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Good afternoon, everyone. If I could have your attention.

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So welcome to our first event of the academic year for the Burkle Center. It's a great honor to have Dr. Samantha Power here. She's going to read from her book, we're going to have a conversation and open up for questions at the end. To give her a proper welcome, well, first, I want to thank our sponsors, the promise Institute for Human Rights and international law program here at UCLA. And I want to invite up to the podium my colleague at the law school, Sharon Dolovich, who has known Ambassador Power for many, many years.

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When our distinguished speaker was nine years old, she emigrated with her family from Ireland to the United States. She came with short red hair, an Irish rose and an American flag t shirts. Never in her wildest dreams Could she have been imagined that just a little more than three decades later, she will be sworn into the president's cabinet as the youngest ever United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

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So at that moment in 2013,

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she just finished serving four years on the White House National Security Council and in both of these roles on the NSC, and as ambassador, she works to mobilize American power on behalf of the world's most

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vulnerable people.

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Now, I've been asked to introduce this for you, but I don't want to preempt anything the ambassador might tell you herself. And I also want you all to read her book, and I don't want to ruin it. But I will just say that Samantha's experience in the Obama administration it's only part of her story. In addition to her work as a high level policy advisor and diplomat she is also a committed humanitarian who has advocated for decades for victims of atrocity

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and violence worldwide.

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She is a Pulitzer Prize winning author whose book "The problem from Hell: American Age of Genocide," moved the generation of young people to advocate for human rights across the globe, and put her on the map as a keen and insightful analyst of American foreign policy. She is a former journalist to cover the Balkans war in the 1990s

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and reported from San Diego and was a city under siege. She is

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also very much a mother and a wife who for eight years and the Obama administration sought to balance the demands of a high pressure work situation with a fervent desire to be here for her husband and her kids.

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And I can tell you from personal experience that she is a fiercely loyal friend,

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who somehow manages to take time out from saving the world to be here when you meet her. And most recently, She is the author of a moving and powerful memoir the space of an idealist. It is already a New York Times bestseller. It is a beautiful book, I encourage all of you to read it. And with that I give you my dear friend, Samantha Power.

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Thank you so much. So, this book would look very different, if not for the laser focus and the scalpel pen of Professor Dolovich who was my most fierce editor of my initially kind of loose pros. And I'm so grateful to Sharon for everything she's done for me throughout my career. I first met Sharon, when we were each sort of taking a refuge of sorts, at all places at Harvard Law School. From Bosnia, from the world of political theory, and its distractions, and she has managed to marry theory and practice in such impactful ways, and you have the chance to be your students, I'm very envious of you. So I'm going to sit down with Kal here in a minute and have a conversation. I'm going to open it up to you, relatively soon as well. But what I thought I would do before we started, just because I did just publish this book, called "The Education of an Idealist," tell you a little bit about it, and then just offer a short reading to give you a flavor of it. I think it's

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the part of it that was so hard for me to write was pretty much all of it.

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Because it entails using the first person and Sharon knows. There's a saying in Ireland that Irish people don't even like using the first person in therapy.

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So

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that was something I had to overcome, and to be the judge as to whether I did effectively. But I did go back to the phases that Sharon mentioned in her introduction, I went back to being a child living in Ireland before we immigrated to this country when I was nine. So the book kind of starts in the Dublin pub. I went back to being a rookie war correspondent in Bosnia learning as I went, I went back to being on a campus like this one. going to law school after having been a war correspondent, which is where I met Sharon. And what that was like and the anxiety that I experienced here, I just been in a war zone and felt more anxiety raising my hand at Harvard Law School, or getting caught up with the Socratic method that I had when I was living under siege in San Diego Go figure. And then while in law school, I wrote a paper for a class that morphed into a book a problem, which would become a problem from hell. And it was because of that book that Barack Obama reached out to me soon after he had landed in the us senate and asked me to come and I suppose I kind of forced myself upon him, in fact, an offer to come to work in the senate office, and I worked on the Obama campaign, and then of course, at the White House, and then as an ambassador, so I keep that sequence because that's the sort of that's the CV, that's the way you normally hear about but what I tried to do in the book is unpack what it's like to go through a lot of those experiences, each one of which I'm a newcomer in and one of the most important sayings in the book is never compare your insides to somebody else's outsides. And so one of the ideas is to in opening up, you know, some of the doubts and, and then sharing some of the bruises and the lessons I learned along the way to also make this story As relatable as I can to young people, and particularly the students, because what I found since I came back to campus and back to teaching having been in the Obama administration, is that people kind of think, okay, you think you can promote human rights or inject humanitarian concerns into this debate or that debate, but you were UN ambassador, you remember the president's cabinet, on just a law student, or I'm just a law professor, or, you know, I'm just an architect. And, and the point of this book is, no matter what you're doing, and many of us share the same doubts about whether we can make a difference given the magnitude of the problems around us. And it's a kind of aim to show that even small steps that make someone's life better,

