Interview
CHRIS WALLACE: Let’s start with Ukraine – the big issue. Your Agency – USAID – has provided more than $12 billion to that country since Russia invaded. What does that money going for and how are you doing in keeping up with the destruction that Vladimir Putin has unleashed?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, USAID’s job is to work with our Ukrainian partners, when the energy grid is hit, to get it back up as quickly as possible. We work in the food sector to try to ensure that grain that has been backed up because of Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea, and even now it's kind of temperamental relationship with letting grain out, we need to diversify and make sure that the Ukrainians can move grain into Europe by river, by barge, by road, by truck –
WALLACE: And are you keeping up with Vladimir Putin’s –
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: I think so. I do think so. And it’s not us keeping up, it’s the Ukrainians and we’re there to support and make sure that they can – they have the generators and the boilers and the transformers and the substations to replace. So, we go hunting and foraging on the open market to try to get them the supplies they need but they’re the ones that are out there on the frontlines with their flak jackets and their helmets, you know, trying to replace that which has been destroyed. But Ukrainian morale now, and its resolve, I think is greater than it was even on February 24th when Russia first invaded.
WALLACE: As I mentioned, $12 billion so far from USAID, but you hear a lot from people in the country, especially GOP officials, that instead of spending money on other countries, including Ukraine, we should spend more at home, and here is a top Republican House official. Take a look.
[audio clip]
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Look, the stakes could not be higher and the consequences of walking away from naked aggression in 2023. For the cause of freedom. For the cause of our own freedom. For the defense of Europe. I think people know about villainy and what happens when villainy goes unchecked, and to have a leader of a superpower – or at least in a country with a superpower-sized military – allowed with impunity to just go take huge chunks of neighbor, even conquer an entire neighbor. We know from not-too-distant history, what the consequences of walking away from that would be for America and for U.S. interest and the American people.
WALLACE: One of the reasons I was looking forward to this conversation is because it seems to me that over the course of your career, you embodied the inherent tension between the calculations people make when they are talking about principle from the outside, versus the calculations they have to make when they are actually responsible for policy, for the effect on the ground. How different is it when you’re on the inside?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: I think I definitely wear the work. You know, I carry it with me, and I didn’t as a journalist in seeking to describe what was happening and what the consequences of American foreign policy were in the hopes of influencing American foreign policy. Now I’m in the room where it happens, as they say, and you know, bringing that same advocacy and that same spirit to bear, but now having this toolkit to actually deploy real resources and try to bring in the private sector and other actors to care about problems that ultimately are coming home to roost more and more, whether climate change or pandemics or other transnational threats. So, the stakes for me, as an American, as a mother, as a citizen, are very, very high as they are for all of us in figuring out how we manage these problems abroad, as a way of looking out for our national security here at home.
WALLACE: Is it true that when you were a member of the Obama administration, that the President sometimes used to say, you get on my nerves, and especially when you were pushing him about intervening in Syria? Yes, Samantha, we’ve all read your book.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Yeah, that did happen, although you can get President Obama’s own accounting of that. But at the same time, he was the one, if I wasn’t in the room, if for some reason I’d been left off what they call “the manifest” by someone or some force of nature, he’d be like, “where’s Sam?” You know, wanting — remember he prided himself on the kind of team of rivals idea and wanting to see these debates play out in front of him.
WALLACE: I want to sort of drill down into this tension between principle and power, inside and outside, and let’s go back, let’s rewind to the 90s when you were a war correspondent covering the conflict in Bosnia, and a few years after that, you wrote that book that Barack Obama said, everybody had read. “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”, which won the Pulitzer Prize. You documented U.S. inaction in atrocities, even genocide in Bosnia and Cambodia, and in this case, in Rwanda. You said that the U.S. had a “responsibility to protect.” What did you mean by that? And why did you conclude, back then, that the U.S. had done so little in so many cases?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, I think the track record, the history, was fairly clear, in the list, the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, we all have terrible regrets about who was able to come to the United States, not taking more refugees, maybe not bombing the train tracks, big debates about that. And in Rwanda, as I mentioned in that clip that I have not seen, you know, over a hundred days for the main policy response to have been to take UN peacekeepers out, rather than to seek reinforcement or to try to sanction or put in place an arms embargo, or any one of a number of tools. And I think that was my point outside of government and remains my point in many government meetings, but luckily one, I think, that is now much more universally embraced, which is when atrocities happen, when human rights abuses happen at scale, just as when we have a, you know, more traditional security threat, we have a toolbox.
