YouSaid · the spoken record

Samantha Power

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78

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2019-11-18

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2019-11-18

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1. “The occupant of the White House, but I still try. And if there's something good that happens at the Trump White House does, I try to not let my overall disappointment and deep, deep, deep concern about the direction of the country interfere with an ability to at least see that there might be something there to work with, but it's hard.”

   2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Relations of those times, but sometimes it feels that way, like very, very hard in this era to, again, find the error in one's own truth and the truth in one's opponent's error. And I was probably better at it with the Russian ambassador, perhaps than I am today with...”

   2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “That's a risk for him within his own system. So the fact that he was willing to continue to try to draw water from the stone is one of the things that made me keep trying as well. But the second thing I'd say is that it was pragmatic and not just this kind of metaphysical belief about needing to aspire to find some commonality even in those with whom we disagree. But the other was just functional, which is the whole security council kind of breaks down if Russia returns to Cold War form and or for that matter of China decides to block action in the Security Council on a routine basis on behalf of vulnerable people. I think that the relationship is instructive on one level in the sense that we're at a very polarized time domestically. I don't know that we can liken it to US-Russian.”

   2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Yeah, well, one of the people I quote in the book is someone I know Obama also likes Reinhold Nieber and he has this line about always seeing the error in your own truth and the truth in your own And believe me, with the Russian ambassador, it was hard to keep my inner Niebuhr in line. But part of what explains the relationship which I go into at some length is I do think if we cease to be able to see the humanity in our foes, that there is something in there to work with, I think I'm not sure where we go. I'm not sure where how we mend things. I'm not sure how we cooperate on things. So some of it was just a basic sort of belief that we just have to keep trying. And he gave me lots of reasons to try because he never gave up on U.S.-Russian cooperation, even when it meant risking something, I think, for him in front of Putin, because Putin was tracking what he was doing at all times. So every time he's like, Samantha and I've hatched this compromise.”

   2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “And in 11 months, basically, we got 55% of the countries of the world who accounted for more than 55% of the emissions in the world to ratify the treaty so that in the event Trump was elected, he may be able to pull out of Paris, which he began to try to do or has done, I guess, on Monday of this week, although it won't take effect until election week next year. But he could do that, but in so doing, he couldn't unravel the entire international agreement. But these are just a couple examples. There are dozens of examples that don't get the headlines, and that's one of the reasons, because they don't get the headlines, the despair about whether America can do good in the world, I think really is higher now than it has been since the Second World War.”

   2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Do things our way, and even though we got to go create a middle class, you don't get to fully do so. You have to make these sacrifices. But we got them to do that because the stakes of climate change are so high. And indeed, one of the stories I tell is an underalded decision that Obama made was even though it looked like Hillary Clinton had a decent lead in the run-up to the 2016 election. In late 2015, Obama said, we have to inoculate the Paris Climate Treaty from a potential Trump or Republican victory because Trump had threatened to pull out of Paris. And that means we have to bring that treaty into international force, make it international law more quickly than any major international environmental treaty. So Kyoto, I think, took nine years. Other treaties of that nature have taken more than a decade.”

   2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Medical Africa Health Corps Malaysians to send tens of thousands of pairs of rubber gloves, the Brits to take lead on Sierra Leone as we took lead in Liberia. And it was really, it was not a perfect case study. Nothing ever will be in the world that is so messy. But it was a great example of U.S. leadership being leveraged to actually lower the burden in the end to the United States. The Paris Climate Treaty, again, was just meant to be the floor of our commitments. It was meant to be something that hopefully we would build a successor to maybe even within five years, but it was the first time China and India were willing to put themselves in a common framework with industrialized countries who they feel, not without reason, got to develop and pollute and emit and then turn around before China and India have brought their populations out of poverty and turn and say, okay, now you have to...”

