Transcript
MOLLY JONG-FAST: Samantha Power is the Administrator of USAID. Welcome to Fast Politics, Samantha Power.
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Great to be here.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: We have so much to talk about. First, I wanted to talk to you about what is the sort of most recent thing that you guys have been working on. Which is the situation in Ukraine. Can you talk to us a little bit about what – it's a year and that's been a very important moment, for a lot of reasons, and including in the refugee crisis.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Just stepping back, it's a year since Putin gratuitously decided to inflict brutality and tried to take over a sovereign member of the United Nations, and a year in which President Biden rallied the democracies of the world, but not only the democracies of the world, in more than 140 countries at the UN, to condemn the invasion multiple times now, which I know from having been a UN Ambassador is not easy, because people's interests pay, the intimidation and pressure that the Russian Federation places on countries not to vote, to do something that might to the outsider seem kind of symbolic, which is a vote against Russia, is pretty hard for small countries to withstand particularly those who are in vulnerable parts of the world.
So, the coalition is held really strong, as President Biden often talks about. Putin went in thinking he would take Ukraine in a matter of days and also thought he would weaken NATO and divide the world. And it's really been quite the contrary, basically, just about everything that Putin thought would happen has not happened and its opposite has happened. In terms of USAID, which is the part that I get to work on every day, and I feel just really fortunate to be in this job at this time. We are touching a lot of aspects of the war and in a way that a lot of Americans probably aren't that aware of.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: Can you back up for a second and explain? Because I don't know that everybody knows what USAID is.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: USAID is the world's premier development and humanitarian agency. And we basically do everything from respond to humanitarian emergencies – sending Disaster Assistance Response Teams, like we just did, in response to the earthquake in Syria and Türkiye – figuring out in a sense, where we spend taxpayer resources, which you mentioned, which organizations we give them those resources to feeding people, providing medical care, providing mental health services to women who have suffered sexual violence, you name it. So, that's all in the emergency space.
And then in the so called development space, we're doing everything from vaccinating the world, as we did over the course the last couple of years – the developing countries, I should say, particularly – to investing in food security to make sure that farmers actually have access to seeds that are more drought and heat resistant, given what's the climate change that is walloping so many countries period, or so many communities period, but especially those living on the margins are the hardest hit as is so often the case. And then we do democracy support, helping countries build independent media sectors. In Ukraine, well before this invasion, we helped the country build up its anti-corruption institutions, which of course, were not working flawlessly, but nonetheless are part of what President Zelenskyy has been using to crack down on corruption allegations, even during the war. We've helped the Ukrainians again pre-war, pre-this war, build something called the Ministry of Digital Transformation, they have some of the best cybersecurity in the world – that's USAID investments there.
And now that the war has started, just the pivot to that, when Putin tries to take out critical energy infrastructure, it is USAID, more than any other actor and more than any other country that is swooping in to provide everything from generators to boilers to replacement pipes, to additional engineering support, to rotating power plants or mobile power plants. And so, we've dedicated about $400 billion to so-called winterization efforts, namely, as Putin tried to weaponize winter and in a sense freeze people into wanting to turn over territory or end the war, we try to offset that tactic and keep people warm. And we're heading towards spring here, we're not there yet, it's still bitter cold in many parts of Ukraine, but at least in a sense to buy time, so that again, the Ukrainian military, which has been so brave and so fearsome, really on the battlefield, you know you would hate for something on the civilian side to be the difference between whether on the military side, they were able to prevail. But if the lights were to go out on the State, if pensioners weren't to get paid, if health services were to shut down, and those are all things that USAID is helping support, again, thanks to bipartisan support from Congress, you know, that would really undermine the war effort as a whole. So, while the latest military system gets the headlines, how medical institutions in Ukraine continue to function for civilians, how people manage not to freeze to death.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: That's all in the purview of USAID.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: USAID, yes.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: You have been a war correspondent, you've won a Pulitzer Prize, not nothing. And you've had, you know, all of these government jobs. I'm curious, like, how that informs, you know, you were in Bosnia, right? Which was like one of the worst wars of our lifetime. I mean, just can you explain a little bit now you're running an organization that serves the people that you couldn't serve when you were reporting on Bosnia? I mean, how does that inform?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Yeah, no, it's a great question. It's a couple of things. I mean, first, just on the specifics of having covered Bosnia as a war correspondent and now seeing Ukraine – it's chillingly familiar in many respects, you know, the use of sexual violence as a seemingly willful tactic of war, a different amount of evidence, just in the sense that everywhere Russian forces have occupied you see, you know, women who have been subjected to gang rape and imprisoned and again, having had sexual torture inflicted upon them. And then the mass graves, of course, emerging for every territory that Ukraine takes back. That's a lot like what was happening in the former Yugoslavia. And recall, that was an anomaly at the time, it felt like an anomaly in that the Cold War had ended, people were feeling very hopeful, the Soviet Union had collapsed, it looked like democracy was on the march.
