Samantha Power on Learning How to Make a Difference

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. I'm here today with Samantha Power, who is currently Professor of Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School and also the Harvard School of Law. She started her career as an NPR wartime correspondent, including in the former Yugoslavia. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell, focused the attention of the world on the issue of genocide and revolutionized our thinking about foreign policy. Samantha Power, of course, later served in President Obama's cabinet, and she was his ambassador to the United Nations. And she is also the author of other books, but most notably, she has a memoir just out called The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir. Samantha, welcome.

Great to be here, Tyler Cowen.

Very first question: which personality characteristics do you feel make for a good diplomat?

Great question, not asked enough, I think, by people who practice diplomacy. Probably I'd start with listening and trying to really hear where the other person is coming from. And often, they're coming from a standpoint of receiving instructions from their head of state or from their minister, for starters, or if they are the minister, they're implementing kind of what is perceived as national will. But they also are individuals who are sometimes very independent-minded, and they're fighting within their own systems. So often there's a tendency to just kind of see the instructions or the diktat that comes at you and think that that's the sum total of sort of what the individual in front of you represents or wants to advance. But in fact, you have to pry a little bit and try to loosen the individual up to get some sense of where they fall within their universe. And I only know that because it's true of me as well or anybody practicing diplomacy on behalf of the United States. You have to listen really carefully to understand the situated self in many ways.

And which personality features make for good wartime correspondents, and are they the same as those which make for good diplomats?

They're similar, certainly listening and really trying to see sort of where the people that you're interviewing, whether policymakers, you know, who are failing to or succeeding in managing a conflict, or more likely in the case of a war correspondent, the individuals who are affected by conflict or participating in conflict. So really trying to hear sort of what's motivating them, how they're affected by conflict, but And I think this would also be true of a good diplomat, being able to bridge a distance between the readers or the viewers that you have in mind back in your home country, and then these experiences that most of your viewers and readers hopefully will never have themselves. And that requires keeping an eye on both and trying to sort of see what is adaptive, you know, what works for a reader, learn from that, you know, if you get a lot of responses to a story because they see themselves in the individuals that you managed to describe, then chances are that's something you should try again. And so really listening and hearing both sides of the spectrum, I think, as a war correspondent.

How risk-averse are good diplomats, and does that conflict with what you need to be a good wartime correspondent?

Well, again, it's hard to sort of convey to people outside the realm of prosecuting foreign policy or practicing diplomacy, but most diplomats are quite bounded in the sense that it's very rare, actually, for a diplomat to be able to sort of lean much beyond where they know their head of state has entitled them to go. When they do, they often get smacked down by the people who work above them. So I was very fortunate, but again, it's not a common circumstance to be both a diplomat representing the United States and a member of the president's cabinet. So I was able to spend enough time with President Obama to have a sense not only of what my explicit instructions were, but where the gray areas were at the margins than how far to push. And so in being in that privileged position of spending more time with him, I was more inclined, I'd say, to be risk-taking than somebody who's literally receiving a cable from their minister or from their head of state to go forth and do X or Y on behalf of their country. I took a lot of risks in my public persona. I mean, they don't sound like risks, certainly not like the risks I took as a war correspondent, but I thought it was really important to try to break out of a kind of stale lingua franca that exists around contemporary conflict. So the tendency is just to describe conflicts in very mechanical, I think very antiseptic ways. And what I would do when I was projecting publicly, let's say at the UN Security Council or at a press stakeout, is to tell the stories of individuals that I had met, who had suffered the consequences of conflict. So this is again back to being— having been a journalist, but trying— recognizing the diplomats who I'm disagreeing with are human beings and that they're as unlikely to be moved by rote talking points as I am unlikely to be moved by rote talking points or changed internally, emotionally, or changed as a practical matter. So my only hope of kind of breaking them out of the rut that they are in— not maybe my only hope, but a main source of hope is to kind of remind them that this isn't just some run-of-the-mill conflict, that this isn't just a day job, that there are these individuals who might be the same age as your daughter or your sister or your mother who are suffering these consequences, and we have a responsibility to try to shake things up a little bit because what we've been doing hasn't been working, or we wouldn't be in a position of having this conversation. So again, it's storytelling, but it's more about breaking people out of their comfort zone so they can hear afresh what is happening in the world.

So if I think about Richard Holbrooke, he was one of the diplomats who helped broker a peace solution in former Yugoslavia. If I read your edited volume on Holbrooke, he sounds so sane and rational. If I read the new George Packer biography of Holbrooke, he sounds somewhat crazy and maybe a womanizer or obnoxious or a fair amount of disregard for protocol. How should I square these pictures? What's the actual truth about Richard Holbrooke?

It would be unusual for any individual in a self-portrait to depict themselves as a womanizing crazy person, for starters. But I also think, I mean, George's book also depicts a person who aligns with the Holbrooke that we know from Holbrooke's own portrayal, namely somebody super energetic and creative and working all sources of leverage. I mean, I think he was a complex individual who was sort of both and everything. I was very lucky to have been mentored by him and I think that's one thing that's a story I told in the edited Holbrooke volume that isn't as salient I think in Packer's account but it's very wonderful but also quite unusual for an established diplomat whether one who is self-involved and egotistical or one— and/or one who is super talented and creative. Holbrooke was both of those things. And for anyone in those categories to spend the time that Holbrooke spent cultivating young diplomats, I think that speaks to, you know, also a depth of character and a deep reverence for the United States, a kind of patriotism because I think he saw it wasn't like, let me have my refracted glory or let all of these minions go forth in the world and there'll be many Holbrookes, you know, going around. I think he really thought, it was incumbent on him to groom the next generation of diplomats to go forth on behalf of US interests. And so I think, you know, any kind of black and white portrait of someone with that range of qualities would be, you know, would be flawed. I think George does an excellent job capturing the yin and the yang.

