The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  THE KEY TO SUCCEEDING as ambassador, I knew, was to get the most out of the remarkable team of people who worked for the US Mission to the UN. Less than 10 percent of the 150-person staff were political appointees like Jeremy, Hillary, and myself. The vast majority were permanent staff, including foreign service and civil service officers who had worked previously for President George W. Bush’s administration. Some civil servants had been at the Mission for more than thirty years, serving as far back as the Reagan administration. Many worked punishing hours, including weekends.

  The career staff had generally internalized an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) rule of government to await instructions from those above them in the hierarchy before taking initiative. I had left my job at the National Security Council with a heightened appreciation for the importance of inclusive and transparent government processes. Yet now I urged the members of my team to show less deference to the system. Before they leaped to implement a direction, I asked them to take a moment to consider whether they agreed with the course of action envisaged.

  Many had lived in the conflict-prone countries we were discussing. Some were experienced in the fields of international law or humanitarian relief. Several were Chinese, Russian, or Arabic speakers who brought invaluable insight to US negotiations. And almost all of them had institutional memories I lacked—knowing what had and hadn’t worked in the past. I reminded them of the expertise they brought to their jobs and encouraged them to make their own recommendations to help shape US policy.

  I knew that Holbrooke, Mort, and Jonathan had surrounded themselves with people who both challenged them and generated ideas, even if they were considered “junior.” I wanted to do the same. One didn’t have to be seasoned to be creative, and I needed ideas from wherever I could get them. I also tried to encourage an ethos of never being satisfied by merely raising an issue, making a public statement, or holding a meeting, stressing that we “care less about inputs and more about outcomes.” When USUN diplomats committed the cardinal sin of “admiring the problem,” I would handwrite on their memos, “If you were Obama, what would you do?”

  Jeremy started organizing “deep dive” discussions during which we would carve out two hours to look afresh at policy problems, asking our in-house Africa, China, or sanctions experts to imagine formulating new policies from scratch. If we felt we had come up with something worth considering, I would talk to John Kerry to sound him out. We also urged staff to dedicate a specific time in their week to talk to someone outside government who knew about the issues they were working on. For understanding a place like Syria, where our embassy had closed down, those who worked in civil society could offer us a perspective that we could not get from within the US government. And we created a speakers’ series, where academics and journalists would come to the Mission to share their experiences.

  My team and I knew the danger of being overwhelmed by what we called “the tyranny of the inbox.” As a result, after soliciting ideas from my staff and the four deputy ambassadors,* I settled on several human rights concerns that I would try to address without much involvement from Washington—issues that would not only help specific individuals, but also perhaps boost the confidence of US diplomats who sometimes seemed to doubt America’s potential impact. We chose initiatives that I knew President Obama would support wholeheartedly, but which much of the bureaucracy beneath him did not prioritize.

  At a time when American society seemed to be increasingly divided on the subject of immigration, I decided to find occasions to highlight the impact being made by refugees and immigrants in the United States. In addition, I would work with my team to embed LGBT rights within the DNA of the UN and to try to secure the release of political prisoners.

  I wanted to highlight these issues from the very start. The same day as my meeting with the secretary-general, I visited a Refugee Youth Summer Academy, where dozens of local elementary and junior high school students who had been refugees were preparing for the upcoming school year in America. I met kids from places like Sudan, China, and Iran, and they told me about the traumatic situations they had escaped. I noted that I too had come to the United States as a young child, not knowing a soul, but had been lucky enough not to have experienced the hardships they had fled. I said that I was in awe of their courage and resilience.

  After my confirmation hearing six weeks before, several newspapers had published a photograph of me with Declan, who had jumped into my arms when the gavel sounded. Since then, I had received notes from women all over the country describing how heartened they were to see someone attempting a national security cabinet role with small children in tow. I understood the reaction because, decades before, the photo of UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick standing alone among so many men in Reagan’s cabinet must have somehow shaped my own sense of the possible. I hoped my presence would show these young people where they could end up.

  As I was leaving, one of the students, a refugee from Afghanistan, asked a question I had not been anticipating: “What do you think about communism?”

  A small group of UN reporters who had accompanied me on the school visit leaned in to hear my response. Once I got over my surprise at the question, I expressed my disdain for the suffering caused by communist rule. Kurtis whispered to me as we walked out, “It is my job to be paranoid, but that was a fine answer.”

  Kurtis added, though, that I needed to get comfortable not answering questions. My press spokeswoman, Erin Pelton, would soon sit me down for media training, rattling off the list of “safe harbors” I could turn to when confronted with a question that was either new or difficult:

  “I’m not fully familiar with what you are describing, but I will look into it, and we will get back to you with a response.”

  “Rather than commenting on the specifics, let me say this generally . . .”