Now, I think what is so grim about today's war in Ukraine is it is a superpower, bringing those same tactics, that same effort to strip a people of their identity, of their dignity, and again, to just inflict horrific suffering with the population size of the Russian Federation, with the military stockpiles of the Russian Federation, you know, not just some small makeshift Bosnian Serb army, you know, back in the day. And so, when you combine even if the Russians are performing very badly and obviously didn't think this through or plan properly. Nonetheless, they have a lot of firepower to bring to bear on behalf of the war crimes that they appear to be committing in areas that they operate. So, it kind of takes what I experienced up close in a small scale. I mean it was big scale for anybody who was suffering at the time, but it just puts it on steroids almost. And there it was chilling.
I will say I do take some solace from my experience in that when I was a war correspondent and so many of my peers and my colleagues who were still, you know, around and writing, you know, had that seminal experience as well, because of this really where a lot of journalists kind of cut their teeth at that time in the nineties. But we would never have guessed that these warlords and political leaders who are inflicting such pain on civilians that they ever would have been held accountable, it would have been like saying, you know, “my next job is going to be to be an astronaut”, like, it was so – it would have been so crazy, they were so filled with arrogance and confidence. And it's not to say that there are inevitable parallels between what's happening in Ukraine and what happened in Bosnia.
But it is to say, you just don't know. And so there is a lot of skepticism. “Oh, ok, USAID, you're helping document all these war crimes.” We've helped document more than 30,000 war crimes, alleged war crimes so far, in Ukraine, but, “Yeah, but look at Putin, you know, he's there at his long table, and how is that ever going to change and people are afraid of him.” And it's not to say, again, that anybody can predict precisely what’s going to happen.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: Right, but you have this reference point of Bosnia.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Yeah, it’s contingent, you know, and all you can – like, I always say to my kids, control what you can control. All we can control at this point as it relates on that matter, is to document, to take depositions, you know, to establish courtroom-ready stockpiles of evidence, and it could be anything from a Russian who travels, and then that has happened, you know, travels and then gets extradited to Ukraine, or could be that the International Criminal Court ends up taking up a case because they've opened an investigation. We're building this evidence at the Human Rights Council. So, again, the point is simply, we know from history that life is long. And unfortunately, the people having these war crimes inflicted, the pain is now but we do have a responsibility to build that record and history may turn.