WALLACE: But, I would suggest that Samantha Power in 1995, or 2003, was, is, different than the Samantha Power — I’ll fast forward to 2013 when Barack Obama nominates you to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and here you are in your Senate confirmation hearing.
So, the question I guess I have is, from the 90s to 2013 and now 2023, have you taken a more
nuanced view? Because you emphasize there, that while there’s a national interest in responding to atrocities and genocide, you also emphasize, not always militarily.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Every case has a context. And it is the responsibility of advocates and writers, as well as policymakers, to take those contexts into account. So, have I changed? Of course, I hope I’ve grown, I hope I’m more sophisticated in understanding what works in what circumstance. You have to look at each case and the toolkit that exists, and the toolkit is much more challenging today than it was then.
WALLACE: I want to look — examine the two cases, one where the U.S. did intervene, one where it didn’t and see what the lessons are from those. First of all, the decision to intervene in Libya’s civil war in 2011. You were a member of the Obama National Security Council at the time, you were one of the strongest voices who persuaded him to join with other countries to stop Muammar Gaddafi. I asked him about Libya near the end of his presidency. Take a look. After we intervened in Libya and stopped the Civil War and took down Muammar Gaddafi, rival militias fought for years, ISIS set up an operation in Libya. And by the end of his presidency, Obama said the Libya mission didn’t work. Do you agree with that?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, it succeeded in the short term in stopping Gaddafi from carrying out his threat to exterminate, in his own words, the rats, the opposition. So that’s no small thing. But, I mean, there’s no question that the chaos that ensued, the fracturing, the inability for the interim authorities and the perennial interim authorities, and then the elected government to consolidate, you know, security over the country that has, you know, made life incredibly difficult for the people of Libya. The deep-seated cleavages that Gaddafi had helped perpetuate by not allowing for debate and political pluralism erupted into the kind of violence that we have seen.
WALLACE: 300,000 civilians were killed in the civil war in Syria. You call — when you were at the UN — you called the President Assad and what Russia were doing to the people of Aleppo, one of the headquarters of the resistance, you called it barbarism and absolute evil. Take a look. And yet, President Obama refused to intervene militarily and even ignored his own red line after Syria used chemical weapons against civilians. Was that a mistake? Should we have intervened?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, I think President Obama made a calculus borne to some extent, of what we were just arguing in, the Libya context, which is that fundamentally on the ground, there has to be a certain unity in order for an intervention to be more than stopgap. And I think that was a very reasonable judgment to come to.
WALLACE: Does Samantha Power think we should have intervened to try to stop the slaughter of 300,000 civilians and the devastation of parts of that country?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: I have to just say my focus today really is on the atrocities of the present. I have, again, written plenty of this. This is not about Samantha Power. This is about what can the United States of America do in the face of very significant geopolitical threats, in the face of malign actors who increasingly have the support from very large, well-resourced financiers, what can the United States of America do, in order to mitigate the human consequences of brutality, bring peace at a time when conflict, we have more conflict today than we’ve had at any point since the end of the Cold War. And in order to see these trends that I think are worrying all of us, where democracy is sort of on its back heel, that also entails being much more aggressive in supporting reformers. We can actually set countries up to not find themselves in the crosshairs of violence.
