The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  However, Obama was never convinced that the United States could use military force “carefully and responsibly” in Syria.

  Publicly, he defended this restraint with great conviction. Most notably, in a 2016 interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama described himself as “very proud” of his willingness to put the brakes on air strikes during the 2013 red-line episode:

  The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.

  Obama’s retrospective embrace of pulling back from his planned air strikes seemed to me a defensive overstatement—one that I believed derived from years of feeling personally blamed for the carnage in Syria. In my experience, President Obama sounded most defiant in public when he felt internally conflicted.

  After reading his comments, I sent him an email, urging him to reconsider the “distorted” account in The Atlantic of what had happened in August and September of 2013.

  “When you decided to go to Congress, you did not expect or want to fail,” I wrote Obama. “By getting Congress behind you, you expected to have a thicker base to sustain an intervention that was unpredictable.” That hadn’t worked out, and thanks to the President’s improvisation, we had still managed to get something useful out of the crisis: the destruction of 1,300 tons of chemical weapons. Nevertheless, I did not think we could call the chapter a proud one in the annals of US foreign policy. The way Obama characterized what had happened also seemed to underestimate the negative, longer-term effects of the red-line events, which I thought damaged his credibility as President and undermined the influence of the United States. Reversing ourselves in public left us looking confused, and it exposed how constrained the President was domestically on foreign policy.

  The consequences of the Syrian war went beyond the unfathomable levels of death, destruction, and displacement. The spillover of the conflict into neighboring countries through massive refugee flows and the spread of ISIS’s ideology has created dangers for people in many parts of the world. Whereas in 2011 or 2012—or even after the 2013 chemical weapons attack—it may have seemed to many non-Syrians (and certainly to most Americans) that the conflict would not touch their lives, today it is much harder to make that case.

  A massive population movement sent a half million Syrian refugees across Europe in 2015 alone. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Brexit advocates used this biblical flight to help strategically demonize migrants and refugees, a key element of their successful campaigns. Of course, the widespread discontent among those harmed by globalization and inequality had far greater effects on American and European political developments than the influx of refugees. But the sense of a world gone mad gave enterprising demagogues an effective scapegoat, and one that they continue to use to this day.

  All that said, I do not now—and did not then—have the bitter certitude of President Obama’s critics. Because history can’t be replayed, we will never know what would have happened had Obama taken a different path, for example, ordering the Pentagon to set up a no-fly zone. Perhaps tens of thousands more Syrians would be alive today and perhaps, without such a huge exodus of refugees, the xenophobic forces rising in Western countries would not have gained such traction. On the other hand, had the US military struck Syria’s air defenses, Assad—sensing how little appetite there was in the United States for a fight—might have called the President’s bluff and dared us to ramp up our military involvement. This escalation could have taken the United States down the very “slippery slope” that all of us sought to avoid, miring our troops in a regional conflagration with Russia on the other side of the line.

  It is easy to speculate about counterfactuals, but all we can know is that those of us involved in helping devise Syria policy will forever carry regret over our inability to do more to stem the crisis. And we know the consequences of the policies we did choose. For generations to come, the Syrian people and the wider world will be living with the horrific aftermath of the most diabolical atrocities carried out since the Rwandan genocide.

  WHEN I WROTE “A PROBLEM FROM HELL,” my friend Jonathan Moore recommended that I read economist Albert Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Published in 1970, Hirschman wrote that when someone is unhappy with a policy or practice, they can choose to “exit,” exercise “voice” (communicate grievances internally or through public protest), or be governed by “loyalty,” which “holds exit at bay and activates voice.”

  Jonathan also steered me to a 1968 Atlantic essay written by his friend James C. Thomson, a former East Asia specialist at the State Department and NSC who had left the Johnson administration over Vietnam. In the essay, Thomson set out to explain why more of his colleagues had not dissented internally or resigned over a US-led war that ultimately killed millions of people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and resulted in the deaths of more than 58,000 Americans. As part of his explanation, Thomson invoked what he called the “effectiveness trap.” US officials unhappy with a policy, he wrote, typically deceive themselves into believing that they are doing more good by staying in government than they could by leaving.

  Late one night in New York, with the kids asleep and Cass in Cambridge, I pulled up the essay online and reread it for the first time since I had joined the administration. Thomson wrote:

  The inclination to remain silent or to acquiesce in the presence of the great men—to live to fight another day, to give on this issue so that you can be “effective” on later issues—is overwhelming . . . it is easy to rationalize the decision to stay aboard. By doing so, one may be able to prevent a few bad things from happening and perhaps even make a few good things happen.

  While I did not see any equivalency between the horrors that resulted from America’s prosecution of the Vietnam War and the Obama administration’s Syria policy, the concept of the effectiveness trap seemed applicable to many professional circumstances. I was determined not to fall into it, and every few months, rather than simply writing off those who attacked me, I would ask whether the balance of considerations still made it right to stay.