Now, you migrated to the United States from Ireland at the age of 9. When you first arrived here, what was your biggest surprise?

Everything was huge. And so when we arrived in Pittsburgh, which was my first hometown in America, I actually thought the airport had to be the biggest airport in the history of the world. And you hadn't been to Dallas yet. Yeah, well, I don't know. Yeah, it would be years really, because I didn't travel that much as a kid. But I remember we moved to Atlanta then when I was in high school and then I got to Hartsfield International Airport. I thought, my gosh, what is going on? Like these airports. But just coming from Dublin or Shannon Airport would have been where we flew from. It was a different world. And then just the selection. I mean, we had the old school TV, which of course Americans did have many generations before, I guess, here in this country, but we had the 3 channels, you know, the antenna where you try to get one of the channels was only in Irish all the time, the Gaelic language. And then suddenly you get to America, and at that time, I think there was 13 or 14 channels, but within a few years, there'd be 60, and then God knows how many we have now. So just that sense of abundance, I think, But some things were similar even if the form changed. Like sport was huge in Ireland, even for a small country. Irish football or soccer or hurling or whatever. And then you come to America and you look around, it's just a different set of sports, but that same kind of enthusiasm and energy. So I just— there were sort of categories that one could slot the new into that I brought with me, I guess.

In which ways do you feel your thought is in some manner still Irish in orientation in a way that would distinguish you from, say, American-born individuals?

Well, it's hard to know because I can't run the counterfactual, so I don't know what's just because my mother is a physician and very empathetic toward her patients and do I learn from that or am I moved by having come from a small country, at that time a poor country that was sending— With a history of oppression, right? With a history of oppression, with a history— the dignity of its people being trampled? Is that why I care so much about individual dignity? Again, I can't run the history a different way but I do think that it is incumbent on large countries and large powers and large personalities to see the individual worth and dignity of the people around them whether the person who works for you or the small country in the United Nations that may only have a population of 10,000, but nonetheless, every one of those 10,000 people on one level counts on the United States, let's say, to deal with climate change or something like that. So the idea that some countries are sort of intrinsically better than others or any kind of superiority complex, I think that would have been— I would have been innately suspicious of that, I suppose, even as I rejoiced in all that made America amazing to me both as a kid and as a diplomat.

Now, China is very much in the news as of late, so let me ask you some very easy questions about China.

Such an easy topic.

Now, as you know, China for years had promised the United States and also President Obama that it would not militarize the South China Sea, and then they went ahead and they did that. And perhaps looking back, this has turned out to be more important than we might have thought at the time. What was or would have been the best proper response to China militarizing the South China Sea?

I think that first of all, there was an awareness across the administration, I think, of how this wasn't just about a pile of rocks. This was about whether countries, especially an ascendant country like China that was going to just ascend and ascend and ascend for the foreseeable future, whether they were prepared to play by the rules of the road or whether might made right, and these are enduring questions that have been with us through history whenever there's a rising power, but also whenever there's a falling power. How do different countries deal with kind of major changes in their status and what level of entitlement do they bring to their practices? I think what we did was challenge them, work with others to challenge them in the court of public opinion, of course, but also at the International Court of Justice, invoking the rules of the road, evoking the rule of law, and then to continue to try to maintain freedom of navigation in these critical areas. It's very challenging because it's also the case that you don't have an American public or an American constituency, let's say, that would be terribly enthusiastic about a military confrontation over questions of, you know, land grabs in the South China Sea. So you're balancing an invocation of the rule of law, a recognition that some of these claims are contested and that it's not for us to decide whether this belongs to Vietnam or to China, but to kind of again invest in a rules-based order where every country doesn't just grab what it wants, but is prepared to abide by these rulings. Unfortunately, what we're seeing with China is it just swats away those rulings sort of as the United States has done in the past as well, I should note, and there is a tendency, especially among strong powers to cherry-pick those findings that they like. So I'm not sure going back, maybe more of an emphasis on the freedom of navigation dimension, which is something that all the countries of the world, including China, should be able to agree upon. We did, you know, really pivot, to use the phrase that President Obama used at the time, to Asia and make very significant new investments, both in terms of trade and the Trans-Pacific Partnership and negotiating that, which I think would have been an enormous boon and all also a real signal to China, you know, that all of these countries are going in a different direction and that you can't separate out the military land grab from the economic and that there are, you know, communities of values also that can come together. But that, of course, has been sort of walked away from by the Trump administration. But we also made sizable military investments in the region, really deepening our presence in Asia. So beyond that, again, I think you— it's a balancing act. So I'm not sure looking back I'm not sure that China was going to be bucked if we did 6 more freedom of navigation exercises, and I'm not sure, again, that the military confrontation approach— some seem quite reckless in their prescriptions. You know, "Well, why didn't you?" Well, answer— like, how would that play itself out? And, you know, you can't be— you have to stand up for what's right and stand up for the rule of law, but it's not as if consequences, potential consequences, have no bearing on that calculus.