   2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Bucked the domestic politics where Democrats and Republicans were united in having a full-fledged freak out about Ebola. And what Obama did with projections of 1.4 million people getting infected in West Africa is he sent 3,000 troops and health workers into the eye of the storm, empowering me, John Kerry, our whole team, to then build a global coalition, leveraging, again, that American investment. And you put the question well because this is an example of when the international system works. This is how it works. You have to have a catalytic first mover who's willing to put a lot of skin in the game. And then you have to have a lot of credibility and trust in the international system to then draw upon the resources of other countries because it doesn't make it easy for them to send their health workers into the eye of the storm. And so we were able to get Cuba to send their...”

   2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “A massive scale in Syria. But again, at no point did I think his position was unreasonable, not shockingly, because Barack Obama is eminently reasonable. Moreover, I've still felt even on Syria that there was good that I could do as UN ambassador, whether getting humanitarian assistance to some pocket of territory by working with the Russian ambassador or getting trying to get a Syrian human rights lawyer out of jail. So I tried to fight within the internal process to get us to leverage our diplomacy and be more assertive, but failing there was plenty to be done. And just you asked the question in both the constraints and the possibilities, because I think the possibilities and what we were able to do get a lot less attention. So I think it's worth noting that in being part of his administration, I had the unbelievable privilege of working for president who”