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really worth

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taking. So before I sit down Calvin just going to offer a reading this is from before I got into foreign policy, all I wanted to be Growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then in Atlanta, Georgia was a sportscaster. I wanted desperately to be a sports journalist. And so one of the great breaks in my life was I went to a public school in Atlanta, Georgia, and was very athletic. I got into Yale University, the first time I'd ever been in the northeast of this country, a guide to Yale. And but after the summer after my freshman year, I went back down to Atlanta, to intern at the CBS Sports affiliate. Again, I was very, very simple minded. So this is just a short excerpt from that summer so the summer after my freshman year in college, during the summer of 1989, I came home to Atlanta after my freshman year at Yale, to intern in our local CBS affiliate sports department. After covering women's basketball and volleyball for the college newspaper. I had decided that Once and for all to pursue a career as a sports journalist. My print dispatches demonstrated little natural talents. My first published article and the email Daily News appearing in September of 1988 had begun. Falling balls aren't the only things high up in here this week for the women's volleyball team. So our expectations and spirits another article had described how the campus acapella group something extra, and some the national anthem before that weekend's yield Cornell women's basketball game. I then proceeded in print to observe that quote, no blue, we're well aware that it would take something extra or rather something extra ordinary for them to win and broadcast journalism I thought might be a better fit. In the coming years. I offer play by play and color commentary for the EL men's and women's basketball teams. I joined a rotating group of students on a nightly radio talk show called sports spotlight. On June 3 1989, I had been instructed by my supervisor at the Atlanta station to shop sheet or take notes on a Braves baseball game against the San Francisco Giants. I had to mark down on my clipboard the precise time at which memorable events occurred. a home run and the error of an on field brawl a funny dance in the stands in order to help assemble the sports highlights for the evening news. As I sat inside the glass booth, I was surrounded by other screens showing CBS video feeds from around the world. On the feed from Beijing, where it was already the early morning of June 4. I saw a startling seeing playing out. Students in gentlemen square had been demonstrating for more than a month urging the ruling Chinese Communist Party to make democratic reforms. The protesters had used styrofoam and plaster to build a 30 foot high statue called the goddess of democracy, which for a close resemblance to the Statue of Liberty. They had lined her up directly opposite the portrait of Mount St them, making it look as though she was staring down the founder of the repressive Chinese state. But the day I happened to be working in the video booth, the Chinese government was cracking down. I watched as a CBS camera crew on the ground film soldiers with assault rifles ripping apart the students sanctuary just as tanks rolled toward Chinese protesters. Young people use their bicycles to try to flee the scene and transport the wounded. In the raw, unfiltered footage playing in front of me, much of which would not be broadcast. I could hear the CBS camera person arguing with the authorities as he was jostle. At a certain point the monitor went black. The feed from China has been trouble terminated. I sat in the booth aghast at what

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I could see. I found myself wondering what the US government would do in response. A question that a never before occurred to me

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that we the front pages of all the major American newspapers printed a photograph of a man invasion, who became known as Tank Man.

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The man wore a white shirt and dark pants and carried a pair of plastic shopping bags. He was pictured standing in the middle of a 10 Lane Chinese Boulevard, stoically confronting the first tank in a column of dozens. The Stark image arrest of my attention that I thought was an assertion of dignity. The man was refusing to bow before the gargantuan power of the Chinese military is quiet for powerful resistance reminded me of the images of the sanitation workers in Memphis who strike Martin Luther King Jr. had joined shortly before he was assassinated

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in 1968. They had carried science that simply read, I am a man.

