YouSaid · the spoken record

Samantha Power

lines on the record: 78
first: 2019-11-18
most recent: 2019-11-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Stirring up nationalism as a way of reconsolidating his domestic base. I think he felt himself slipping, feels himself slipping as the economy slows in Turkey and so forth. But he has now done something that actually makes it easier for ISIS, again, to reconstitute itself. And he's shameless about it because like Trump, his own political fortunes are what he has prioritized over the good of his country and certainly over the good of the region.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Defeated handily, or he was defeated by a sufficient margin that he should have accepted defeat, or his party was, and then he called for a revote so he could manipulate the results, and he lost the second time by a margin 60 times that of the first time. So again, people are voting with their feet and at the ballot box to reject the kind of Erdogan model all around the world, including an Erdogan's own backyard. But I think between Turkey's own internal human rights practices, its laxness over the years also about the extremists and how they were flowing into Syria. And now this decision that privileged, I think...”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is our euphemism for all things Trump and dictator related. Look, Erdogan, the president of Turkey, has been steadily centralizing power within his own hands. There's plenty to talk about just in terms of the mass arrests that he has carried out, the lack of due process for his own citizens. The one area on which we had managed to cooperate was against ISIS, first under the Obama administration and then carried forward by President Trump. And on that, Erdogan's own, and by the way, this decision he made to go into northern Syria occurred in the wake of having suffered his worst electoral defeat in nearly a decade, an electoral defeat in Istanbul, where he actually tried to manipulate the results having lost back to the point about freedom still being championed around the world.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the kind of nationalism and the xenophobia and the great skepticism of international cooperation that this administration represents. And I think that's where one can't get greedy or complacent about the coming election, but the margin of victory, if there is a victory for the opposition, for the Democrats,”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to your question earlier, because I think it's the core question, right, what will happen even after Trump? Will the credibility deficit so sort of overshadow the relief that people have to be dealing with countries whose leaders tell the truth and who are not out for their own personal enrichment? I think it's complicated. I think that what I hear a lot is, look, even after Trump, you'll still always be the country that elected Trump. And so, what are you going to show us that indicates that, let's say, we do a new Iran deal, that that deal won't be supplanted by some future leader? In other words, are you just rejecting Trump or are you rejecting Trumpism?”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We see it now with the Trump Bolton dynamic and elsewhere within our own system. But if you don't have a merit-based system, if people are afraid that by being critical of a decision you have made that sycophancy is a recipe for career success, again, we know from our own little experiment in that we're having to live through right now, that's not auspicious over time, and it's hard to imagine innovation prospering again over time in a climate where freedom of speech is so stultified. So it's brittle. And what we need is a fair competition, right? That model out there.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. People want to be able to hold their leaders accountable. They don't want to feel that sense of violation that one feels when a corrupt official demands a bribe to put in your electricity or to let you go past a stop sign or a checkpoint. And so all around the world, you're seeing people voting with their feet in the interests of greater accountability and in the demand for leadership, whatever the regime type, but leadership that delivers for their citizens. And the Chinese model for all of its sort of moraculousness in terms of the number of people pulled out of poverty, it's an extremely brittle model. I mean, again, imagine the long-term prospects of a system in which loyalty gets rewarded more than merit, in which if you raise dissent even internally, that could be a recipe. We've seen it.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. And that is, I mean, that is going to be the challenge of our time, these two models in competition. Right now, freedom has receded for 13 years in a row, and the greatest setbacks for freedom, human rights have occurred in established democracies like the United States and even India. On the other hand, though, David, as you note, it's a scrum of sorts with these two models and competition. And if you talk to the people of Algeria or Sudan or Malaysia or Hong Kong for that matter, who are really staring in the face, these two models sort of intersecting on the ground and on the streets of Hong Kong, they're not willing to kind of say, oh, well, China's the top dog, I guess end of history now is upon us with a different outcome than people had thought after the end of the Cold War. Authoritarian capitalism, that's the new model.