And just to close the loop on Bosnia, of course, these names are now you know, a little bit, you know, nobody's talking about these people anymore, but Ratko Mladić, Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, they just, you know, they were strutting around and they all ended up behind bars.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: It strikes me that there are like a number of issues with what's happening in Ukraine and China’s relationship with Russia and how you guys navigate that.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: You know, it is very, very challenging. China is a permanent member of the Security Council, as is the United States, as is Russia. We would expect that the People's Republic of China, which has long stressed the importance of sovereignty, right, as a way of keeping countries from looking into human rights conditions inside the PRC, Chinese diplomats have always talked about sovereignty, and it's every State's right to do what it wants within its borders and territorial integrity and all the like. We would have expected a country that for so many years – well, I shouldn’t say we would have expected – we would have hoped that a country that over so many years had made so much of sovereignty and territorial integrity, would leap to publicly and plainly make clear that what the Russian Federation is doing, namely, trying to erase a UN member state, is not only antithetical to the UN Charter and to all international humanitarian law in terms of the way they're prosecuting that war, but completely antithetical to what the Chinese leadership had been saying for decades, that, you know, what has been the core of the foreign policy message from Beijing, that has not happened. Obviously, the growing relationship prior to this war between President Putin and President Xi, their shared interest in not having human rights norms, wanting human rights norms to be weakened, hoping that they would not have traction, wanting to be able to lock up who they want within their own borders or do what they want to ethnic minorities within their borders so that they have a lot of shared interests of that nature in terms of what they want the international rules of the road to be. And as a result, I think you see Beijing again, acting and talking inconsistently in many respects from their previous positions.
Now that said, Molly, what's noteworthy is notwithstanding the closeness of that personal relationship between the two leaders, I think they refer prior to the wars, this being a relationship without limits, that was the language. And yet the PRC is not standing with Russia, either. So, they are notably abstaining, and in a sense, trying to still sort of say that they're very much in favor of sovereignty and territorial integrity and yet also now, having just put forward a peace plan.
I think you and I are talking during a week where we in the United States and our allies have expressed concern that the PRC may take decisions now that would put them more squarely on Russia's side in waging this war of aggression. Namely, if they were to provide lethal assistance, that would be moving the PRC into a much more frontally aligned position with Moscow. We have seen no indication to be clear that they have yet made this decision, you've seen a lot of U.S. diplomacy and public statements, to just underscore what a terrible mistake that would be. So, Beijing, again, appears not to have taken off the table, but we haven't yet seen an indication that they're going to move forward.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: And that is good news.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: I mean, it would be better news if it was off the table entirely, because of it would be subject to such a mistake, but certainly, you know, we think it's very important for the war to end, which is what Chinese officials do say they want for the costs of Russia's actions to be borne by Russian officials, by the Russian government, because the way wars end is when the costs outweigh the perceived benefits for going on. So, it would not be good for the cause of peace if, you know, China, were to get involved on the legal side, it would be very inconsistent with the peace plan that the PRC has just put forward. And I think an important point is that in the long term, the PRC wants to be a world leader, you know, wants very much to increase its standing in the Global South those are the markets for Chinese goods, you know, that it really helped fuel Chinese economic development, which has been so explosive prior to the pandemic and has lifted so many Chinese citizens out of poverty. I mean, they are playing this longer game, you know, with an eye through the Belt and Road Initiative and their building and their development assistance, and they're very substantial loans, which unfortunately, carry very high interest rates in developing countries. But nonetheless, they are, you know, doing all of this. Well, again, more than 140 countries within the UN have condemned Russia, you know, for Beijing to throw its lot in with Russia, in this war, I think would be very counterproductive in light of those larger ambitions.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: So, I want to ask you about the earthquake and Erdogan in Türkiye, because there has been this rise in these authoritarian states and Turkey now has this earthquake.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: I mean, first of all, it's just a searing event in the lives, you know, easily make well over a million people in Syria, and I think if you take Türkiye and Syria together, it's more than 10 million people likely affected, about three million people lost their homes and imagine again, it's still winter. It's extremely difficult. We saw that, as we attempted to support the rescue with our search and rescue teams, just the dead of winter and the snow in the frigid conditions making that even more challenging than it always is.
