The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  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. And it was a two-way street. They introduced me to challenges their countries were facing that I would not have known about otherwise. This information allowed me to reach out to my colleagues at the State Department to see if the United States could be doing more to lend a hand.

  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.

  And the connections extended well beyond higher education. Most Americans appreciate the vast cultural and immigration connections the United States shares with countries like China, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, or Poland. But it was only through these courtesy calls that I learned of more obscure ties. For example, although 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 ambassadors’ personal stories—which I could learn only through these visits—were often gripping. The Cypriot ambassador, who had an enormous Chicago Bulls banner hanging in his office, had been ten years old when his family fled the Turkish invasion. He had returned home only once. Although he despised the sight of Turkish settlers living in his childhood house, he expressed appreciation for the fact that they had returned two photo albums left behind decades before—one of his parents’ wedding, and one of him and his brother as kids. Like so many who had been displaced, he longed to go back permanently. We discussed the UN-brokered Cypriot peace talks, which had stumbled partly over property issues. Knowing the ambassador’s connection to the home he had lost humanized what was at stake in the negotiations.

  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, and his father had sent all the surviving siblings to the capital for their education. The ambassador, who learned to speak seven languages, ended up getting his PhD from Johns Hopkins University and working with political scientist Francis Fukuyama.

  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.

  When the ambassador from Antigua and Barbuda was four years old, he told me, he had been playing in the cotton fields when another child had poked his eyes with a stick. Because Antigua had no ophthalmologists, he lost sight in both eyes, but eventually became the first legally blind person in the Caribbean to attend university. During his time at the UN, one of his children was working at a center for the blind in Massachusetts.

  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.

  The ambassador from Swaziland—a repressive, landlocked monarchy in southern Africa—told me that his mother was the corrupt king’s sister, raising my hope that he would have influence with his government back home. However, his next comment quickly brought me back to reality: “Oh the king has soooo many brothers and sisters. I was already in this job before he even realized we were related!”

  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.

  When Jammeh was unexpectedly defeated in elections in 2016 and refused to give up power, Tangara took a stand. Risking his life and that of his elderly father back home, he declared allegiance to the legitimate, newly elected president, and refused to take further instructions from Jammeh. Promptly fired, Tangara made plans to pack up his family and leave New York. But thankfully, unrelenting pressure from African leaders, the United States, and the broader international community forced Jammeh to recognize the election results. He gave up power, and Tangara was eventually reinstated.

  In June of 2017, after I had left office, I received a text from Tangara informing me that he had just been named foreign minister by the new president. “Your support and friendship gave me the courage to stand strong in defense of truth and justice,” he wrote. What was striking to me was how little it had taken to make him feel that way.

  Occasionally, in the privacy of these one-on-one meetings, an ambassador would confide that he or she would like to support the Uni
ted States on a particular issue but couldn’t because of problematic instructions from their capital.

  “I am with you,” they would say, “but I need help. Can John Kerry call?”

  At such times, the ambassadors would identify the minister or deputy minister responsible for the objectionable voting guidance. This would enable me or other US diplomats to reach back to our embassies on the ground to get them involved. 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.

  The Cape Verde ambassador told me that in the previous year, his country had not seen a single drop of rain. “Do you know what it means for it never to rain at all?” he asked. For island nations around the world, the huge spike in extreme weather events was destroying whatever economic or developmental gains they had made during the previous decade.

  The ambassador from the Marshall Islands informed me that every two weeks, high tides on different parts of the islands caused around a thousand people to relocate inland. Since she was based in New York, she had allowed her family residence to be converted into a home for “climate refugees.” She explained that four families were crammed into the residence at any given time, but most people she knew were looking to emigrate. Many indigenous communities, meanwhile, could not even contemplate the pain of leaving behind the bones of ancestors or forgoing sacred traditions tied to the land.

  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.

  These countries were counting on the United States to lead the world in finding a solution. Their ambassadors encouraged people who denied or doubted the global scientific consensus on climate change to visit their homelands. “We are losing so much time,” one said. Each full year that I was in my job at the UN was hotter than the one before, and each was hotter than any single year in recorded history. If the United States did not show leadership to combat these trends, they warned, they and their families were doomed.

  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.”

  — 32 —

  Upside-Down Land

  With its towering ceiling and large, ornate mural depicting a phoenix rising from the wreckage of war, the Security Council chamber always exuded the aura of a grand and timeless stage set. But in February of 2014, when I looked around the room, I momentarily felt that I had actually been transported to a prior age.

  The chamber was packed in anticipation of a US–Russia showdown.

  Using tactics similar to those of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin’s Russia was attempting a vicious land grab in Ukraine. Furthermore, he and his representatives were lying about their aggression to the world, acting as if the abundant evidence from photographs, satellites, and live witnesses did not exist.

