The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

It therefore seemed particularly dangerous to announce a decision to go to Congress without first having a well-informed understanding of where the necessary votes would come from.

This is important.

Despite the fact that only limited US strikes were planned, Putin worried that US actions would set in motion a chain of events that could result in Assad’s ouster or diminish Russian influence in the region.

To those prepared to review the facts—a practice that had already begun its sharp decline around the world—Assad’s regime was clearly responsible. The Syrian government was widely known to have a sophisticated chemical weapons program. Only professionals had the know-how to mix the chemical agents, fill the munitions, and strike so many opposition neighborhoods in such quick succession. The rockets used in the Damascus gas attack were used regularly by the regime and had never been seen in the possession of the Syrian opposition. Tracers from the rockets indicated that they had been launched from regime territory. Our intercepted communications revealed a senior Syrian official discussing the regime’s responsibility for the attack.28 And, of course, not a single person in regime-held territory appeared to have been injured or killed. Put another way, a ragtag opposition would have had to acquire the chemical agents, the mixing expertise, and the surface-to-surface rockets capable of carrying sarin gas; then these opposition fighters would have had to move all of this across an impenetrable front line into regime territory so as to target their neighbors and family members back in the areas where they lived. Despite the plethora of hard evidence, most foreign ambassadors ducked the question of who had used chemical weapons.

🤦‍♀️🙎‍♀️

I did not view America’s responsibilities in the world in such simplistic terms. Like President Obama, I cared above all about consequences. I believed that the most important part of decision-making was not the justness of one’s intentions but the effectiveness of one’s actions.

On the one hand, we share the deep conviction that chemical weapons are barbaric, that we should never again see children killed in their beds, lost to a world that they never had a chance to try to change. Yet on the other hand, some are wondering why—given the flagrant violation of an international norm—it is incumbent on the United States to lead, since we cannot and should not be the world’s policeman. I closed by stating as plainly as possible what was at stake: We all have a choice to make. Whether we are Republicans or Democrats, whether we have supported past military interventions or opposed them, whether we have argued for or against such action in Syria prior to this point, we should agree that there are lines in this world that cannot be crossed, and limits on murderous behavior, especially with weapons of mass destruction, that must be enforced.

The student activists, civic groups, churches, mosques, and synagogues that had come out en masse to demand help for the people of Darfur were largely silent.

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described the importance of being able “to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time,” while still retaining “the ability to function.”

DURING THESE NEGOTIATIONS, I had the chance to work closely with John Kerry for the first time. He had already represented Massachusetts in the US Senate for ten years by the time I moved to the Boston area for law school, and I had crossed paths with him at Harvard events and Red Sox games over the years. I had also watched him in action when I worked in Obama’s Senate office, as they both served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But I could never have predicted the warmth he would show me as his colleague. The relationship between UN ambassadors and secretaries of state is often quite tense. Strain inevitably arises from the fact that a UN ambassador’s cabinet role technically gives him or her a vote equal to the Secretary of State’s on matters of national security, despite the fact that the Secretary manages 276 diplomatic posts around the world and more than 70,000 personnel, while the UN ambassador runs the equivalent of one small embassy in New York.

Kerry had one overriding objective in his role as Secretary of State: get as much done as humanly possible to prevent and end wars.

He acted as if each day in his job could be the last, and he seemed to see me as an ally with a similar mind-set.

“I just read Sergey the riot act.” Between his first call and unexpected second call, I had begun nursing Rían, and she was an audible eater. “What’s that noise?” Kerry asked suddenly. My cheeks flushed. Even though he couldn’t see me, I felt as though he could, and it was not a pretty picture. The receiver on the secure phone was jammed under my right ear, Rían was draped across my bare chest, and I had a pen in hand. “Multitasking,” I said. “I’m just feeding my girl.” Kerry howled with laughter. “That’s SO GREAT, Sam. Make sure she gets a good meal, and then go stick it to the Russians.” In the end, guided by the Kerry–Lavrov framework and backed by the technical expertise of our respective arms control teams and lawyers, we came to an agreement on the text of a resolution. The final step was to put it before the Security Council for passage.

Among the many notable nursing stories in this book, this might be the best one! 🤱☎️💼🕶

More than anything, I despaired for the future of Syria. By coming so close to punishing Assad only to pull back, the US government had moved farther away than ever before, telegraphing that we would likely never do so.