Here's a reader question, and I quote, "Can the US really push hard on global human rights anymore if doing so would simply drive countries into the arms of China, Myanmar, for instance?" End quote.

Well, I'd separate a few different dimensions. I mean, right now, we're not going to be living in a Trump world for an infinite amount of time. Some of us hope that it'll be a very short amount of time from where we sit today. But right now, it's very hard to credibly stand up for human rights. Just given the actions and commitments and practices of the Trump administration. I say that not as one who is a—

But say we had your preferred president, whoever that would be.

Yeah, no, no, no, but I think it's not as if the world doesn't remember children in cages or orphans, people orphaned by the United States who now can't find their parents or the Kim Jong-un love fest or the— It's not as if that's a blip. That's going to be part of our national heritage in a funny way. Just to bracket the question of how we recover from a Trump presidency and the human rights practices and affections of this president, I think that the core of the questioner's concern is more geopolitical. It's more, well, any country now can forum shop, and if they don't like what they're hearing from us, they'll just say, "Okay, well, I'll go and do my Belt and Road Initiative with China." So that's an enduring question, irrespective of whether we can clean up our act in the wake of Trump. And what I'd say is I actually look at it a little bit differently, which is that in an age of China's increasing aggression beyond its borders, its crackdown and increasing assertiveness in the near abroad, I'm not sure you can call Hong Kong the near abroad, but the fact that China actually goes to Thailand to round up a critic of China, of its incarceration of the Uyghurs, or the fact that it is prepared to act beyond its borders in very aggressive ways, whether in the South China Sea or again in order to keep itself insulated from criticism. China is now at the UN. Trying to sort of alter the rules of the road and the core human rights principles that have undergirded the international system for more than 70 years. They're trying to make the rules kind of more pro-censorship, more about state consent, and not about there being a set of higher principles against which states should be measured or judged. And so they're out there being China, and they're out there not yet in a fully in a full mode of let us export our domestic values internationally. They're not— that is not their number one game plan right now. Their number one game plan is internal stability above everything else and of course sustained economic growth and economic sustenance and provision for their people. But day by day, you're seeing more and more of this exporting. So what the United States could do is in deference to the logic of the question is to say, well, China's out there doing its thing. If we start whining about human rights, what good is that going to do? Or to look at our values, our democracy, our traditions, our respect for the dignity of individuals as a comparative advantage in what is a bit of a scrum geopolitically. There I think we would actually have a lot of friends. What I hear most from European partners or democracies in Asia and Africa is we're all alone. You know, now China is trying to change the rules of the road and we're kind of scattered among ourselves. We're trying to learn how to build coalitions without you, United States. And that's not just because of Trump's human rights practices, that's also because of his lack of engagement with international institutions. And we really, as democracies, if we believe in this model, if we believe everything we've been saying for a very long time about the links between democracy and prosperity and the links between democracy and stability over time, then it's actually in our our interest to see that model strengthened and not to go into retreat. So I actually think that you're going to see American politicians and leaders talk more, not less, about values in an age of China's rise.

Do you think it's a fair criticism that US human rights advocates have been a little soft in criticizing China or a little bit lax? That you have an incarceration of maybe over a million people. And it's sometimes claimed there's a kind of soft implicit censorship at the think tank level, think tanks who get money from China, universities reliant on Chinese students. A lot of companies, of course, have business in China. And has the whole thing been soft-pedaled compared to, say, how Yugoslavia was talked about in the 1990s? Well, we know Hollywood moviemakers won't make a movie where a Chinese person is the villain, and they insert Asian-looking individuals as heroes typically to appeal to the Chinese market. Which is now number 2. Have we painted ourselves into a box of censoring ourselves?