  Was the President still listening to me or was he tuning me out? Could I take specific initiatives at the United Nations to try to help Syrians? Would the public reaction to my resignation make a difference in President Obama’s decision-making or to the plight of Syrians? Was I making progress on other issues that mattered? If I were replaced, would someone carry those issues forward?

  Depending on the day, my answers to these questions varied. When I talked to Cass, he would remind me of how often I agreed with Obama. And he would say, “If you can make one person’s life better, do that.”

  I did what was within my power to do. I made use of my public platform at the UN to expose the ways in which Assad’s government pretended to be a bulwark against terrorism while it cynically provided weapons and oil to ISIS.58 I used public and private diplomacy (through Vitaly) to push to get Syrian political prisoners out of jail. My advocacy conceivably played a role in securing the release of human rights lawyer Mazen Darwish, a prisoner for more than three years whose wife I often met and whose court appearances I tracked.

  Working with Australia, Jordan, and my European colleagues, I also secured Russia’s support for a UN Security Council resolution that permitted food aid to move across international borders into opposition areas of Syria. This allowed more than two million people to receive UN assistance that the Syrian government had been blocking.

  Yet next to the scale of Syrians’ suffering, I knew all of this was a pittance. I would force myself to read every Syria report that crossed my desk, and nothing I and my team did diminis
hed my sense of guilt and frustration at being unable to make a convincing case to do more to help those in desperate need.

  Still, I never seriously considered leaving.

  Mort was blunt, as always. “Look, I think your administration’s Syria policy is terrible,” he said during one of our calls. “ ‘Don’t do stupid shit’ basically means, ‘Don’t do shit.’ But what the hell are you going to accomplish for the Syrians from Cambridge? You leave and it’s a one-day story. The next day nobody will give a damn. Certainly, Obama won’t give a damn. There will just be more like-minded people in the Situation Room.”

  When I spoke with Jonathan, I reminded him that when we had first met at Carnegie, several State Department officials had just resigned to protest US inaction in the face of atrocities in Bosnia—the largest wave of resignations in the Department’s history. But when we spoke about Syria, he distinguished the two situations. For those Balkans specialists, he said, staying meant that they would work only to implement a policy they abhorred, with no recourse for changing it and no other issues on which they could make a positive difference. Jonathan urged me to see how privileged I was.

  “You need to keep arguing for what you believe on Syria,” he insisted. “But even if it is the most important and most deadly conflict on the planet right now, you can’t let Syria become the only measure of what you do. You can use your position to help a lot of people out there. The world is filled with broken places. Pick your battles, and go win some.”

  — 39 —

  Shrink the Change

  I heard one question more than any other during my time as UN ambassador: “But what can one person do?”

  Even committed, motivated people felt overwhelmed by the gravity of challenges in the world, from climate change to the refugee crisis to the global crackdown on human rights. I worried about individuals experiencing a kind of doom loop in which, because they could not single-handedly fix these large problems, they would end up opting to do nothing. Whenever my own thoughts about the state of the world headed toward a similarly bleak impasse, I would brainstorm with my team about how we might “shrink the change” we hoped to see.

  I had come across this phrase in a book called Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by professors Chip and Dan Heath. Cass had given me the book when I worked at the White House, and I had ordered many copies for my US government colleagues. The Heath brothers stressed that, counterintuitively, big problems “are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades.” “Shrink the change” became a kind of motto for me and my team, along with President Obama’s version of the point: “Better is good.”

  Sometimes human achievements were big and sweeping—like helping end the Ebola epidemic. But more often, the changes we as individuals were able to make in the world were smaller. “Even if we can’t solve the whole problem,” I would say, “surely there is something we can do.”

  FROM THE BEGINNING OF MY TIME at the UN, securing the release of political prisoners seemed like an achievable and worthwhile initiative. I used private meetings with foreign ministers, public statements, and social media to call for the release of individuals being held around the world for “crimes” like exposing officials’ lawbreaking or advocating for free speech.

  Efforts like this naturally rankled foreign governments, so I was fortunate to have a supportive colleague in Secretary Kerry. When a foreign minister called him to complain about “Samantha’s tweets,” Kerry would occasionally vent to his staff that I was making his job harder. But we talked and emailed several times a week, and we met whenever we were both in Washington. He never urged me to temper my criticisms of abusive governments.

  When I once raised with him the Egyptian foreign minister’s objections to my advocacy, for example, Kerry just rolled his eyes. “Soon they will have no one left to lock up,” he noted, and that was the end of it. My style was not his style, but we had an unspoken understanding: Kerry would try to influence governments his way, generally through private channels, while I would conduct quiet diplomacy and exert public pressure.