WALLACE: Let’s go back to Bosnia in the 90s. You said at that time that you wished you worked at the State Department so that you could resign to protest U.S. inaction. And I guess the question I have is, when you were the UN ambassador, in 2016, why did you choose not to resign over what was going on in Syria and the decision by the Obama administration not to intervene?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Because I had the incredible privilege, as I do now, of working on a given day to try to improve conditions in dozens of countries. And when I was UN ambassador, again, at the risk of going back, when there’s so much to talk about that’s happening in the present, when I was UN ambassador that was preventing mass atrocities in Central African Republic, it was launching a campaign to get female political prisoners out of jail, which was shockingly successful given the circumstances at the time, it was helping John Kerry negotiate the Paris Climate Accords, it was bringing an Ebola epidemic in West Africa to an end just by mobilizing UN –
WALLACE: So, there’s a bigger picture is what you’re saying.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: There — I mean, in any given day, as I like to tell my team and tell myself, there’s always something we can do that is useful, that is helpful. But that is a privilege I have in, you know, being so fortunate to be serving where I can see definitely a bigger field than when I was living under siege in Sarajevo in my early 20s.
WALLACE: I want to talk now about you. You grew up in Ireland, you came to this country when you were nine, and you say that you became American, as you put it, playing sports. And even in college, you say, your ambition was to be a sportscaster or as you put it, the next Bob Costas. Really?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Yes [laughs]. Well, once I couldn’t play professional sports, which became very clear early, and once my college sports career sort of flamed out a little bit, that was the next best thing, right, was to –
WALLACE: Look at you here. So, you were a little — were you a little leaguer here?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Yeah, but my hands are not together in the way that they might be – That’s a horrifying –
WALLACE: Was it Ty Cobb or some–? There was some great player who –
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: There was, but it certainly wasn’t me. But no, I loved — it was a way of fitting in. It was, every immigrant I think finds their currency. And for me it was to rattle off RBI, ERA, statistics. I moved to Pittsburgh, where the Pirates were winning the World Series, the Steelers were winning the Super Bowl. So, I went to college, I was part of a team that had a sports talk show. I did play-by-play for the college basketball team, and some color commentary for the baseball team and that’s what I wanted to do. But history interrupted and I found myself very moved by world events and detoured from that. But I took the journalism that I’d learned to be a sports journalist and then parlayed it into, at least trying to learn how to cover the war in Bosnia.
WALLACE: So, you met your husband, legal scholar Cass Sunstein, in the 2008 campaign. And there you are on your rainy wedding day.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Ireland. That’s Ireland. It will shock you to hear that’s a wet day in Ireland.
WALLACE: You gave your two children very Irish names: Declan and Rian. But around the time you were courting, your husband wrote a book in which he said that there should be no marriage, government should get out of the marriage business, and it should all be domestic partnerships. What did you think about that? Particularly, at a point when you’re about to get married.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: When you are married to Cass Sunstein, who writes as prolifically, and as often, provocatively, as he does, you do not get in the business of parsing his latest thought experiment or his latest missive. I’m not going to comment on my private back and forth with my husband. I think I already — on the way over to this interview I was arguing with him about one of the things he’s writing now. So, no more — he speaks for himself.
WALLACE: I want to take a sad turn here. You say the worst day in your professional life was in 2016 when you went to Cameroon to visit a refugee camp, and your motorcade struck and killed a six-year- old boy. How terrible was that?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: I mean, I think anybody can imagine what that would be like. It was the worst day in my professional, my personal life. I mean, it was — you ask yourself had we not come to bring support to these communities, you know with this little boy, would he still be playing, you know, out in the streets?
WALLACE: Let me just pick up here because you didn’t know, you were in another SUV. You find out and you say, I got to go back, I’ve got to go back to the home of Toussaint, that little boy. And your security team says far too dangerous, Boko Haram, other groups that are around, we can’t retrack, retrace our steps. And you insisted on it and you went back.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: I did. Yeah. I mean, I don’t think — I think anybody would have gone back. And to me, a family that is grieving in the moment, I mean, again, there’s no words really to describe that, to see, Toussaint’s siblings and to know all that they’d be missing, as they went ahead. And, you know, we have done our best in that community to make sure that things that the community was lacking, you know, that they had, and that they could remember the boy, also for what came to exist that wouldn’t have existed but for his short life on the Earth. And — but it was devastating, and, so I try to find motivation in all that is difficult. And, again, above all, the difficulty for his family is something that I know they’re living with to this day.
WALLACE: Thank you.