   2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “I could lose my voice in meetings that he wasn't into buck me up. And he knew that anybody standing up on behalf of human rights, even under an administration led by him, that there's a lot of gravity cutting toward short-term expediencies, toward lots of military assistance to different regimes irrespective of their human rights performance. And so he would have wanted me to maintain my credibility. So I tell My point is it was complex. I would have incurred more risk. We didn't.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And to your point earlier about the country he was governing is continuous with the country that we're in today where people are really skeptical that U.S. especially US military action when uncoupled with a larger strategy we would have had a larger strategy in the way that I think the current administration doesn't in just about anything but I think what I try to show is his position is very reasonable. He's Barack Obama. The plight of Syrian civilians was tearing him apart, I believe. Most of my most difficult clashes, most difficult conversations with him that sometimes became clashes were over Syria where he'd say things like we've all read your book, Samantha, in a quite unusual, dismissive for him, I think way, and in front of other people, which is not ideal. But then he quickly...”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Yeah, I mean, maybe just I think what gets the most attention, of course, are the heartbreaking issues we confronted, like Syria, of course. And for someone like me who'd written a problem from hell, that's the place that most people sort of want to take Obama's second term, the story of Obama's second term, certainly the story of my service, and it's very reasonable for”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “And I went to work for him. Not a fun year in the Senate, not a great, it wasn't a good time. It was the least productive Congress since the do-nothing Congress in Harry Truman's time. And the Do Nothing Congress, I only realized this when I researched the book, produced the Marshall Plan. It was that very Congress that got that through. So it was a very, you know, it was the beginnings of the kind of polarization and divisions we see now. And I think you'd know better than me, but that was a major reason, I think, where Obama decided to take the risk and throw his hat in the ring because it wasn't as if he could see a path in the Senate to make the kind of difference he wanted to make.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “That's fair. That's very fair But anyway, we were on the street. My chance was slipping away. And so finally I took the plunge and engaged in self-promotion of the old school sort.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “And so then we're like on this No, but just even to say maybe I have something to offer just sounds so pompous. I know you didn't even understand. That's good. You're such a guy.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “But anyway, so I, and on the other side with the Red Sox tickets was what a lot of women have in their head. I'm sure men do too to some extent, but I hear it more from women. But that kind of the ickiness of putting yourself forward, that feeling of like, what if I, you know, and I just, as I was weighing all of that and I write about my thought bubble kind of as the dinner's going on and on and on, I'm like, well, maybe this is my opening and then maybe I just sound too tacky.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “So, as I'm kind of taken by him and at this dinner, which ended up being like a four-hour dinner, and I'm thinking to myself, will I just propose that I come and work in his Senate office? I'm thinking that Red Sox tickets, that Red Sox tickets. I told you.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Without us even the US government even having a cabinet meet or a national security council meeting, principals meeting. But he sees Rwanda as the flip side of the Iraq coin, whereas a lot of people think you think non-intervention, intervention gone awry. And he looked at the, he was like, you know, have in common the fact that human consequences are not prioritized at the highest levels of government. And what would it take to change that? So I'm listening to this first-term senator from Illinois just look sort of thinking all of this through in such a fresh way. There were no taboos. I love that about him and the sort of fresh approach he brought. I mean, it's not like he'd been thinking about foreign policy in Springfield so much, right? He thought about it as a young person in college and always had read about it, but he was this just fresh approach and then this ambition of it has to be that we can do better and do different.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Yeah, and you, David, will appreciate just how compelling Obama was for all the reasons you know as the first person of great prominence to sign on with him, but you'll appreciate that I've been waiting on a waiting list for, I don't write about this in the book, but I've been on a waiting list for Red Sox season tickets for 10 years, and I just got my package. Yeah, exactly. And it wasn't even like 81 games or anything, but it was just like a dozen games and it was whatever was shared with a bunch of other people. And that's when Barack Obama's office reaches out. And that's the context in which I'm having that dinner with him that I write about in the book where I go down and meet him. He's read a problem from hell. What's so interesting is that he reads the book. He's very interested in Rwanda and how 800,000 people could have done.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “No, did not. But my agent's very British, and so I tell the story in the book, I had an answering machine way back then, and I would come home from work because by then I'd graduate from law school and was working, and there'd be the blinking light and I'd run to my answering machine. And there'd be some either usually more than one, but she'd say, Houghton Mifflin, PAS, Ferrar Strauss, Pas random house PAS. And it was just pick it up Pas. And just as an Irish person, the British accent has some, but now it's forever associated with this, you know, I don't even know how many publishers rejected it, but in the end, this tiny sub-imprint of basic books called the New Republic Books, the kind of owner publisher effectively did me a favor and published just a few, I'm not sure how many copies, but probably a few hundred.