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Although Tank Man subsequent actions received less attention. Video footage showed him taking an even more remarkable risk. He climbed onto the tanks tour and scope of the soldiers inside. After he stepped down and attack attempted to past him, the man moved with it, daring the soldiers to run them over a few minutes into this grim dance men in civilian clothes dash onto the road and hustle Tank Man away the convoy barrel ahead, the man disappeared. He's never been identified, and untold number of Chinese students likely thousands were killed that summer in the government crackdown. I did not respond to these events by suddenly proclaiming a newfound intention to learn Mandarin and become a human rights lawyer. But while I knew little about the protests before they started, or even about China itself, I could not shake my discomfort and how Been contentedly taking notes on a Braves game. All students my age were being mowed down by tanks. For the first time I reacted as though current events had something to do with me. I felt sped away that I could not have explained in the moment that I had a stake in what happened to the lone man with a shopping next.

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So I first really want to thank you for coming back to UCLA. I think, by my count, this is your third official trailer that have been involved with you may have been here otherwise. And it's great to have you talking about this book. It's a chance at a really fantastic book and I really, truly urge you to read it. It's both a personal story as as, as was alluded to a story and staff is life or immigration here and her career. But it's also a very insightful and very thoughtful analysis of the last 1020 years, in some ways, even further back of American foreign policy. So we're going to talk endlessly about that today. So let me ask you, you, you alluded to this very important, pivotal moment in your life. And the way that it began to get you to think about human rights. And ultimately, your career really became defined by the way human rights intersected with American foreign policy. And so looking back on your your career, your book your career as a government official, as a reporter, what does it mean to have a human rights conscious foreign policy? What would that look like? How would you describe it? How can we do that in maybe not this administration, but at a future level?

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Thank you, and thank you so much for putting this event together on the fly a little bit and making it happen as you always have managed to do

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so I guess,

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where I live, maybe, maybe just say about where I started and how I came to even pursue the objective at the heart of your question to begin with, I mean, when I was in Bosnia, I was there, serendipity many, in many ways. I you know, I opened up the newspaper I saw in the early 90s these images of men emaciated behind barbed wire in Europe. I had the impulse very much the sort of snuck up on me much like the impulse I just described a few years earlier of kind of, wow, you know, this is really bad. But I probably would have shelved that away and it would have been someone else's problem, but for the fact that I was working for a US former US diplomat named more Abramowitz is one of the heroes of the book in many ways. He's featured in a chapter called doers. And he was just this you know, peripatetic, energetic us diplomat who believe that us power could be harnessed for good which is not an under salable proposition, especially these days, but, but he shown it, he had been ambassador in Thailand and he created a policy that allowed us to welcome Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees initially, to get the Thai government to welcome them in Thailand and then to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees in this country. In the early 1980s, have been part of that then you've been part of harnessing us power in the wake of the Persian Gulf War and turning back of Saddam Hussein's aggression in Kuwait. He'd been ambassador in Turkey and responsible for helping convince president HW Bush to create a no fly zone for the Kurds in northern Iraq. And so he was my first boss out of college. I was an intern. I mean, I did nothing more really been pour coffee alert him to the fact that when he returned from events out of the office, he often returned wearing women's women's coach by accident. He called me Susan for much of the time I worked for her moment, Samantha. So he was making much more of an impression on on me than I was on him. But I mentioned him and within the context of your question, because these mindset was I have seen us government make terrible mistakes. Vietnam War was, you know, only over 15 years really at that time, long before the second iraq war, and another terrible mistake, but I've seen the US government make terrible mistakes. And I've seen people turn to the United States with no place left left to turn. And I've seen us do tremendous. And you know, which of these you do turns on the rigor of your process and on the sensibility and the life experiences and the sophistication and rigor of the people who comprise us institutions, so there was no from very early on. There was no idea that the US government was a monolith. You know, it was it always seemed like a sort of fluid enterprise. Were human agency and expertise really football would would make a difference. And so then, you know what I go off to Bosnia and end up writing a book about American responses genocide, and the most striking conclusion was that the mere fact of the occurrence of genocide in distant lands wasn't enough to even get senior policymakers to hold a meeting, never mind, you know, to get them to do anything that would carry a financial cost or require the exertion of diplomatic muscle to mobilize a coalition. And so that's when I sort of gotten to the point of your of your question of kind of accountability. So what you know, how come human consequences of in decision making circles don't just kind of rise on their own? You know, we know that we're immediately going to ask people the effect beyond jobs on the economy. You know, how are we defining our national security and will it will endanger American zero? broad, but the idea that, you know, people who you might actually be able to, you know, help that minimum risk, but that their fate just doesn't intrinsically rate on the mattering map was was a little bizarre to me. And then when I met Barack Obama, he was very interested in the kind of how it had been that we landed in the Iraq war. And he was one of the first people who sort of engage me in a way where he was like, Look, it seems to me that the invasion of Iraq and then the pulling out UN peacekeepers during the war and genocide are, they're very, very different. One is a major sin of omission, catastrophic consequences United States, the region, Iraq. The others is sin of omission. Although it was an active commission as well to get rid of the peacekeepers, but both of them have to do with again, they're not being in the room. Kind of