  “I’m not going to speculate on . . .”

  “What we should all be focused on is . . .”

  I joked with Erin that I was reminded of the scene in one of my favorite baseball movies, Bull Durham, where Kevin Costner’s veteran character lectures a rookie pitcher played by Tim Robbins. “You’re gonna have to learn your clichés . . . they are your friends,” Costner advises, before sharing several favorites, like “We’ve gotta play ’em one day at a time” and “I’m just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ball club.”

  Erin and Kurtis understood that I was someone who tended to speak from the heart. I also tried to answer the questions reporters actually posed rather than the questions I wished they had posed. But we all recognized that these habits could become liabilities. Over the course of President Obama’s first term, I had seen how easily administration officials’ words could be taken out of context, and I did not want to supply the sound bite for the next manufactured scandal on Fox News.

  I WOULD SPEND THE LARGEST SHARE of my time as ambassador in the UN Security Council. The UN founders assigned the Council the task of maintaining peace and gave it broad enforcement powers, making it the UN’s most important body. The Council has fifteen members, but operates on a two-tiered structure of permanent and nonpermanent members. The five permanent members are the United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, while the other ten seats are held by countries elected to serve two-year terms before rotating off.22 The competition for these nonpermanent seats is fierce.23

  The Security Council tends to be ineffective when the major powers are divided (as was true during the Cold War) and when they are largely indifferent (as was the case during the Rwandan genocide). But when the divisions can be managed or overcome, the Council has enormous influence. It can impose economic sanctions, initiate emergency mediation, and launch peacekeeping missions. Above all, it has the power to legalize actions that would otherwise be illegal under international law.*

  The work tempo at the Security Council had changed a lot over the years. In 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall fell, the Council met just 55 times. In 2014, my first full
year in the job, the Council met on 263 occasions—but we issued resolutions licensing concrete actions in only one-fifth of those sessions.

  The presidency of the Council rotated alphabetically each month, and when I arrived in August, Argentina controlled the agenda. At my first Security Council meeting as ambassador, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the country’s populist president, presided, and the UN secretary-general and fourteen foreign ministers attended. Kirchner, who arrived twenty-five minutes late, used her remarks to slam the United States and other permanent members for using their veto power to block important initiatives.

  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who conceived of the UN with Winston Churchill, insisted that the Security Council’s five permanent members be given the power to reject Council measures they didn’t like. FDR had seen Congress vote against US membership in the League of Nations after World War I, and foresaw that providing the United States the veto as a lever of control would make it possible for the US Senate to support joining the UN, which it voted overwhelmingly to do.

  Over the decades, the United States has used its veto power to prevent nondemocratic countries (which remain a majority at the UN) from joining forces to weaken international norms or to take other actions that harm US interests. That said, as of my arrival in 2013, the veto had been used more than 250 times, sidelining the Council on some of the world’s most devastating conflicts.24

  Although I did not find my first Council meeting as ambassador terribly enlightening or practical, a head of state was presiding, and my staff advised me not to get up and leave after I had spoken. Colleen King, my new special assistant, handed me background reading for my other meetings that day, and I remained in the Council from 9:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m., when the meeting was “suspended.”

  “It isn’t over?” I asked the US diplomat sitting behind me. When he told me that the meeting would resume after lunch, I offered the old adage, “I guess everything has been said, but not everybody has said it.”

  The afternoon session, which one of my deputies attended, consumed an additional four hours and forty minutes.

  Many Council sessions were far more valuable. I found those on specific crises an important means for us to mobilize global support for the US position. Their occurrence also allowed me and my team to use the days or hours in advance to urge our colleagues in Washington to reconsider what were sometimes stale US policy positions. We tried to use the Council debates as occasions to articulate fresh stances on behalf of the United States—for example, challenging foreign autocrats for doing away with term limits, or condemning human rights abuses about which the US government had not previously spoken. And of course, in my time at the UN, the Council would use its enforcement powers to condemn lawless actions in many parts of the world, to dispatch peacekeepers, and to impose economic sanctions on those who had violated international law.

  Narrowing negotiating differences with other countries happened not in formal Council sessions, but in one-on-one meetings with my fellow ambassadors or in the calls and overseas visits I made to foreign ministers and heads of state around the world. With this in mind, I delegated attendance at some Council meetings to my deputies. However, even this calculation of when to show up was more complicated than it seemed. When the American ambassador made a habit of skipping Security Council sessions, it offended the country presiding and other Council members. Because each of the ten nonpermanent members of the Council would rotate off the Council after two years, and in many cases would not be elected again for decades, their ambassadors were regularly present. I would need support from them on close votes, so every decision on skipping a meeting entailed an intricate calculus involving issues beyond whatever was being discussed in the moment.