Well, let me agree with a part of the premise, which is, given the scale of the brutality and really the atrocity being carried out against a people, the Uyghur people in China, we're seeing woefully insufficient coverage and criticism. So I agree with that premise, in part just because of the gravity of the harm. It's very hard to imagine what would be sufficient. I mean, that's unbelievable. Like they can't get out. It's not as if— I mean, they talk about reeducation, rehabilitation. It's not like there's some test where you say, "I love President Xi and I wish he could be dictator not only for life but for 100 lives," and then you get out of jail. This is mass incarceration with no shelf life. And no one can escape this if you are a Uyghur and speak your language and practice your culture. I mean, it's sick. So woefully insufficient. In terms of the soft pedaling, I guess I'd want to look at that as an empirical question. I mean, I think part of what's going on is you don't hear a lot of criticism coming from the United States government. Every now and then because of the religious freedom sort of commitments of different individuals within the Trump administration, you'll hear some discussion of the Uyghurs more than you might, let's say, in Saudi Arabia or because there's a broader attack on China because of trade and other things, this sort of gets lumped jumped in with that and there seems more comfort criticizing them than countries with which we are aligned and seem totally unprepared to criticize again like Saudi Arabia. But it's not as if the Trump administration has a human rights policy as such. It's not as if they're looking at the conditions inside particular countries. If they were, they'd probably be nervous about discussions of detention given the amount of detention being done in the— migrant and immigration context by the Trump administration. Not that there's any parallel, but nonetheless, it's the kind of thing that would be thrown back at them. So I think that there's not enough noise, but I just— it's hard for me to know whether or not that latest Brookings piece isn't going all in on that or because of censorship or because of corporate influence. It's plausible that that's a factor. Or because they actually feel that they don't have a great recommendation as to what can be done. I found— find in advocacy, you see the most spirited advocacy in circumstances like Bosnia where policymakers are on the brink of doing one thing or another and activists feel like in making their recommendations or in taking over the op-ed pages that they're sort of one step away from really making a difference. On the Uyghur policy, even if we were in office, the Obama administration or the next Democratic administration, it's hard to speak with confidence that any particular tool that you employed would convince the Chinese government to think differently about this repulsive and brutal policy that it's practicing. And so I think that is another factor, but I'm sure the money is a factor as well. And it is terrifying. I see even here the extent to which, you know, you see such a willful attempt on the part of the Chinese government to sort of insinuate American college campuses, to really shrivel up the safe spaces in which criticism of China can occur, even, you know, thousands and thousands of miles away from where any instability might take root and might actually threaten the regime. And again, with us more recessive on these questions, we the United States, that is, I think you're just seeing an emboldened China using the money that it has, using the economic leverage that it has around the world, using the student exchanges that many of us really do think are a good idea as a general proposition, in part to increase connections among our peoples as our governments grow more estranged. But I mean, they are all in on this strategy of sort of sanitizing China's reputation globally. Think tanks and independent institutions, educational institutions absolutely have to defy the intimidation and the really kind of of de facto bribery that China brings to bear in order to advance that agenda.

Why is democracy so rare in the Middle East? Another easy question.

Yeah.

Well, it seems there's this, if not a healthy democracy, but a vibrant democracy in Iraq, right?

I don't know. I wouldn't go that far.

I mean, insofar as there are elections, someone wins. It seems who wins corresponds to how the votes actually should be counted, I suppose.

But then it's also the case that if you whether you're a member of one sect or another that dictates whether or not you have due process or whether— I mean, so if you want to use— make democracy just about whether you hold election, just an independent judiciary— Of course.

Sure. Not the rule of law.

Yes. Well—

But a democracy is worth—

But I mean it's worth defining one's terms. But look, I think Tunisia is now as it happens as we speak going through a transition where the rule of law had to kick in in the wake of the death of the president. And even though Tunisia is experiencing terrorism, economic stagnation, the very level— levels of corruption arguably that gave rise to the Arab Spring in the first place, you know, it's a plucky democracy that has seen I think its leaders do something that other leaders in the Middle East haven't done, which is to move away from the kind of winner-takes-all mindset. I think, you know, why has democracy not taken hold in other countries? I mean, you have families that brought— that almost wrote a how-to manual for how to inflict the most savage atrocities on their people that in the case of Syria, in the case of Egypt and el-Sisi, a different kind of manual, not the same extreme tactics of incendiary weapons and napalm and chemical weapons and mass torture and so forth, but nonetheless willing to to pull out all the stops to keep power because self-preservation and a mindset where if you practice your religion or believe that religion has a different place in society, you are like a terrorist. I mean, that's the sort of Egyptian mindset. Could it have gone another way in Egypt after Mubarak's fall with a different outcome to their first democratic election or indeed had with the same outcome, which was probably inevitable given, you know, sort of popular will all told, if the person elected to represent the Muslim Brotherhood had not had a winner-takes-all mindset. In Tunisia, you had the equivalent of a Muslim Brotherhood victory, but he recognized that the society is so divided that there had to be some kind of pacted transition. And it's a tragedy that in the case of Egypt, at a time when the society was clearly divided and again along similar lines as in Tunisia, that the idea on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership was— Morsi was, "I'm in power. I may not have another election," which was always the big fear. And then Sisi comes in and he says, "Now I'm in power and now this part of society that doesn't represent my worldview, you are to be excluded from any hand in governance and effectively I may never have another free election." Elections weren't supposed to bring to office people who would have an election once in order to rubber stamp their own power. But I think, I mean, it's not only bad luck. There are no democratic institutions that have taken hold over time, you know, that have the kind of resilience and the rule of law behind them to have kicked in. But Egypt also suffered some bad luck, I think, in who the individuals were who who were elevated. In a lot of these societies, you see some of the best leaders leaving and not— or staying and becoming entrepreneurs or civil society members and being so repulsed by what politics has represented that they wouldn't dare to be part of public life or public office.

If I look at Iraq since the surge, not the last year and a half, but it seems there have been some pretty high economic growth rates. Some of that's oil, but it's not all oil. Is there the danger that 20, 30 years from now, people look back, they simply see Iraq as a successful US operation? The country is a funny kind of democracy. It's growing, it's getting wealthier. The rest of the region is doing much worse. Is that a possible scenario?