You know, our objective is to come in behind national authorities when they have the capacity to respond. And certainly, that was true in Türkiye as their in a sense civil protection, FEMA equivalent, did a very good job. But the scope and the scale of what they were up against was whoa, you know, just not something that any agency could have prepared for. I think Syria –
MOLLY JONG-FAST: Syria’s worse off, right?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, it's just so much more challenging because you have the regime, of course, which had gassed its people and inflicted on its people the equivalent of daily earthquakes by pulverizing civilian centers, and apartment buildings and medical facilities throughout that war.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: Continuously for years and years and years.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Yeah, continuously. And so, creating scenes just like that. But, you know, if there had been a respite in a community, and somebody might have been displaced two, three, four times from different places that Assad had terrorized, maybe they finally got an apartment. Then if they were in Idlib, and Aleppo, maybe that apartment, in all likelihood, you know, has either been damaged or destroyed in this earthquake. So, it's just compounding crisis after compounding crisis.
We don't work, of course, with the Syrian Government – they're isolated, they're sanctioned, we continue to hold them accountable for the atrocities in these ways. The epicenter of harm occurred actually in opposition-controlled areas, because there are still parts of Syria that are controlled by opposition elements. The challenge there is extremist groups, of course, have been present in many of those areas. And there are a lot of restrictions or safeguards that we have to have in place so that our resources are not going to an ISIS affiliate, or al Qaeda affiliate.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: It's hard to, quote, unquote, “good guys.”
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: There are plenty of good guys. To be clear, there are plenty like the White Helmets famously, are there, you know, taking people out of the rubble with the most rudimentary support for much of the outside world. But you just always know that these extremists lurk and can take advantage of these circumstances. So, you just have to be careful. So, I think all of that to say the response was much, much slower, international response, there wasn't that same national infrastructure because Assad, again, is not present in the worst affected areas. That scale up is happening. We, the United States, have announced $185 million worth of assistance so far. Most of our assistance that flows from this point is likely to go to Syria to try to compensate, again, for the much more rudimentary infrastructure there. But it is going to be a dark and long road to recovery, just again, because of the preexisting conditions in the communities that have been afflicted.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: Yeah. Oh, no, I'm sure. Do you think that sort of Türkiye might have a moment of being able to sort of dislodge Erdogan?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, I mean, they have their democratic elections coming up here. And I think it's unclear, you know, how the earthquake is going to affect either the conditions, I mean, a lot of people are worried about where they're going to sleep the next night. And so, but they're also, you know, thinking about voting or not, you know, I don't know, I'm not close enough to it. But also, in general, when emergencies hit, it's very unpredictable, you know, kind of what the effect of an emergency or the response to the emergency or questions about decisions made prior to the emergency, how all of that kind of comes together to inform voter opinion. So, again, I wouldn't comment on that. But it is absolutely the UN has issued a $400 million appeal for Syria, but just, you know, that's just several months’ worth of resources will be needed to just even provide temporary shelter.
The Turkish appeal is a billion dollars. And not to have every aspect of our conversation be depressing and dark, but it is, this earthquake just lands at a time when you have almost a billion people, you know, facing very severe food insecurity on where the knock-on effects of Putin's invasion of Ukraine because Ukraine is the breadbasket of the world and 40 percent of the World Food Programme’s food comes from Ukraine. And so, you know, for Putin to invade, take out so many of the major ports, you know, block or, you know, reduce to a trickle the export of grain from the world's breadbasket, put unexploded ordnances and landmines all over the land, even that his forces were vacating. I mean, it's just such a horrible gratuitous compounding factor. And it was bad enough, you know, before the earthquake, and then the earthquake hit, and suddenly, there’s more than 10 million people who are in need of some form of assistance between Türkiye and Syria – so it's a very difficult time, you know, ever more scarce resources, and ever more demands on those resources.
So, if your listeners are inclined to want to help with any of these emergencies, we have at USAID on our website, just a list of organizations that are vetted and are great partners of ours. So, it's cidi.org, cidi.org and whether the earthquake or the war in Ukraine, there are lots of ways to contribute.
MOLLY JONG-FAST: Thank you, Samantha Power.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Thank you, Molly.