Samantha Power: belief

Transcript context

…I think the fact that our military is active in as many conflicts in the world today and that we have not been able to secure from the US Congress an authorization for the use of force, effectively since — depending on how you date the authorities under which our current soldiers are operating — 2001 in the wake of 9/11 and then the flawed vote on behalf of the Iraq War. That’s 16 years. We’re going on two decades since the 9/11 authorization under which most of our operations abroad are being waged. It’s a failure to perform Congress’s duty as stipulated under the Constitution and, I think, under the War Powers Resolution as well, but it’s also such a disservice to our troops and their families. We say that we’re all for the troops and we’re giving the troops this and we’re giving the troops that. We fail them consistently on benefits, and we fail them in overseeing how their lives are being spent, and by “spent,” for the most part, I mean how their days are being spent, where they’re being deployed. That conversation has not happened domestically in too long. So yes, if you did a referendum of the American people, or if that were played out as we saw in the Syria red-line episode, I think you would see great skepticism about the use of force. I think there should be great skepticism in many, many cases when our vital national interests are not involved. But if you see a circumstance like the Ebola outbreak, where we used our military in such a constructive way, and where we did a congressional notification, but because that didn’t really rise to the level of war, we weren’t engaged in combat at all. But it’s an example where, if Congress were playing in the larger space of the deployment of our military generally, we could have had a constructive and maybe, in some ideal world, eventually a bipartisan discussion of why problems that happen over there matter to us over here. Instead, the Obama administration carried out the intervention in support of the local efforts on the ground, which were heroic and dauntingly complex. And because of our polarization problem, which we haven’t talked about, Republicans, by and large on party lines, basically sniped at, criticized, undermined, threatened to quarantine even those American heroes who went over to be part of the intervention. And it’s funny. For all of the valorization of what our troops do, there’s a carveout for Ebola because it was Obama’s successful intervention to end a major public health calamity, and they decided that the politics of supporting that weren’t good or whatever. In general, we need more buy-in for our foreign policy. And given the large weight that the US military is carrying in shouldering the foreign policy burden, that oversight role is incredibly important. If we could somehow return to a time where Republicans didn’t snipe at what Democrats did . . . I hope we’re still in a world where Democrats, if Trump did something . . . ole is incredibly important. If we could somehow return to a time where Republicans didn’t snipe at what Democrats did . . . I hope we’re still in a world where Democrats, if Trump did something . . . I think you saw this with the Syria chemical weapons response, that some Democrats came out in favor of that because it’s something they had favored Obama doing, and they were consistent. But probably the fact that it was Trump doing it overrode their cost-benefit of the action itself. It proved not to be a terribly effective action over time anyway. But when our lives are at stake, the lives of our soldiers are at stake, but also when American lives are at stake — which is what is at stake in many foreign policy decisions — I just wish we could return to the Nunn-Lugar era of bipartisanship, where we could work on really hard problems together. If you had that kind of backdrop, then you could imagine more congressional oversight but also not the evisceration of our foreign policy generally. So we are in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation where polarization makes the prospect of securing congressional authorization for anything large harder to imagine. But that gets back to the first principle, where we have to deal with our polarization and start working together on issues of all stripes. I recommend to you all Samantha’s new memoir, The Education of an Idealist, and thank you very much, Samantha Power.…

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