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “And since most of us, if we're lucky, we will find ourselves maybe hopefully not perpetrators, and if we're very lucky not victims, but on ordinary issues of justice and injustice, it's that continuum that's the most relevant, I think, to have.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “And this works and it flies. I was like, it flies, but it's long. She's like, Yeah, but it flies, it's good. We're good. And I thought I'd figured out a way to tell a difficult story through, again, these upstanders, these Americans who try to...”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “And again, I tell that story of just it was crazy. I had this wonderful agent who I approached, I wrote a paper actually for a class. And the paper I went to write a paper about American responses to genocide, and I went to library and expected to find 10 books on American responses to genocide. There were no books. And so the paper kept expanding. I started calling people who'd been in the U.S. government because having been a journalist, that was always my impulse is to talk to the people actually making decisions. And eventually the paper sort of grew and grew. And then when it was like 80 pages as a paper, I thought, well, it's not that far from being a book. And so I did write the book and I got a publisher initially for the proposal idea for the paper, the school paper, but then four plus years later, so it was a five-year project total, they saw this big thick, dark thing arriving. And my agent was like, it's great. And I've read it.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Hague War Crimes Court, you could over time could become a prosecutor, could hunt down the bad guys and make sure that at least the victims would see their perpetrators face justice. So that was kind of to the degree that there was a logic to it. It was rooted in that idea of getting something tangible, more tangible than the pen to do something about what I was seeing.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “And the more time that passed and the more deflated actually the local people became, the more they started slamming their doors in our faces. At one point we were ambassadors of hope and then we became kind of ambassadors of impotence or something. And so as they grew frustrated, as I began to feel like nothing I wrote, no matter how even on a good day, if I wrote movingly, if I felt like that I bridged the distance somehow between what I was seeing and what I knew my readers' lives were like, which was so different, and yet it just felt like it was falling on deaf ears. So I went to law school thinking maybe there's a path there if you can't prevent the Srebrenica massacre, at least now there are these new institutions being built like the...”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “I think when I first got to Bosnia, I felt the power of the pen, and again, it wasn't obvious that it would work for me to just go with a fake pres and become a war correspondent, but it worked. And in it working over time, I got to write for more and more influential publications like The Washington Post. I became their stringer, their special correspondent there, the economist, publications like that. The combination of writing for Bill Clinton by the time writing for the Washington Post and time passing, I began to think, well, gosh, I couldn't get a better audience, right? I'm writing for the person who every day is deciding how much to invest in diplomacy, whether or not to enforce the UN Security Council resolutions that have been passed, whether to let NATO planes just fly overhead or whether to rescue people.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “I was just learning how to be a correspondent. I was embraced by particularly the female war correspondents who were all freelancers just like me and learning about how the UN worked or didn't work. Peacekeepers were doing some heroic work feeding people, but also stood idly by in the face of the largest massacre in Europe in 50 years. And so all of that was so formative. Really, I think left me with an impulse that I carried with me even to becoming UN ambassador of always wanting to be out in the field, talking to people, trying to understand better how the policies that were crafted in some sterile conference room, whether the situation room or the Security Council, how those policies were affecting people on the ground.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “As though they were being left behind, that they were not being seen. They'd had the privilege, and now a changing world was bringing other ethnicities to the fore. There were more demands for equality, more concessions to equality. And not all of them, of course, but some decided to throw their lot with a nationalist xenophobe. And it's sort of surreal when I just never would have imagined that such parallel dynamics could take hold here that was in no one's mind. It was a kind of overly, in retrospect, overly triumphant moment to triumphant, because I also think it didn't, it was a moment in which policymakers weren't really taking note of how aggrieved Russia was to be looked past in that sort of post-war order, and some of that has come home to roost. I wasn't thinking any of these grand thoughts.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Well, it was a moment where this would have been 93 to 95 was my first two years, then I went back later, but it was a time when the Balkans seemed the anomaly. Remember the wall had fallen in Berlin. We just celebrated 30-year anniversary. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The end of history was nigh, according to Frank Fukuyama and others. It looked like liberal democracy was on a, I mean, this is why never view even the challenges we're having with democracy now as irreversible. Everything is contingent, I believe. But this looked like an inexorable march of freedom and so forth. And then there was Bosnia. And, you know, when I look back now, actually what we saw in the Balkans is a preview of what we see today in so many parts of the world. People, in that case, the Serb population within the larger Yugoslavia feeling.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “So I grappled in an ethically challenged moment. I'm not sure, again, that including that particular part of my arc was advised or advisable, but I included it because it spoke to kind of that frame of mind I was in at that time.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Who were part of a world that seemed the most accessible to me because I'd been a sports journalist, so at least I knew kind of how to write a lead and to write on deadline, the fact that I'd covered women's volleyball and then was seeking to become a war correspondent was a detail. Small detail, but it did matter that I at least that that was at least the only pathway it seemed like I had an even plausible case to make that I could do something. So I went over and became a worker.