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variable, a weighty variable, which is how will human beings pay a price and then the Iraq cases was American soldiers as well as Iraqis who, you know, didn't factor near enough in terms of contingency planning and thinking through all the could go wrong. So I think what it would look like is that there would be a strategic recognition about how intertwined political reform, economic reform, respect for human rights are with our national security, this is going to be sort of a baseline lack of controversy around that bag. And to be honest, in the Obama administration, there wasn't a huge amount of controversy, as with that fact, as an obstruction. So you know, if you've said in a meeting, for example, whenever we were thinking about increasing our military assistance to a government that was submitting abuses against its people. You know, I would take note of the fact that this government's abuses, whether it's prisons, Or like in the case of the Iraqi Government across society as a whole, towards Sunni, but then that was a radicalizing that there was all this history that showed that in Egypt, for instance, or where al Qaeda decided to group that, you know, I didn't know about ISIS, like in 2013 at that point, but fundamentally, we're already seeing radicalization occur in Sunni communities that they were being repressed by their government. And you could get everyone to agree with that core, empirical fact of which there are a zillion studies that bear it out. But then that next step of Okay, so now we're going to engage from Minister Maliki and tell him that there has to be ways of undoing or reversing or mitigating diversification, that it was like No, no, but we, you know, we have a certain level of deference to this government and we're not going to engage them. And And so again, like I think that the intellectual baseline understanding again, at least in the interaction, administration was there. But there's just still this risk aversion. It's like loss aversion. I mean, on one level, it's just what we have a kind of a relatively stable relationship with Yes, we kind of agree that the things he's doing could cause a long term threat to our security. But that's long term in the here. And now, it seems very disruptive to be introducing these ideas at a high level with leverage behind it, you know, in our dialogue, but then, to me, that's what a look of it would move from this, you know, kind of understanding of an abstraction to something much more actionable. And it wouldn't mean that there are no trade offs. It wouldn't mean that you don't have hard decisions to make about what to do about Saudi Arabia or even what to do about working, for example, with the Iraqi government, against ISIS when ISIS does metastasize and come into existence, like all those trade offs are real. But I was just struck again and again and how, even with the president of sort of embrace The synergy among these concepts and rejected the idea that our interest in our values are separable just at how hard it was to fight the gravity, which leads us to just kind of defer to almost whoever the state is, regardless of whether we believe that in the medium and long term and their actions are going to be harmful.

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Are there? Is there an example or two, you want to point to either from your time at the White House or as ambassador, where that worked? Well, in other words, where you are, you are others were able to imbue the importance of a values based foreign policy into the process and actually see it worn out. So you can draw on any of the examples from the book or enough in the book, but somebody you really want to highlight where that was shown to work.

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Yeah, well, I mean, again, it gets to this question of linkages. So the most dramatic example of doing the right thing and the smart thing at the same time was an occasion when Doing the smart thing for national security was doing the dump thing. It seemed politically. And that was responding to the Ebola epidemic meeting domestic politics, domestic sorry, domestic politics. Yes. So people get it now, because it's a dog that doesn't bark. So it's not a case that even people really associated so much with President Obama. But in September 2014, we're confronting epidemiological charts from the CDC and other very credible bodies back pretty much by everyone who and the international public health community that show that 1.4 million people in Liberia in Sierra Leone are going to be infected with Ebola by January and at that time, 70 to 80% of people who are infected are dying because they're being diagnosed too late and there's no infection control. And what is the response of pundits here in this century, you know, build the wall. Walls everywhere build walls there and build walls here. And there are the studies that show the extent to which Donald Trump who began tweeting in this period, he'd always been tweeting, but he began tweeting in a way that really resonated politically for the first time. And there are studies that show that his response to a bowl actually was part of what catapulted him into his own self understanding that he could be president but also, Fox News and others really elevated his profile in this period. So this fear mongering and was adaptive for your political career if you're Trump, and even democrats like Governor Cuomo in New York, sided with people like Governor Christie in New Jersey in order to say public health professionals who go over to West Africa should be quarantine when they come back. And really, there were calls for travel bans of all kinds from West Africa, prison, Obama to his, you know, to the total credit on one level, but also just out of Common Sense, looked at and said, If we do not deal with the problem in West Africa, and it spirals to this extent, I mean, at the time when we saw those projections, you know, some 10,000 people had been killed, but it was this exponential curve. But he said,

