Samantha Power: prediction

Transcript context

…You’re going to hate me, but I find it very hard to discuss in the abstract because, again, it is so multifactorial. For example, if you’re talking about looking historically, which I know is not what you were asking, but if you look at, let’s say, the East Timor intervention, which was widely seen as a success — that was a population of one million people. The entire, let’s say, 99 percent of the people in the relevant area supported the intervention. The intervention from outside was Australian led, so there was at least some regional expertise and not the kind of tortured history that, let’s say, Portugal or the Netherlands or whatever, some kind of colonial past. So it was maybe, you could argue, just enough regional heft. There were a lot of issues between Australia and East Timor, but not quite the same baggage maybe, so a little more legitimacy in terms of culture and nationalism. And it had the broad support of the UN Security Council. You raised a number of issues. What I would say is, what is the harm on the ground that you’re even contemplating a humanitarian intervention in response to? Many people argued in the United States, in the Bush administration, that what Saddam was doing to his people in 2002–2003 had crossed some threshold for humanitarian intervention. It was a huge country, not a million people. It had a huge sectarian cleavage that the Bush administration, of course, completely underestimated. It had zero international legitimacy. It had a huge amount of attention from the president, initially great popular support because of the faux link mainly, I suppose, to 9/11 and to weapons of mass destruction. But I would argue that you don’t even get to that question of “Is it a humanitarian intervention?” because a dictatorship, even one as brutal as that one — there was no clear and present danger to huge numbers of lives or no imminent risk of genocide or something of that nature. And in part, it kind of takes care of itself because when there isn’t that precipitating trigger, you have a very hard time securing international legitimacy, never mind international legal support through the Security Council, which is hard to get in the best of circumstances. So I’d say that — and indeed this was said at the time, I think — that your ability to build an international coalition, to use military force, the breadth and the pluralism of the coalition itself that might be brought to bear — usually that will have some relationship with the underlying harm and the sense that there’s a kind of trigger, either for a slaughter in a country or a trigger for an intervention. In Syria, which was the most vexing issue that I’ve dealt with in my career, where I think we should have leaned in and at least taken some steps militarily to see whether limited intervention might have kick-started our diplomacy, might have created some protection for some number of Syrians . . . d have leaned in and at least taken some steps militarily to see whether limited intervention might have kick-started our diplomacy, might have created some protection for some number of Syrians . . . I think if you’re looking at that from where the president was sitting — President Obama that is, and now President Trump — you see just the . . . similar to Iraq, but the underlying complexity among the factions on the ground, so the humanitarian trigger is higher than anything arguably since the Rwandan genocide. But as you do your cost-benefit calculus, the complexity of what you are seeking to influence just shatters, really, any of the other examples that we’ve dealt with over the last three decades. So again, to look at it to say that there’s one cabining factor, one great limiting factor — the fact now that there is very little American domestic constituency for using military force when our most vital national interests are not implicated — I think that’s a fact right now on the left and the right. There is a shrinking constituency for internationalism generally, and so, I think, one has to be all the more careful about getting too far in front of where the public is because already you’re seeing in very dangerous ways, I think, a backlash against the war fatigue in Iraq and Afghanistan and a kind of tendency to say, “This is what foreign policy buys you,” instead of, in the case of Iraq, “This is what a poorly planned, poorly executed military intervention buys you. ” We need to restore a constituency and a faith that we can have a productive foreign policy, and I think that part of what that will entail is putting diplomacy and burden sharing at the front of our messaging and of our packaging and of our actions. Right now, humanitarian intervention, if it happens — and it’s happening in different places around the world — but is much more likely to be done by regional organizations like the African Union than it is to be orchestrated by great powers. And given the lagging public opinion, until some successful actions are prosecuted — depending, again, on the circumstances — that may be a wise thing. But that doesn’t mean that the United States doesn’t have a role, for example, in training and equipping the troops that are going into a Central African Republic or into a Mali or into places where lives can be saved. I very much enjoyed reading your just-published memoir, and I recommend it to all of our listeners and readers. One thing that shines through in your account of your own life is your passion for sports. So, if I may, a few questions along that direction. Very simple — are baseball games too long? Why not make it 7 innings?…

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