  In September of 2015, Chinese president Xi Jinping planned to hold a summit at the United Nations to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1995 World Conference on Women that had been hosted in Beijing. Xi’s conference provided an occasion to highlight an inconvenient fact: women’s voices were still being silenced in many countries, including China. Indeed, recently, the Chinese government had even locked up a group of women for having the temerity to campaign against sexual harassment. These women, who became known as the Beijing Five, had only been released after sustained international pressure.

  Knowing that the Chinese-led “Beijing+20” summit would of course ignore the plight of the world’s female political prisoners, my team and I decided to use the unique spotlight of a major global gathering to show solidarity with imprisoned women and to pressure governments to release them. These efforts coalesced into a campaign called #Freethe20, through which we aimed to help free twenty female political prisoners from thirteen countries.* Our list not only included prisoners in countries with which the administration had adversarial relations (like Venezuela and Syria), but also women incarcerated by governments with which the United States wanted to maintain strong ties (like China and Egypt). This balance made our stance on human rights more credible, and it comported with my view that our important relationships could withstand human rights pressure.

  For each of the women we planned to profile, we reached out to their families, directly or through human rights organizations, to gauge whether they wanted their wife, sister, or daughter included. But we also needed clearances from numerous US officials, including the ambassadors posted to the countries where the women were jailed. Some resisted, worrying that a prisoner’s inclusion on our list would add unnecessary tension to our dealings with the country. Even with Kerry’s support, we only received sign-off for the final woman after I had put out a press release announcing the campaign’s launch for the next day.

  Twenty days before the Beijing+20 conference, in front of the diplomatic press corps at the State Department, I shared the story of the first prisoner, a courageous forty-four-year-old Chinese lawyer named Wang Yu. In addition to representing the Beijing Five, Wang had defended Ilham Tohti, the Uighur scholar jailed for highlighting the Chinese government’s abuses against its brutalized Uighur minority. Now Wang herself was imprisoned for “subversion of state power,” which carried a potential life sentence.

  Thanks to the Mission’s human rights adviser Kelly Razzouk, Kurtis Cooper, and others on our press team, we unearthed unforgettable details about each woman and made full use of social media to publicize their cases. Although our emphasis was on each individual prisoner, the women’s experiences cast light on the larger judicial systems that abetted injustice: the coopted judges that presided over their trials, the draconian laws used to sentence them, the inhumane conditions in which they were imprisoned, and the persecuted organizations and movements for which they worked.

  Every day for twenty days, I posted a video to Facebook in which I described the featured woman’s work and the charges against her. Then we hung a jumbo picture of the woman in the large glass windows in the lobby of the US Mission, directly across the street from the entrance to UN Headquarters. Dignitaries attending the UN General Assembly, as well as anyone walking down First Avenue, had little choice but to pass this expanding series of portraits.

  I reached out to Kelly Ayotte, the Republican senator from New Hampshire, who agreed to introduce a resolution in support of the campaign. The resolution, cosponsored by the then-twenty female US senators, Republican and Democrat, called for the immediate release of the prisoners. “Our message is simple,” the senators said in a press release. “World leaders and foreign governments . . . should empower women, not imprison them.”

  On the day I hung the poster for Wang Yu, China’s Ambassador to the UN, Liu Jieyi, telephoned
me with “an urgent message” from Beijing. I had a respectful relationship with Liu, but he sounded mystified by what I was doing. He explained that Beijing saw our campaign as an aggressive act. He cautioned that continuing would not contribute positively to the atmosphere between our countries, and he urged me to reconsider.

  I said I understood his government’s perspective—and assured him that releasing Wang and China’s other political prisoners in time for them to participate in the summit would do wonders to improve that atmosphere.

  Soon after, I profiled Ta Phong Tan, a forty-seven-year-old Vietnamese blogger arrested in 2011. Tan, a former police officer, had written about corruption in Vietnam’s judicial system and was serving a ten-year prison sentence for publishing “anti-state propaganda.” Her mother had died after setting herself on fire to protest her daughter’s prolonged detention.

  Not long after we publicized Tan’s story, I received a call from Vietnam’s UN ambassador. She also expressed her government’s displeasure with our decision to feature Tan and another Vietnamese prisoner named Bui Thi Minh Hang. But a few days later, we learned that Tan was going to be freed, and Kelly soon emailed me a photo of her landing in Los Angeles to start a new life.

  I was amazed. When we developed the concept for the campaign, I did not expect that many of the women would actually be released. Nonetheless, I thought it worthwhile to make repressive governments pay at least a reputational cost for their actions. Yet our modest effort already seemed to be producing some tangible results.

  Sanaa Seif was a twenty-one-year-old Egyptian arrested the previous year for peacefully demonstrating without a permit. Within forty-eight hours of featuring her, Kelly informed me that Sanaa had been pardoned—along with ninety-nine others. At our daily morning meeting, Kelly arrived carrying the photo of Sanaa that we had hung in the window of the Mission. Only now, the image had the word “RELEASED” stamped in large red letters across the bottom.