The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

On September 9th, John Kerry gave voice to this skepticism about the prospects for destroying Syria’s chemical weapons. At a press conference in London, a reporter asked him whether Assad could do anything to avert US bombing. “Sure,” Kerry ad-libbed, still clinging to the hope that Obama might order the strikes. “[Assad] could turn over every bit of his weapons to the international community within the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay . . . But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.” Yet just a few hours later, to Kerry’s great surprise, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov called him. Having heard the Secretary of State’s public comments, Putin had asked Lavrov to follow up to say he was, in fact, willing to work with Obama to rid Assad of his chemical weapons. Within four days, Kerry and Lavrov had negotiated the contours of a framework for how the chemical weapons program could be dismantled. I was then handed the task of negotiating a UN Security Council resolution with Russia’s Ambassador to the UN. We had to map out a massive, unprecedented operation and get the world on board.