Although the effects of this red-line episode were hard to measure, a large number of foreign diplomats told me afterward that America’s “flip-flopping” had damaged President Obama’s global reputation. I found much of this criticism maddening, given that many of these same ambassadors represented countries that would never have stood publicly with the United States had we gone ahead with air strikes. But it is undeniable that the perception of the “unenforced threat” shadowed our administration’s subsequent efforts to influence Assad and other actors in the war. This moved us further away from the President’s aim—and the regional and global necessity—of achieving a negotiated settlement to end the conflict.

Obama had asked in his speech to the nation on August 31st, “What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?”

This is a good question

The second consequence of visiting Ambassador Doubane and hearing his story was that I decided to try to meet with each of the UN ambassadors to learn theirs. Partly, this decision was strategic: for the big, challenging votes in the General Assembly, where the United States was often outnumbered, the relationships I built could turn my colleagues into unlikely allies. But even if these so-called courtesy calls did not win extra support for the United States, I believed in the importance of conveying a sentiment I often heard from Vice President Biden, quoting his own mother: “Nobody’s better than you, but you’re better than nobody.” The UN Charter says that the UN is “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members,”

The United States, on the other hand, was the host country to the United Nations. We were the most powerful and richest country in the world. At times, this privilege led us to take other countries for granted. But when we recognized the inherent worth of nations and the individuals who represented them, we were valuing their dignity. By visiting the other ambassadors rather than having them travel to the US Mission to meet me (as was traditional), I was able to see the art my colleagues wanted to showcase, the family photos on their desks, and the books they had brought with them all the way to America. Most significantly, regardless of their size, wealth, or geopolitical heft, I could show them America’s respect.

My twenty-four-year-old scheduler, Megan Koilparampil, took full ownership of this effort. She had read “A Problem from Hell” after college, and during her job interview, she made clear that her interest in atrocity prevention drew her to the position. She understood that the operations work she and others in the US Mission did—scheduling, logistics, and event or trip planning—was every bit as important as the work our diplomats did negotiating through the night. Indeed, the operations team had mugs made with the acronym “GSD” (for “Get Shit Done”) on the side. Megan devoured the task of scheduling courtesy calls. Some of the people who answered at the offices I hoped to visit did not speak English, so Megan canvassed our team to find people with the necessary language skills. At the small, understaffed missions, days of attempts were sometimes required before someone answered the phone. Often, it was the ambassador who eventually picked up. When I had concluded my visit to a foreign colleague’s office, very often he or she would bid me farewell with a request to “say hi to Megan.” On occasion, when urging a country to take a tough vote, I would invoke the person they would least want to disappoint. “I am really counting on you,” I would say. “And so is Megan.”

Haha. Omg

Around 50 of the 191 ambassadors I visited reported that no US Permanent Representative had set foot in their mission before. Many treated “America’s visit” as a very special occasion, dressing up more formally than usual, bringing national delicacies from home to offer me, and having a camera at the ready to record the moment for posterity. Developing these relationships obviously did not mean smooth sailing for me or for US objectives at the UN. But just as President Obama’s personal popularity was a major asset in getting other countries to share information with the United States or to spend money on something the US government deemed important, so too did my personal relationships help turn ambassadors into advocates for our causes.

I was struck on many of my visits by the extent to which the UN-based ambassadors and their citizens back home were intertwined with the United States. The ambassador from Eritrea, then the most isolated country in the world aside from North Korea, had been educated at Bowdoin College in Maine and American University in Washington, DC. The Somali and Bruneian ambassadors had attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. I heard constantly about connections like these. A half dozen of my fellow ambassadors began our meetings expressing “personal thanks” to the United States for educational support they had received through various State Department programs, which they said had made it possible for them to become diplomats.

Cape Verde is a country of just 546,000, some 400,000 people of Cape Verdean descent live in the United States. Likewise, more than 15,000 people from the Marshall Islands, which only has a population of 53,000, reside in Springdale, Arkansas, with most of them working at the Tyson Foods headquarters.

The Zambian Ambassador to the UN had previously worked as a pediatrician in Lusaka, her country’s capital, treating children with HIV. She spoke about the powerful impact of President George W. Bush’s multibillion-dollar anti-AIDS program, which had successfully slowed the devastating spread of the disease. “Before PEPFAR,” she said, “there was nothing I could do to help my babies.” New HIV infections in Zambia had been cut in half since the program’s inception in 2003.