  The UN press gallery, often a sleepy locale, was brimming with foreign journalists. Photographers jostled one another for the best vantage to cover the expected drama. As I entered the chamber, the initial flurry of camera flashes was blinding.

  I was not alive during the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I was only nineteen and just beginning to immerse myself in foreign affairs. In the years that followed, I had mistakenly assumed that Russia had left behind the era of brutalizing its neighbors.

  As our emergency meeting was gaveled to begin, I sat in the US chair and reflected on the fact that just as in 1956 and 1968, only one country could lead the world in standing up to Moscow on the international stage: the United States.

  Then it hit me: Wait! That’s me. I’m America here. I’m the one who has to respond.

  DURING PRESIDENT OBAMA’S FIRST TERM, he had orchestrated a “reset” with Russia, and his partnership with President Medvedev resulted in a number of significant national security achievements. The United States and Russia had successfully negotiated the “New START” treaty and slashed our respective nuclear stockpiles. We had worked together on Iran, imposing multilayered sanctions that would soon cause Tehran to surrender its potential nuclear weapons program. And perhaps most remarkably, given the history between our two countries, Russia had granted the US military access to a critical land route for supplying our troops in Afghanistan.

  Even when we were on good terms, however, nothing came easily with Russia. Whether Vladimir Putin was prime minister or president, the Russian government locked up and even murdered its critics. At the UN, Russia played the spoiler, impeding American efforts to promote human rights and to secure various reforms within the organization.

  Nonetheless, I had invested long hours in forging a constructive working relationship with Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s Ambassador to the UN. Because Russia held one of five vetoes at the Security Council, its vote was critical if we were to get the Council to send peacekeepers to conflict areas, impose sanctions on wrongdoers, or even just condemn a coup. In order for the UN to have a meaningful impact on issues of war and peace, the United States and Russia had to be willing to make deals. Our two countries did not have the option of remaining at arm’s length.

  Vitaly had only recently gotten to know me during our negotiations over the Syria chemical weapons resolution. But I had known him far longer, having watched him in action when he served as the Russian envoy to Bosnia in the 1990s during the war. I had occasionally been in the pack of journalists surrounding him in Sarajevo, notebook and tape recorder in hand. Vitaly always seemed to relish these engagements, eloquently delivering a predictably pro-Serb line while simultaneously insisting upon his own complete objectivity. I remember being struck by the fact that his English was so fluid that he quoted lines from American movies and songs and even made English puns.32

  But something else impressed me more. After the February 1994 massacre of Sarajevo market-goers, Vitaly had reportedly been pivotal in convincing the Bosnian Serbs to move their heavy weapons away from the Bosnian capital. This brought Sarajevans a reprieve of many months. When the Serbs subsequently resumed shelling the city and began assaulting the UN-declared “safe areas,” Vitaly was also the rare Russian official who publicly criticized them, saying they were “afflicted with military madness.” To me, this indicated a promising independent streak.

  Vitaly became UN ambassador in 2006 and seemed a permanent fixture. He had sparred
with Susan Rice when she had been ambassador, but they had also become friendly. In their last UN meeting together, she had roared with laughter when he presented her with a mock Security Council statement expressing “relief” at her departure. The mock-up also sent condolences to “that other Security Council,” the National Security Council she would soon chair in her capacity as National Security Advisor.

  I had already come to respect Vitaly’s talents as a negotiator. He had brought procedural wisdom and textual creativity to our Syria chemical weapons discussions, but above all he listened with careful intensity. When he wasn’t melodramatically storming out of a meeting, he was good at bridging gaps.

  Significantly, he also valued US–Russia cooperation. From his time as an interpreter in arms control negotiations during the Cold War, Vitaly drew a lesson: even when Russia’s overall relationship with the United States was strained, our two countries could carve out discrete areas for progress and try to build constructive momentum. I knew he often pushed for compromises that Moscow was disinclined to make. Vitaly and I always took each other’s calls. And for the three and a half years we worked together, we would do our best to reconcile positions that on their face looked irreconcilable.

  As I got to know Vitaly, I naturally wondered how he could stand working for Putin and why he hadn’t resigned somewhere along the way. Even though people who crossed Putin often ended up jailed or even killed, I didn’t think he stayed because he was intimidated. Instead, the most memorable stanza from Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (one of Eddie’s favorite poems) would often come to my mind: “Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.”

  Vitaly had been a child actor in Soviet films and had come of age during the height of Cold War competition with the United States.33 After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he despised what he saw as the American tendency to take Russia for granted. Like many proud Russians, he embraced Putin’s goal of “raising Russia from its knees.” Even if the Russian leader’s actions made him uncomfortable, he would go on serving his country.