Dr. Jessica Vinas-Nelson: Well, I mean, I think what you could— maybe somebody could conclude 30 years from now, I mean, we'd like them to conclude that democracy is the better form of government or the worst form of government apart from all the others perhaps and to see those returns and to— with Tunisia to be able to point to a couple examples of what democracy can bring and so forth. I mean I think that would be a wonderful outcome. What no, I think, self-respecting historian would be able to say is that what the United States did was well prosecuted, was well thought through. I think it'd be very hard to argue that, you know, you have to break eggs to make an omelet and this was just what it had to look like. I mean, you could imagine wildly different scenarios ultimately leading to the same kind of outcome, but without a degree of bloodshed that is certainly unprecedented in that country's history, even by the standards of having been governed by Saddam Hussein. I think in the end, they might say, "Yes, we staggered our way out of this completely bungled US-led invasion and we took matters into our own hands with the support of the United States ongoing including by this administration, by the Trump administration but also by the Obama administration and once the lessons of everything sort of ham-handed that had been done had been applied." we were able again to stagger ourselves into some kind of solvent political structure and then lo and behold, we were able to build our own democracy. I think that would be a— it would be great if Iraq became another exhibit of how over time when you allow people to hold their leaders accountable, you will end up with leadership that advances the needs of the larger population. That would be a great outcome. In some dimensions, as you say, on the economic axis, the fact that state-owned enterprises and other things have been taken over and there is— the Iraqi entrepreneurial spirit has been unleashed. On that axis, good things are happening, but it's a very difficult place for Iraqis to live.

If we think of the cases where US humanitarian interventions should not happen by your judgment, and we ask what is most likely the binding constraint when we should not intervene? What is it you think is the scarce factor? Is it the attention of the president, the tolerance of the public, having enough quality senior diplomats, the money it would cost, number of military troops? What's the relevant margin, at the margin?

You're going to hate me, but I find it very hard to discuss in the abstract because, again, it is so multifactorial. So for example, if you're talking about looking historically, which I know is not what you're asking, but if you look at, let's say, the East Timor intervention, right? Which was widely seen as a success. That was a population of 1 million people. The entire 90— let's say 99% 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, you know, some kind of colonial past. Was sort of maybe you could argue just enough regional heft, but not with quite the same— I mean, there are 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. So you raised a number of issues. I mean, I guess 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 warranted that that crossed some threshold for humanitarian intervention. It was a huge country, not a million people. It was— 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. 9/11 or into 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. 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 guess I'd say that— and indeed, this was said at the time, I think— that, you know, your ability to build an international coalition, to use military force, the breadth and the sort of pluralism of the coalition itself that might be brought to bear, it usually— that will have some relationship with the underlying harm and the sense that there's a kind of trigger either for something, 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 kickstarted 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 3 decades. So again, to look at it, to say that there's one cabining factor, one rate-limiting factor. The fact now that there's very little American domestic constituency, 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 about sort of 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 like, "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." So we need to restore a kind of constituency and a faith that we can have a productive foreign policy. I think that part of what that will entail is putting diplomacy and burden sharing at the front of our sort of messaging and of our packaging and of our actions. So I think right now humanitarian intervention, if it happens, it is— and it's happening in different places around the world, but it is much more likely to be done by regional organizations like the African Union than it is, I think, to be orchestrated by great powers and given the gap between or given the trail, the lagging public opinion, again, 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.

Trevor Burrus: I very much enjoyed reading your just-published memoir, and I recommend it to all of our listeners and readers. And 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?

Why not make it 12?

It's boring, right?

For you?

For me, it's— so many games are over 3 hours. Shouldn't the game be, you know, 2 hours, 17 minutes?

Look, I mean, if the pitchers could live with I could live with shorter warmups between innings. If the— what's left of the advertising industry could live with fewer ads delivered in that manner, I could live with slightly shorter games. But I think so far, the kinds of adjustments that have been contemplated, for example, or that are being indeed put in place this year, like holding your hand up and saying, "Here are your 4 balls for your for your intentional— here's your intentional walk. I'm not going to go and do the 4 pitches. I personally think that's a loss, and maybe just shows you what a purist I am, but I find the suspense and the fact that even if 1 out of 20, or I don't even know what the numbers are, probably worse, probably more obscure than that, but just the 1 out of 50 balls that go awry on an intentional walk, that's part of the drama. So much of what happens in baseball is about what has happened before that informs your experience of what is happening before your eyes. So I just think to buy yourself 4 minutes here, 7 minutes there. I mean, the bigger issue, and Susan Jacoby actually had a wonderful little book on this called Why Baseball Matters, but the bigger issue is we do have an aging constituency for the game, a youth potential constituency that can't stay off its phones and that believes in instant gratification for just about everything. And so, like, the sort of one-click consumer wants drama, wants action, doesn't— the slow buildup, the idea that how many pitches the pitcher has thrown by the 5th inning then is going to have bearing on which crappy middle reliever the Washington Nationals are going to bring in. Those sort of joys that people who've been groomed on the game and who didn't receive the game in the first instance as kids with these competing— in this world of distraction, we do have to grapple with the fact that we're not winning those new converts. Now I think a lot more could be done by bringing baseball to the inner city and to communities that just haven't had the space or the resources to make it happen because the truth is the greatest conversion for people or the greatest attraction to the game comes from people who've played the game and have had to work those mechanics and those philosophies and those strategies themselves. So maybe less focus on length because frankly, if a 1-0, 9-inning game is boring for somebody, a 1-0, 6-inning game is going it's gonna be boring for somebody.

Should Pete Rose be allowed into the Hall of Fame? Oh no.

You know, oh, I don't know. I don't know. Can I say I don't know once?

You can say you don't know.

Is that my lifeline?

Should we have robot umpires?

Robot umpires?