The Somali ambassador had spent his career as a journalist with the BBC until 2015, when he had narrowly survived a double car bomb. “Many times I wept like a child because of the news,” he said. “I decided that I couldn’t continue to stand by like an outsider. I had to do something to try to help my country.” He decided to join the fragile Somali government to do his part to combat terrorism.

Bhutan’s ambassador had been raised in a family with six children in a rural part of the country. When her father decided that she and her sister were going to be educated, they had walked an entire day to reach a paved road, where they boarded a bus bound for a school in India. The Tajik ambassador was one of thirteen children,...

The Lao and Vietnamese ambassadors each had lost close family members in wars with the United States, and they had traumatic memories of fleeing their homes and sleeping in trenches to avoid US bombing. However, both said they wanted desperately to “turn the page” on relations with their former antagonist. They reported that their populations were fiercely pro-American.

While I looked forward to most of my courtesy calls, I was unenthused about some, including my meeting with the Cambodian ambassador, a man who in UN gatherings mumbled his country’s turgid prepared statements and betrayed no charisma. True to form, he began our meeting by delivering a set of rote talking points. But when I asked him what life had been like for him as a boy growing up under the Khmer Rouge, his manner was transformed. He said that the Khmer Rouge executed his father “for being a teacher,” but when they murdered his sister, a housewife, he said, “they did not have to give a reason.” The ambassador noted matter-of-factly that he and his surviving siblings nearly starved to death. “I am surprised by how much food is wasted at the UN,” he said, simply.

Damn.

One of the biggest surprises came when I met Mamadou Tangara, Gambia’s ambassador. Tangara reported to Gambian president Yahya Jammeh, a vindictive dictator who had been in power for more than two decades. When I dropped into Tangara’s office, he told me he had never been paid such a visit and quickly opened up. “I’m worried,” he confessed, explaining that Jammeh was growing increasingly erratic. “Things are getting worse every day,” he said. “He is pushing away anyone who tells him the truth.” A few months later, I saw Tangara at the annual Fourth of July reception I hosted on behalf of the United States at the Central Park Zoo. After posing with him for a photo in the receiving line, I pulled him aside and whispered, “Mamadou, I’m starting to think your president is a bit crazy.” When his face darkened, I worried I had crossed a line. “That’s not true, Ambassador,” he said, his voice rising. “My president is not a bit crazy. My president is completely crazy.” Tangara became a friend, and someone who volunteered to help me try to secure the release of political prisoners languishing in Gambian jails.

I was awestruck by America’s reach, and by the eagerness of our ambassadors around the world to leap into action.

Nothing was more unsettling than my conversations with ambassadors whose countries were threatened with extinction as a result of climate change. I arrived at the UN at a time when the UN-sponsored process was stalemated and acrimonious. When countries convened in 2013, more than two years before the eventual Paris Agreement, the Philippines’s lead delegate went on a hunger strike to protest the lack of urgency among negotiators, and a bloc of 132 countries staged a walkout. Similar frustrations, as well as abject fear, dominated my meetings with representatives of the most vulnerable nations.

I remember this hunger strike and walkout

The islands that formed Kiribati had a combined population of 112,000 people. Among them, the highest elevation was just six feet. The ambassador was skeptical his country would survive. “We are falling into the sea,” he said. His government was encouraging citizens to consider moving elsewhere under a plan it called “migration with dignity.” It had even gone so far as to purchase land 1,200 miles away in Fiji, where Kiribati residents could relocate when their country became unlivable. The only plot the Kiribati government could afford, however, was forested and swampy, and unlikely to support the livelihoods of their entire population. The inhabitants of island nations felt trapped. Even though they knew they needed to make plans to live elsewhere, they did not have the visas required to move. “We didn’t cause this problem,” the ambassador from Tuvalu said. “But when a hurricane hits the United States, your people get warned and they have some chance to move to higher ground. When we get warned, there is nothing we can do. We don’t have high ground—the only place to go is up a coconut tree.” But how, I asked, could an elderly person get up a tree? “Exactly,” he replied.

When I visited the ambassador from Grenada, she summed up the dynamic with a phrase I heard often: “If America sneezes, people in my country catch a cold.”