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “And I'm still very close to him. But it wasn't like I was doing such important work by any means, but I was in watching him, I was hearing about, you know, that was a life, right? And it wasn't one I thought about going into to be a diplomat, and I mean, it would have been so grandiose to think in those terms. Then there was the think tank life of people who tried to be analytic in a kind of contemporary way. Then there were historians who were passing through, there were op-ed writers. There were war correspondents, there were aid workers, there were people helping refugees. And I think that's really, it's one of the great things about the institute you've set up is that you bring when people can show, can model these pathways, then if you're a person thinking, I'd like to do something, suddenly you have a place to kind of attach that impulse. Like, well, maybe I could do. And so in my case, it was the journalists.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Yeah, I think that was more where the pathways became evident. So again, a lot of people today see big problems and they think, oh, but what can one person do? So they think, I want to do something, but what can one person do? And what was amazing about the Carnegie Endowment was I was working for a man who had been a career U.S. diplomat. He had been, in fact, U.S. ambassador in Turkey, which we were talking about earlier, but helping convince George H.W. Bush to set up the no-fly zone to protect the Kurds of northern Iraq. So he's a complete doer, and he had an actual experience of harnessing U.S. leadership to protect people. And so that was my first exposure in my early 20s. He was consumed with what was happening in Bosnia. And just by being kind of his coffee pour, he called me Susan for the entire time. I interned for him practically, might still call me Susan, but...”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “I got a subscription to the New York Times, and again, I think the appropriate humility, because I knew nothing about what was happening in the world, but I would underline the New York Times, like the name of the world leader, and I would kind of quiz myself and I would try to keep track of historical events. I knew geography because every Irish person carries with them an innate knowledge of geography in their DNA because they know they're going to have to leave at some point properly. So I knew geography, but I didn't know anything. I tell that story in the book, not because it's always going to be some moment of I see an injustice and therefore I'm going to go fix it. The moment more likely leads to something much more incremental, which was just an opening to the rest of the world. And then as I got more educated gradually, but it took years, I began to think maybe there's a place for me to do something small and then that ended up becoming journalism.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Well, but I mean, even because you meet young people who want to be UN ambassador already, and I'll say why's the thing you want to do when you get to that place, because that's a more reliable driver. And so all I had was, I didn't even have the, again, the notion that I would go into public service, I was still on my sports track, but I did have the sense of I think I need to learn more about the world outside of sports and really the only difference that what was an epiphany, but the only difference it made was I went back and I ended my subscription to USA today, nothing against USA Today, but at the time I subscribed to USA Today and I used to take the red section, which is the sports section. I think purple is entertainment and green is money, and I would shake the rest of the newspaper into the recycling bin and just read my sports section. And so I went back and I...”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “And again, in the movie version, right, that's the moment you say one day I'm going to go forth, I'm going to become a human rights lawyer, I'll get into politics, I'll get to represent the United States at the UN and stand up to bad guys. But that's, I think, not human nature. I mean, for me to have...”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Yeah, I was taking notes on a Braves Giants game, San Francisco Giants. These were the lean years for the Atlanta Braves. Many errors were committed, and my job was to sort of track the errors in order to cut the sports highlights for the evening news as an intern, occasional home run or a good play as well, dance in the stands. And there I am, and it seemed the most important thing I could be doing was a dream internship for a public high school kid who suddenly found herself at Yale and I was doing sports play by play and I was on a sports radio talk show and here there I was that summer but on the in the little video booth I was in there were multiple screens with the CBS feeds from all around the world and on the feed from Beijing came the footage of Chinese tanks moving toward student protesters and mowing them down and this was in June of 1989.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “I think people don't expect all of this to be on the page. And what's nice is, I think it has the chance at least to render this world that you and I have been privileged to be a part of more accessible. You know, if you're just the sum of the CV you happen to amass by the middle of your career, the end of your career, that's one point of entry for a young person. But if you're all of the doubts and issues you confront along the way, I think that's a much more potentially at least much more relatable story. So that was why I opened up that much.