For baseball. So you have artificial intelligence judge if a pitch is a ball or a strike. And probably this would be much more accurate than humans.

Can I just say that I thought you said, should we have robot empires?

Oh no, umpires.

And that grows out of our discussion of China, I'll have you know. And the rise of artificial intelligence and the like. Robot umpires, I watch a lot of tennis as well as baseball, and I think it is very useful in tennis to have a machine that tells you what is true. My worry in baseball is that your two concerns sort of compete with one another. I mean, I guess you're imagining a robot umpire 24/7, like not as a port of As much as you want.

That's the question.

So the idea would be the catcher's glove would be like the tennis— I suppose. I mean, if it's— on TV, we can see what a strike is. Maybe there's no downside to that. I think to get the angles right at second base or to get the— not that they make great calls at first an overwhelming percentage of the time, but to get the— well, maybe you could even find a way, I guess, technically, "To get the Tygos to the runner" question at first. But I think applying tags, that's something we're going to need to retain some— we're going to have to retain the human element there. Maybe there's sort of a weirdly an appeal from a robot to a person in some of these subjective circumstances. But on a home run ball, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to ascertain on the question of whether a home run has gone over the line or is below the line or— I don't know how you would do the foul ball. You could probably have some magnetic field along. Along the yellow foul pole where the people sitting in those stands have electromagnetic rays going into themselves. That would be very, very healthy for the game. No. I don't know. I think it could get really carried away, but it is I think useful to have instant replay where at least there's a court of appeal and I think on balls and strikes, I hadn't really thought of it much before. I've been a little preoccupied with—— the destruction of our democracy and other things. But I think it's not a bad idea. Yeah, if we can do it at home. I mean, that's the migration tennis took, right? Was that they had that technology available and the fans were like, "Wait, why can we see at home whether that was an ace or a fault?" And we're in that world now. The technology is just so good that the media has— why are the pitchers and the catchers and the batters denied it?

Bob Dylan or Van Morrison?

Oh, born Van Morrison, married into Bob Dylan.

Okay. Star Wars or Star Trek?

Born into Star Trek, married into Star Wars.

What's your favorite novel?

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. Why? Spanish Civil War, journalists, questions of taking sides. I don't know. I read it when I was in Bosnia as a kid in my early 20s, and it made a deep impression. It felt like the world around me.

There was something timeless about about it. Your favorite memoir? I was told that you read a large number of memoirs before writing your own.

Yeah, for my sins, and that was a terrible idea. Future memoir writers, don't read books along the lines of what I'm going to describe. No, the best, and I mention it with great joy, the best memoir I read was Andre Agassi's memoir, Open. I love that book. Now that you hear that I love sports, you'll think, listeners, you'll think, "Oh, she loves sports." When I was growing up, I couldn't stand watching Andre Agassi for all of the reasons of image is everything and the hair and the not wearing white in Wimbledon. And I've never read a sports memoir in my life, weirdly. So I'm recommending this not because I like tennis and not because I like sports or because I somehow am some big or was some big Agassi fan, but it is the— it's about friendship and family and grit, and it's, it's just beautiful in every respect. I recommend it to everybody.

And overall, where is it, or why is it, that so many memoirs fall short? What do they get wrong? Why aren't they better than they are as a genre? They're like self-help books, business books, travel books— on average, maybe disappointing. Not yours, but so many.

Well, I mean, look, it's— I found it I have taken on some very ambitious book projects in the past, and I found this so much harder. I mean, partly, how do you write in the first person and not sound like an asshole? Like, and not just sound like you think you're worthy of speaking for, in my case, 500 pages in the first person, to not be presumptuous, to have the right, what Cass would call the right implied author, you know, to be a person that the reader, whether they're interested in your story or not, that the voice that you're projecting is the voice of a person they'd want to spend time with. I mean, that's— it's really presumptuous. I mean, we have a— the Irish like to say that you shouldn't even use the first person in therapy. And that's how I felt writing. I felt immensely self-conscious at the beginning. But I think to the degree that I got mine to work, and I hope I did, it really requires a ruthlessness with your own story. You know, that just because something happened doesn't mean it belongs in the book. Just because it's interesting to you doesn't mean it's interesting. And because I was focusing specifically on kind of learning how to make a difference in the world, I think subjecting the stories that I was including to the— remembering what my purpose was, which would be very different than other memoirists' purposes, but I had a very distinct purpose in writing the book. People are turning away from public service. They don't believe they can make a difference in their communities. They think the problems are too big. I wanted to write a book that opened up the world of service of different kinds, even of journalism and of teaching and of, as well as of government, and to show the kind of nobility of effort, if not always, God knows, in outcome, and to show the integrity of that at a time when some of these institutions are being ridiculed. And so I knew my purpose. I think if you know why you're writing a memoir and it isn't just, you know, again, to vent or to get back at somebody or to sell books or to, and if you have a purpose, to subject what you're writing to that constant kind of callback. Is it doing any work for my ultimate purpose? Now, if I look at my Syria chapters, is that an inspiring case of here's why you should go into public service? 500,000 people died and you thought you could prevent atrocities and you go into government. It turns out some conflicts are incredibly complex and maybe beyond your reach or beyond beyond certainly the reach of outside actors and so forth. So why muddy up my happy message about the importance of trying to make a difference with something so complex? Because that's life, right? Is that you're not going to win them all and you're not going to be able to certainly affect the world in the way that you would like. But the question is, can you make a positive difference enough of the time to make it worth your effort? So I think because I knew what I was trying to do with the memoir to include those cases where I, as a citizen and as an actor in some of this history, where I was crushed and disappointed and flattened by the irrelevance of what I was doing, that proved to be a really important part of, in the end, and being able to urge people to get in the fight. And so, again, I think the ones that flop or that lose you are ones that either didn't know why they were doing what they were doing to begin with or lost sight of that someplace along the way.