Unlike some other foreign colleagues, Vitaly accepted every one of my invitations. When I brought a dozen ambassadors to the Public Theater’s performance of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, he was the first to leap out of his chair to ignite a standing ovation. He did not hold it against me when the press covered his presence at the LGBT-themed musical Fun Home, an unusual night out for the representative of a famously homophobic government. At the intermission of Hamilton, he interrogated Cass, a professor of constitutional law, about whether creator Lin-Manuel Miranda had accurately depicted the Founding Fathers’ debates. Vitaly and I both loved sports, and the only times he didn’t answer his phone were when Russia was competing in the Olympics or the World Cup. We brought each other to games (he favored hockey and tennis; I could never convince him that my favorite sport, baseball, was interesting, so we settled on the NBA). I also introduced him to FX’s Cold War drama The Americans, which he claimed was “a bit ridiculous,” but nonetheless watched compulsively. Most memorably, I invited him and Irina to my parents’ home in Yonkers for Thanksgiving, making him the only United Nations colleague who ever entered my wild Irish family sanctum. When they arrived, Irina immediately sat down on the carpet and began playing with my children, while Eddie and Vitaly talked Russian history and literature. When we went around the table to describe what we were most thankful for, Vitaly said...

I found myself sitting two seats away from Vitaly, listening as he used identical tactics to deny that the Russian military had invaded Ukraine.

Haha. Nope! 🥸

I absolutely had to win the argument with Vitaly.

Yes. She does! (Have to win)

The Russian takeover was not about self-defense or restoring calm, as Vitaly had alleged. It was a military invasion of territory that the Soviet Union had made part of Ukraine in 1954, but which Putin and many Russian nationalists wanted to be part of Russia. “Russia has every right to wish that events in Ukraine had turned out differently,” I concluded, “but it does not have the right to express that unhappiness by using military force or by trying to convince the world community that up is down and black is white.”

I traveled to Ukraine to meet with young reformers who had joined the new government that succeeded Yanukovych’s. I also visited with families who had been forced to flee eastern Ukraine because of the Russian-sponsored violence. One mother told me how her husband and two-year-old child were killed when their home near the town of Debaltseve was shelled during a Russian separatist offensive. She and her five surviving children escaped in a van whose roof and doors had been blasted out by shelling, eventually arriving in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, where locals took them in. And yet Vitaly continued to act as though none of this was happening, giving voice to the deceptions of the Russian government. When I presented the facts, he simply pretended they were not true. “I have the impression that Ms. Power is taking her information from United States television,” he said during one of our confrontations. “Then of course everything in Ukraine must seem just wonderful.”

During one televised meeting, I still had no speech in hand when the Council president turned in my direction and said, “I now give the floor to the representative of the United States.” As my microphone light turned red, signaling my time to begin, I felt my special assistant Colleen breathlessly swoop in behind me. I reached my hand back like the anchor in a relay race awaiting a baton, Colleen handed me a green folder, and I opened it and immediately began to read, feigning calm.

🧐🎃

“Did Putin leave Crimea?” he asked. I smiled. Declan, in all his wisdom, was focused on the one result that mattered—not who won the public debate, but whether the aggressor had retreated. My son had brought me down to earth. “Not yet, Dec,” I said. “But a Power never gives up, do we?” “Never!” he said, his face bright with possibility. “And tomorrow you can try again.”

This is both wonderful and melancholy

Nonetheless, on the day of the vote, I was worried. I knew that Russia’s closest allies would take its side, and we presumed that many countries would abstain in order to avoid angering Putin. We had also heard from several developing countries that Russian diplomats were offering cash in return for their support. In the General Assembly, each country’s representative presses a button and his or her vote instantaneously appears on a digital jumbo screen beside the country’s name: green for YES, red for NO, and yellow for ABSTAIN. The green YES votes of the United States and Ukraine—voting for the resolution and rejecting the validity of the referendum—were among the first to appear. Russia was naturally first among the NO votes. Other countries seemed to be taking their time, and my heart beat wildly in suspense. One by one, the votes appeared. In the upper right of the screen, I saw a flash of green, followed by another flash of green in the lower left, then another in the upper left. For thirty seconds, flash after flash came up green. So many of the countries that had been undecided—that had privately confessed their fear that Russia would retaliate against them if they sided with the United States and Ukraine—came through. The final vote on whether to reject Russia’s referendum proved a rout: 100 YES votes with the United States and Ukraine, just 11 NO votes, and 58 ABSTENTIONS.* The Associated Press described the result as “a sweeping rebuke of Moscow.”