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see an unwillingness even in kind of generic condemnation statements of multiple countries to include China because of the recognition that now there's a super retreat on the part of the United States that there's a question about whether you just need to go along to get along. And I think the debate over 5G and Huawei and so forth reflects that, where in a normal universe where the United States is out there and credible and also has more where a leader has more support within a democratic public in a country like Germany, Trump has no support. So when an American leader has polling low, it's not a popularity contest, it actually makes it harder for the leader to do deals with or be seen to be with the American American political.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you I think two things are happening. One, I have never met more foreigners who are versed in the website 538 and probably listening to Axfiles as well. I haven't gone that far with them. Yeah, one hopes. But I mean, tracking Kentucky and the margin of victory and the Virginia House of Representatives and how long it's been since both houses have been controlled by Democrats. I mean, I was just in Ireland and England and even with Brexit consuming people in those two countries, just the amount of political literacy, so tracking, waiting, hoping, I suppose, on the one hand. But then there's also a huge amount of hedging going on where you see, for example, the European Union used to be prepared to criticize things like the mass detention of more than a million Uyghur in China.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People in the three years that have passed since have left, and they were Mandarin speakers and Arabic speakers and people who understood, for example, the highly technical dimensions of the North Korean nuclear program and why this sanction on this natural resource would have the biggest impact on the amount of hard currency the North Korean government would be. Well, we're now friends now.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the longer term consequence you asked about short-term, long term. So there's sort of both chilling effect now and a boost in sort of seeing people speak on one level these individuals are speaking on behalf of so many would be my guess. But longer term, the hollowing out of expertise, I mean, when I think about the staffing that I received as UN ambassador and the staffing that Ambassador Rice received before me and even that Ambassador Haley received after me because basically as I write in the book, most of the, virtually everybody stayed on who was a career employee, even though they might not have been all that pleased with the prospect of ripping up the Paris Agreement, which they'd worked on on climate change or ripping up the Iran nuclear deal, which they might have worked on. Nonetheless, they stayed because they saw the dearth of expertise in Trump's inner circle on foreign policy and because they serve the country. So many of those”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, signing up to think that this is an administration that is dedicated to putting the interests of the Americans.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In different ways, I think it has been the biggest boost to foreign service officer morale, civil servant morale probably in a very long time. But I don't think what you're going to see is young people.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ecosystem. On the other hand, and very much kind of very different consequence of what has happened, is that I think actually the Foreign Service officers, my impression is from afar that this has been the greatest boost to their morale in seeing individuals step up sort of on their own behalf, like a little bit of an I am Spartacus moment, you know, just one after the other saying, whether you're Vinman and you're from one part of the bureaucracy or you're Fiona Hill and you're a lifelong Russia specialist or you're Bill Taylor and again you've sort of been consistently taking the same position over successive administrations with nothing to do with partisanship and you served your country in these different variety of ways over the life of your career. This sort of range of Americans, of patriots coming forward.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that Trump had served in multiple Republican administrations. Bolton had served in multiple Republican administrations and had never seen anything like it and probably felt while he was there that he was a guardrail. But again, when Trump gets fed up with a guardrail, he snips the guardrail and removes the individual imposing some constraint on him. And in that sense, credit Bolton for still knowing Trump's track record prior to Bolton's arrival for continuing to raise those concerns, even knowing it probably meant that he wouldn't be in his job. He must have known that. But I think, so to your question, though, so I think there's a chilling effect, but not really a new one in the sense that anybody would have known that dissent would not be welcome in this political”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's sort of complicated, I think, in the moment because on the one hand, there's a chilling effect, of course, but there's been a chilling effect from day one, January 20th, 2017. I mean, anybody who has raised dissent, including even John Bolton, Trump's own hand-picked national security advisor, as soon as you disagree with the president enough times where he's like, oh, you know, I'm not getting what I want. I want people to agree with me, that isn't good for your career. That's not adaptive in this Trump.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe President Xi as well, but from China, but it's almost as if he was sort of aware that there were these guardians of the Constitution, these guardians of the rule of law, and so preemptively to try to, again, disparage them and make them seem political before they'd even perform their duties.