  So much was happening at the UN that, when the prepared speeches went on too long, I would use the time to plow through more than a hundred pages of materials I received daily in order to deliver direction to my staff. At any given time, US diplomats working at the Mission were immersed in negotiations on issues ranging from whether to impose sanctions to how to rehabilitate child soldiers after conflict. In the General Assembly chamber, US representatives often sought to expand girls’ education programs while also fending off maddening efforts to create new UN positions, which would cost money that could otherwise be spent providing assistance to people in need.

  Sometimes, leaving the office at nine p.m., I would see the size of the briefing book being sent home with me for the next day and wilt in disappointment, groaning to Jeremy, “So much for catching up on The Affair!” But as soon as I got home, I would inevitably devour the contents—preparatory material for my meetings and events the next day, classified updates on various conflicts I was tracking, lengthy analytic reports from organizations like the International Crisis Group, and updates from staff on our longer-term initiatives. Having consumed foreign policy news since I was eighteen years old, I found homework like this riveting.

  AFTER THE FIRST PORTION of the Security Council meeting chaired by President Kirchner had wound down, her team escorted those of us who participated to a large UN dining room for lunch. I found myself seated next to Bruno Rodríguez, the foreign minister of Cuba, a country with which the United States had not had diplomatic relations since 1961. Because US officials did not then have contact with Cuba’s diplomats, I seized the opportunity to raise the case of Oswaldo Payá.

  Payá was a fearless Cuban democracy activist who had gathered more than 25,000 signatures to press the communist government to allow basic freedoms. After mobilizing the largest peaceful movement in Cuba since Fidel Castro had taken power in 1959, Payá had been killed in a car crash in 2012. According to his family and the Spanish politician who was with him at the time of his death, government-backed thugs had run his car off the road.

  The Castro government naturally denied wrongdoing, but its history of harassing and imprisoning those who pushed for reform left it little credibility. At the lunch, I pressed the foreign minister to allow an independent investigation of what had happened.

  “If you have nothing to hide,” I said to Rodríguez, “what are you afraid of?”

  I had just started an official Twitter account. Having returned to the US Mission, I tweeted: “Oswaldo Payá stood up for freedom. Just raised with the Cuban foreign minister the need for a credible investigation into his death.” Payá’s daughter tweeted back her thanks and urged the UN to “help stop the #Cuban government impunity.”

  The Washington Post and newswires picked up the story, which appeared in media around the world. I was exhilarated by the seeming ease with which—from my new position—I could elevate the profile of an egregious injustice.

  But a few days later, when I met the Mexican Ambassador to the UN for the first time, he chastised me for publicizing something I had discussed during a private UN lunch.

  “You have to decide whether you are a diplomat or an activist,” he said. “You can’t be both.”

  “I am both,” I told him, “and we should all be both. I’m not going to drink wine at a lunch with the Cuban foreign minister and pretend his government is not responsible for killing one of the country’s best.”

  “I hear you,” he said, “but people won’t speak freely to you if they think you are more interested in making a media splash than engaging in real dialogue.”

  I explained my rationale. “Cuban government goons ran Payá off the road. They know that and will never allow a proper investigation. The closest we may get to holding them accountable for murdering a Cuban activist are a few negative headlines. I don’t see how silence helps anyone.”

  “Talk to me in a few months,” he said.

  The Mexican ambassador became a friend, but I never came around to his view. I was not prepared to choose between public and private diplomacy; both have their place.

  — 29 —

  The Red Line

  In August of 2013, just three weeks into my new job, I took a short family vacation back to Watervi
lle, Ireland, where Cass and I had gotten married. We had booked the trip long before my nomination as UN ambassador, and I had considered canceling once I was confirmed. But knowing how little time I would have with Cass and our kids in the coming months, I decided to go ahead.

  We descended on the tiny coastal village with my security detail and secure communications equipment in tow, along with baby food and bottles, two car seats, and a stroller. We spent our first two days going for walks by the sea and enjoying long meals with my aunt Patricia and uncle Derry.

  But on the third day, August 21st, I awoke to find dozens of news reports on my BlackBerry. A multipronged Syrian chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburbs had killed more than 1,400 people, including at least 400 children.

  As Rían slept and Declan played in the next room, I watched the horrifying videos of the aftermath already being uploaded to YouTube. The ghastly montage included footage of the deceased—wide-eyed, openmouthed, and seemingly frozen—and survivors who were vomiting, tearing at their clothes, and gasping frantically for breath. Witnesses recalled the smell of burning sulfur or cooked eggs. First responders came across children convulsing and turning blue. “I went to one of the houses and found an infant who was a year and a half old,” one man said. “He was jumping like a bird, struggling to breathe. I held him immediately and ran to the car, but he died.”