Putin had not left Crimea, and he was unlikely to do so. In fact, despite having denied his forces were there, the Russian president soon signed a treaty annexing the peninsula.

In the days ahead, Russian separatists casually wandered through the wreckage, trampling on human remains and carting away evidence. In videos, they could be seen tossing around children’s toys and rummaging through luggage. They also removed from the crash site the missile parts they feared would incriminate them. The Russian government, of course, simply denied any involvement, rejecting evidence that the missile system came from the Russian military.* Meanwhile, the Russian disinformation apparatus, which had been distorting events in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine from the start, went into overdrive. Russian news and internet sources simultaneously pushed stories blaming the crash on the Ukrainian military (for mistakenly believing the aircraft was Putin’s and trying to assassinate him) and the CIA. One macabre theory held that the plane had been surreptitiously filled with dead bodies prior to taking off.

The passenger plain they shot down.

One year later, a poll would find that only 3 percent of Russians believed Russian separatists were the perpetrators of the attack, while more than 60 percent thought the Ukrainians or Americans bore responsibility. The Russian lies even made their way to the American mainstream when, in October of 2015, CNN asked presidential candidate Donald Trump who was behind the missile strike. Trump repeated Putin’s denials of Russian involvement, adding, “to be honest with you, you’ll probably never know for sure.”

Dude has bad instincts — could get a lot of people killed.

I said I understood why, and quoted my favorite line from the late psychologist Amos Tversky, who had said he preferred optimism because “as a pessimist, you suffer twice.”

I made my way into the US box in the General Assembly hall and ruminated. One of the immensely gratifying aspects of being a senior official in President Obama’s administration was that I almost never received direction from Washington that I did not have a chance to shape or challenge. Looking around the chamber at the other ambassadors, I knew that I was likely the only person in the hall who enjoyed such independence.

Frieden explained that Ebola patients needed to be temporarily quarantined from their communities so they would not infect their relatives and neighbors. If 70 percent of those with the virus could be isolated, we could bend—and ultimately end—the devastating curve of the epidemic.

The Ebola mission being contemplated was like none undertaken before. But with talk of sending troops, Defense Secretary Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dempsey did what the military sensibly does when any new troop deployment is being discussed: they questioned whether soldiers would be given clear tasks that they had the mandate and means to accomplish. “I keep hearing you all saying, our soldiers will ‘suit up’ and do this and that,” Hagel said in one meeting. “Suit up? What does that even mean? My guys have never even seen these HAZMAT suits, apart from in horror movies.”

Ultimately, Dempsey and the Pentagon planners devised a brilliant operation that the Chairman presented to the President—“a logistics mission with a medical component,” he stressed, “not the other way around.” President Obama then announced that he was sending some 3,000 troops to Liberia and ramping up each component of the US response. Drawing on the expertise of hundreds of USAID and CDC staff deployed to West Africa, the United States would facilitate the training of tens of thousands of local health workers to care for Ebola patients. We would create an air bridge to fly doctors, nurses, and supplies to the region quickly. And we would build the Ebola Treatment Units, which would allow up to 1,700 patients at a time to receive treatment.

His decisiveness gave those of us who worked for him what we needed to mobilize this international support. I invited the other UN ambassadors to the US Mission to hear from Frieden, who once again explained the stakes in his mild-mannered yet terrifying way. He described how Ebola had jumped across national borders, penetrated urban areas, overwhelmed clinics, and caused businesses and schools to close. He detailed how local burial customs had helped it spread. And most unnervingly, he walked the ambassadors through The Slide depicting the path to 1.4 million infections by January of 2015.

In his presentation, Frieden let nobody off the hook. His message, which I reinforced with the foreign ambassadors, was that each of us had a responsibility—no matter how big or small our country, no matter how substantial or minimal our financial means.

Because Russia and China typically objected to expanding the Council’s writ, I turned to the individuals who represented the imperiled West African countries. After the ambassadors from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone filed into a small conference room at the US Mission, I expressed my sympathies and asked them how they were holding up. Some 23 million people lived in their three countries, and the epidemic did not discriminate; the ambassadors’ immediate families were in grave danger. I told them I was considering convening the Security Council on the epidemic, and that the US was prepared to introduce a resolution declaring Ebola a “threat to international peace and security.” We would use this resolution, the first of its kind, to call on countries to provide more money and health workers to combat the outbreak.