There's some fairly personal elements to your story. So you talk about going to therapy, you talk about the kind of men you dated and what that meant for your life. Were you on the margin of putting more of that in or less of it in? Did you have second thoughts?

I mentioned my sort of meta-purpose, which of course has evolved as I've written the book and become clearer to me than right when I started. But what I saw, I think, in teaching when I came back to teaching after being a member of President Obama's cabinet and being in this incredibly blessed position that I was in was somehow I was now other. I was somebody who had been a senior official and I had my act together. Clearly, I must have had my act together or how could I have been representing the United States at the United Nations? I mean, very much in the same way that I would have seen a Madeleine Albright or a Jean Kirkpatrick when I was a kid, you know, just these sort of iconic women who are out there standing up to Russia and that can be very appealing and you can have some students will come up to me and say, "I want to be America's ambassador to the UN. You know, how do I go about doing it?" I'll say, Well, not that way probably because if you focus on a title rather than what you want to do in the world, you're probably not going to get very far. But some people are drawn to power, to the position or whatever, and I get that, and I want to work with those students too. But many just think, "I think I want to try to make a difference, but I don't know that I could ever be that person. I don't have my act together to that extent. I don't have that kind of conviction. I don't have that." And so the reason I include include the personal and especially the material about self-doubt and about what I call the bat cave, which is my head at times. Bats are swirling around and can I do this and have I gone too far and did I go on too long in that meeting with President Obama and this sort of self-recrimination. But by opening that up, I want young people to know that whatever doubts they're experiencing, whatever their romantic foibles, you know, that's what it looks like, right, to grow up. And sometimes you grow up in the public eye, Sometimes you grow up in the confines of your own relationships and your own family and your own home, and I did a bit of both. And so the idea that my public persona would somehow cause young people to think that I was some other species of person, I did not want that to happen. To the essence of your question about whether there's more, there's always more, Tyler. But yeah, there's something that happens to— oh, this is actually interesting, and somebody pointed this out to me. I would not have picked this up on my own. Lee Siegel, the writer, pointed this out to me. So when you're writing a memoir, if you're me anyway, you start pretty boxed up and again, anxious about using the first person and saying, who am I to write a memoir? I didn't make Middle East peace. What the hell am I doing here? Start with that disposition. Then you gradually kind of unfurl yourself and you realize that you have to build the portrait of a character and the readers have to get to know the writer. And so it becomes almost a literary exercise, but you can't make anything up because it's a memoir. So you have to use the material of your life to build a kind of thick portrait that people will get to know and hopefully root for. I wanted people to root for me and the ideals that I had. I want them to share those ideals, hopefully. But Lee Siegel pointed out to me that as you sort of unfurl, there comes a moment where you then think that you have to say everything. And you start to just TMI, too much information, you know, your readers, and you actually can lose your dignity. You can, you just, because you've lost your sense, you initially had an appropriate sense of what TMI is. I mean, my past pre-memoir self, I think, is the right balance of what you share and what you don't share. I share a lot as it is, but then I decided, okay, I was really going to go out there, and then you lose a sense of where the boundaries are. And so to go back over it and to say, okay, I want to give enough of a portrait where this is a distinctly human person that the reader gets to know, but also like they don't need to be in my And you know, they don't need to— what work is every one of these scenes doing for the larger story? And if it doesn't meet that threshold, and if let's say I'm making the same mistake with different men 6 times, they only need to hear about one, it happening once. If I did it 5 other times, the part can stand for the whole.

For our final closing segment, I just have some super simple questions about foreign policy. Again. So over the course of the last summer, Iran apparently seized two British tankers. There have been other incidents in the Strait of Hormuz in some way connected with Iran. From a game theoretic point of view, why would they do this? Why does this make sense?

The one thing that they would know that would give them some point of leverage is the extreme war fatigue within the United States and really within the Western world. And so by kind of upping the stakes, arguably, I mean, who knows why the hell they're doing what they're doing, but by upping the stakes, they arguably could be sending a signal like, this is, you want to get in this game? It's not as if we are an island and you can just break the deal, penalize us gratuitously, penalize the people who are still trying to maintain the terms of the deal, and that there won't be collateral consequences outside the nuclear space because the nuclear consequences as they begin to enrich and violate the terms of the deal, having legitimately argued that we had violated the terms of the deal, the effects of those are not day-to-day effects in the news. It's a bit abstract, right, for the public and even for policymakers. It's an incremental abrogation, but acts like this sort of show that they have leverage, that they are active militarily in parts of the world where we have a vested interest in maintaining freedom of navigation. And so I think they're showing that they can hit and that they can hit in domains outside the nuclear domain. I think that is probably what they're doing.

