," Power said at the Center for American Progress as she made the case for intervening in Syria.

"Or, if not, at a minimum, we thought perhaps a shared evidentiary base could convince Russia or Iran — itself a victim of Saddam Hussein's monstrous chemical weapons attacks in 1987-1988 — to cast loose a regime that was gassing it's people," she said.

Iran was going to turn on Syria and embrace the policies of the Great Satan? Putin was going to take his thumb out of Obama's eye? Does that sound naive? Well, yes, and Ms. Soft Power said so a bit later in her speech:

The international system that was founded in 1945 —a system we designed specifically to respond to the kinds of horrors we saw play out in World War II—has not lived up to its promise or its responsibilities in the case of Syria. And it is naive to think that Russia is on the verge of changing its position and allowing the UN Security Council to assume its rightful role as the enforcer of international peace and security.

The timing of her conversion is unclear - was it naive to think Russia might change its policies six months ago, or does she think the naivete only became obvious with recent developments?

It must be tough being that brilliant.