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and when you look back at what Trump has been doing since he came into office, sort of disparaging what he calls the deep state, referring to all civil servants, officers, foreign service officers, intelligence officers generically as Obama holdovers. And I can tell you as one who, again, had a team of 150 civil service officers, foreign service officers, and intelligence service officers working for me at the US Mission, the UN, the notion of me ever thinking of them as bush holdovers is so, again, foreign and strange, but when you look back at Trump's disparagement, you almost think he was laying a foundation for this, right? It's like, how do you disqualify the individuals who are going to be watching me day to day, my every move? They're going to be, I'm stuck with them on my phone calls. I wish I could just make phone calls on my cell phone without anybody listening, which I will sometimes do. Only Putin will be listening.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Far worse than what he's going to be subjected to in the coming days. And I think he recognizes that he has the law and tradition and fundamentally sort of a majority, if not on the narrow question of impeachment, a majority of the people in this country agree with the core fact that your job as a public servant, as a civil servant is to serve the Constitution and serve the country and not serve the parochial interests of one person”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That view and that Putin was getting, it just seemed in multiple theaters that he was getting more and more emboldened and that that was a place to provide very quickly defensive weaponry and then again to give them the means to be able to defend themselves which required going a little further. Again, President Obama had a very reasonable argument on his side and there was just a healthy debate about national interest. At no point did anybody did it enter anybody's mind, oh this is about Barack Obama, right? It was about different good faith beliefs about how we would support the Ukrainians, how we would advance our U.S. foreign policy interests. The idea that at any point of our foreign policy discussions on any topic that Barack Obama's own political welfare would have been driving the discussion, it's just so foreign and so unthinkable. Taylor, again, a professional.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More on Tay But insofar as I thought that Ukrainians were in the best position to judge the escalatory risks because the escalation would affect them the most. And so I was inclined to be deferential. Vice President Biden also was very much.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He thought that Putin would always have Always be prepared to go further and that it would just potentially inflame Putin to go further still without actually leveling the playing field in the way that the U.S.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as a nice segue to Bill Taylor, I mean, he's completely consistent, not only on his respect for the rule of law, his belief that U.S. national security interests and the Constitution are what he is serving, but also on the substance of Ukraine policy, Bill Taylor dissented from President Obama's approach, one dimension of President Obama's approach to Ukraine, because he believed that it was in America's interest for us to be providing more significant weaponry to the Ukrainians in light of what Russia was doing to Ukraine and potentially to the international”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed, indeed, absolutely. But what you see, and in a way, the performance The testimonies of the career civil servants and foreign service officers, it's Are the keepers of the rules? They are the keepers of institutional memory. They are the keepers of the rule of law. And so they are sort of stoically going forward their own careers jeopardized or indeed in a couple cases maybe even ended by the fact that they just refuse to say that the old rules don't apply. They refuse to say That just because a president wants it enough for himself, that makes it okay.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I very much felt that representing the United States of the United Nations, dealing with Muslim nations, I wanted to come out very forcefully and say, this is a terrible idea, you know, this is unAmerican, this would be bad for our national security, it's an affront to our values, we were cautioned by our lawyers from not taking a position on something that Trump had taken a position on in the campaign because it would be seen as interference by a national security official in American politics, a violation of the Hatch Act. On an issue that was arguably undermining our national security even though it was only an American presidential candidate who was”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is absolutely unusual. I mean, the idea Bringing a foreign government in any way into your own domestic political fortunes. I mean, I remember in my last year, and we'll come to Bill Taylor in a second, but my last year in office, President Trump, when candidate Trump was running and was threatening a Muslim ban, you remember this.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess And disappointing it is Credible witnesses who have come forward. Closed doors and recounted in such a consistent And over and To a Military assistance unless you did. That has not caused more people who are members of the President's Party. Up their arms and say, okay, he's crossed a line that should be uncrossable. So just stipulate that it's surprising and disappointing.”
2019-11-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 356 – Samantha Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source