Why won't Germany and some of the other larger NATO countries spend 2% of their GDP on defense? Germany's not even coming close. How can that make sense? How can they expect NATO to last? Isn't NATO a good deal for them? From a game theoretic point of view, please explain that to me.

Yeah, it's— I find it outrageous. But I also noticed over the last couple decades that we are really good at understanding our own domestic politics. And even with some of our closest allies, we tend not to internalize or pay much attention to their constraints. And, you know, the real problem— and this isn't just about defense spending, but there's a big problem across Europe Europe in that if we were in a world of referenda, I'm not sure many of these European countries would have defense budgets or would even have militaries in some cases. So if you ask, should they? The answer is unequivocally. Is it an incredible deal for them? Yes. Should they be alarmed by the fact that successive presidents who are very different, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have all harped on this issue, Trump of course the most sort of vocally but— and tweetily, and not to this point very effectively. But nonetheless, we all agree that this— there has to be burden sharing. I mentioned earlier a kind of shriveled constituency in the United States that we have to win back. The way we in the United States will build back the kind of foreign policy that our European allies want to see us having is when they find a way to step up and bring their constituents along. Maybe there'll be an opening in a post-Trump world where we can— because on some level, we also have to— we as American leaders have to speak directly to the constituents who then elect the parliamentarians who then pass the budgets. I mean, this is not about— there's not a bunch of dictators who are like, "I've done a public opinion poll and they don't want to go the full 2%." This is about the Chancellor of Germany who also has to get that budget through a parliament in a coalition government and so forth. Again, I'm not an apologist for their politics, but I'm a believer that they need to work a lot harder to try to change their constituencies just as we're going to have to do the same on this end.

Should the United States have 800 military bases in about 70 countries and territories? Under what theory of the world does that make sense?

And as I note in my afterword, you know, we are performing some form of counterterrorism operation now in 40% of the countries in the world. Not all— of course, not all us performing combat roles or anything like that, but some kind of support or combat role in 40% of the countries. No, there has to be a right-sizing for the sake of the families who are the ones who bear this burden because that is not actually the face of America that is the most winning face. It isn't— I mean our soldiers of course are making an amazing contribution in some of those places but having these large bases where locals don't get to even interact that much with our soldiers, it just perpetuates a perception of America as a militarized nation. But also it speaks, I think, to the imbalance that I write about also as one of my sort of conclusions in the book of just how can it be that we have more— almost more people serving in military marching bands than serve as diplomats representing the United States when our military is the first— our military leaders are the first to say that they can't do the conflict resolution. They can't deal with the underlying socioeconomic or ethnic or other tensions or the land grabs or the climate change. That shrinks the resources that people are fighting over. I mean, it's just a set of problems where we need the other tools in our arsenal, and other countries comparably need to expand their diplomatic and socioeconomic benches to be able to pool our resources to make more of a difference to deal with the causes of these conflicts rather than just setting up bases and playing whack-a-mole. The one thing I will say is that I do think we're moving into a period where we do need to make investments in state solvency elsewhere. By we, I don't just mean the United States. I mean the sort of broader international community such as it is, but with the United States probably as always playing a leading role whereby the one reason that we're constantly asking about humanitarian intervention or why we have 100,000 peacekeepers in countries around the world is that the militaries in those countries are either preying on their people or are incapable of— take Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, Chad— incapable of thwarting Boko Haram, which is preying on the people. Indeed, the militaries are so either corrupt or abusive themselves that they end up fueling or effectively aiding the Boko Haram recruitment process by committing such human rights abuses cases that people just said, "Well, there's no difference between the Nigerian Army and Boko Haram," which can't be the case. Even though it again can sound like militarization, we have some of the best trainers in the world. I think we should be more, not less ambitious working with other countries' militaries and there's a real gap in the international system around police and there's actually a very, very police training capability in the— if you think about like global goods and collective goods, training other cities or other countries' police forces depending on how the police are structured is an incredibly important investment in the rule of law or prodding them to train their own police or for themselves to hold their own soldiers accountable. But I think that you could imagine some of the resources that are now expended again in places where we in combat that the American people don't even know about, but to actually invest alongside other countries in professionalizing some of these training apparatuses, I think that would be a worthwhile investment. Last question.

US Congress seems to have voluntarily surrendered so much of its authority over foreign policy and indeed the war-making authority. How do we fix that? Should we fix it? And does fixing it mean we won't get to undertake as many beneficial humanitarian interventions as other Tyler Cowen: I think the fact that we have not authorized—

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 2000, depending on how you date the authorities under which our current soldiers are operating, 2001 with 9/11, in the wake of 9/11. And then the flawed vote on behalf of the Iraq War. That's 16 years. That's— we're going on 2 decades since the 9/11 authorization under which most of our operations abroad are being waged. That is a— 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— it's such a disservice to our troops and their families. I mean 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. By spent, I mean, for the most part, I mean just being how their days are being spent, where they're being deployed. I mean, there's just 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 really wasn't— didn't rise to the level of war. We weren't engaged in combat at all but it's an example where 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 again 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— sort of 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. It's funny, for all of the valorization of what our troops do, Ebola is— there's like a carve-out 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, you know, didn't— weren't good or whatever. So just 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. Again, 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— like 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 proved not to be a terribly effective action over time anyway. But we need— 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 sort of 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. 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. Tyler Cowen.

Great to be here, Tyler.

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