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “It's okay. It's a made up word that my college boyfriend invented for the intense feeling of claustrophobia I had, which he, of course, took personally, but was more product of some of the demons I was carrying. And so Lungers, I mean, I was just in Ireland last week, and I did an interview with some women, and we were talking policy and women's empowerment, LGBT rights, and so forth. The interview ended, and two of the women are like, I had lungers and I never knew what to call it before because it isn't quite panic attack, although that's what it sounds like to the people who don't have lungers, but it's just a sort of constriction in your chest where you just feel kind of things closing in. And so as one who's out being a war correspondent and an activist and a Harvard professor and somehow managed to be part of the Obama administration,”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Digging into it, do you, and especially now having two young children of my own, do I sort of really, I think, fully appreciate how young I was and how little agency a child has. But for choosing to tell this story in as honest a way as I can, in as accessible a way as I can, particularly for young people, I mean, just traveling around these last weeks talking to young people in particular about the book, I'd expected to spend a ton of time talking about Syria and the question of whether I resign or not resign or the Ebola response or climate change. And it's amazing how many people now come at the story telling me about something that they felt responsible for in their childhood and how much they had struggled to forgive themselves or I write a lot about my anxiety, which is something I carry, which of course...”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Appreciative of what I have, but it also made me not ask too many questions about the past because I didn't want to cause to drudge all of this up. My mother felt guilty enough about what ended up happening with my father. And so this book, in a way, all these years later, ended up being an excuse for me to go back to my father's girlfriend at the time that he died, to his sister, to the people at the pub, like, guys, what were you thinking? The tavern. And so in a way, writing the book, it ends up being a great blessing for me because I got to dig into questions where even all these years later I kind of was feeling responsible. And only when you, no matter even after years of therapy, still have that sense that so many grown up children have that they could have done more. And only by re”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “You know what was really hard is that the truth is what ended up happening in the wake of that scene is my father died very suddenly, or at least to me was very suddenly, after we left Ireland and I, in effect, chose my mother in that moment, he began drinking even more and his alcoholism got the better of him, and he really just alone deteriorated terribly. And so when I got word that he died, it of course I felt, and I write about this in the book, I felt responsible in one way, but I also it made me savor the people that I had in my life who were still alive, like just be so grateful that my mother still had my mother. And we were talking about this earlier, just every time the phone rang at a weird time, assuming that maybe something terrible had happened to even to my mother. And so it just made me...”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “No, no, no. Interesting. No, it's funny how conditioned we are for the narcissism of former American government officials to come out and tell their own stories as if it's the most obvious.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “I don't even know where to start. I mean, it was so much harder to write about myself, in part, I basically, I don't know how you felt when you wrote your memoir, but a large part of me kind of feels you shouldn't write a memoir unless you brokered Middle East peace. And last I checked, I didn't manage that.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “You know, for a long time, according to the Geneva Conventions. Again, there are lots of perils associated with the larger strategic approach that we in the United States have shifted to in recent years. But the strategic that is now a big hole in the center of it, which is who's going to volunteer to die for land that they didn't want in the first place? They went to Raqqa and dismantled the caliphate, not because those were historic Kurdish lands, but because they were going to get something in return. And so I think, again, if you stay true to that idea of bring the troops home, yet still protect U.S. national security, there has to be, you have to have partners to do so. But in order for partners to step forward, there's going to have to be trust.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “But my point is again, now once you've broken your word, this outsourcing model, which has downsides as well because you don't have complete command and control, and it's not like these forces have been trained.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Exactly. The longer term problem with what he's done now with our anti-ISIS coalition is that one way of responding to the fatigue that exists on the left and the right in this country, I mean really in the public as a whole, especially among the families who've been asked to bear this burden more than the rest of us. But one way to respond to that and yet still prevent terrorist threats to the United States is to outsource some of the ground fighting to local forces, whether the Iraqis in Iraq, where you have an army or what we did in Syria, unable to partner with a regime that gases its people, is to partner with these local ground forces, the Syrian Defense Forces.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Look, I mean, I think would that Trump even kept his commitments to his base that wants to bring the troops home? I mean, Trump has increased our troop presence, sending troops to Saudi Arabia, even now sending troops, it seems back to Syria, but just for the oil and not with any regard for the people. So it's like, we don't care about...”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Leaders as well. And the United States has decided that it's more appropriate to show affection toward Russia and China than it is to our allies. So we're not in a strong position, again, to support countries where this blackmail is being attempted.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “He is a bully and he will intimidate and bully and this is where it's very unfortunate that Trump has done so much to alienate our allies in Europe because I know from my own my old stomping ground at the United Nations, you know, one of the things you could count on in a crisis was that you'd look around and those countries that shared your values, you'd be a block, right? With Western democracies, you could stand together. And in a moment like that where Erdogan is using his leverage in a bullying way, that would be a very appropriate moment for all the Western democracies to come together, especially those who have citizens who are part of the ISIS contingent that Erdogan is talking about, but to amass our leverage so that we can push back. But instead, we're so atomized now. I mean, Europe is, as you note, looking inward, dealing with Brexit, populism, and the rise of right-wing.”

    2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source