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We don't deal with it there. It's, it's coming here, you know, you can there's, we live in the, in the 21st century, there's no way to to inoculate ourselves or build some, you know, Martian bubble over our, over our country. And and, and so we were, he was, of course, motivated as well by altruism and a desire to use the resources that we had that the people in the region did not have on their own anyone to have their backs, and so it's about them, but it also so rooted in an understanding of the integration of our world at this time. And so, amid this very difficult, political backlash, he deployed 3000 US troops and public health professionals into the IBM academic at a time when Again, fear was just spreading like wildfire. Remember, we did have a patient who died here who had come from Liberia. And that's and our infection control was bad beginning in the protocols weren't in place. And so you know, wasn't like we handled it as an administration so perfectly. But we did learn very quickly and get the protocols in place. But there's an example where we went in and we didn't do it ourselves. It was the the people who are responsible for any epidemic or the people of the region who didn't give up who learned how to bury their loved ones and wholly different way who learned how to give up a child who was infected and recognize that they have to hand them over to authorities that they didn't trust. And so again, most of the the will and the resilience and everything came from the people, but absent this huge infusion of us leadership and and the US military actually just doing the building, which you can do so quickly in a way that so many other institutions cannot. This thing what I'm struggling with like wildfire And it was very hard and gratifying for me because I get into the UN Ambassador is a privilege any day, but the greatest privilege is when the US has very clearly defined what his leadership is going to look like. And that doesn't always happen sometimes back into leadership. But this is an example of very frontal leadership, which then enabled me to go to my Chinese counterpart, you know, my British counterpart, my French counterpart to say, Okay, here's what we're investing here. Now, what are you going to do and and there is a freeloader problem. Trump talks about it and makes the problem worse, because politically harder for people to partner with us, given how often he's insulting their leaders. But then, but it is actually the case that people would just assume often it's human nature. Let somebody else do the hard work and, and so there again, our interests, we have an interest in not being the world's policeman, but we also have an interest in recognizing that the world often in the face of crisis needs like a police chief. So, you know, it's sort of building a coalition is often like building a pickup pickup team. And you're picking, you know, who do you want and you need a number of Cuban doctors from here, Malaysia. Okay, can you do the rubber gloves? Japan can you build better, you know, anti infection or infection control suits that are less hot for people who are working near the equator to try to save lives. And that was just, you know, remarkable to be a part of, but again, Trump, he managed to catapult this into something for himself. But nobody when you think of Obama's record, you don't even most people don't really even think about helping end Ebola epidemic as something that benefited us as such. Because it's so it's the dog barking.

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If I remember right, you're you're omitting one part which is you yourself even went over and face some of the same challenges coming

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out. You get getting into that I first person to hold the higher serafina

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I did go because I felt With the myth of fear, I wanted to show that if you obey the protocols, if you did what the who the CDC said you should do that you could go and you could come home safely. And one of the stories I tell in the book, though, is Ambassador Rice, who had been UN Ambassador before me and was National Security Advisor. I already lined up the White House plane. And I had my whole team of people we were bringing journalists as journalists were also afraid everyone was afraid, I was afraid. And but I but I was also afraid of being afraid and what that would do for response and and so I was all set to go and sort of overcome it cast. My husband was telling me not to go but there wasn't a single dangerous place or even a single foreign place that I never gotten where he wanted me to go. So this he had no credibility. But my son who was old enough then finally, he was just turned six I think was had heard about it somehow at school, and so he was saying don't go to the bowler place, you're going to go get a bowl full of bola bola. So this is really difficult but but Susan, who really you know was was so kind of clinical in her judgment and had run the international response from the White House I think so effectively. But she had the last minute she got cold feet she just said don't go you know, it's not it's not worth it and but her logic was kind of unassailable, even though I ignored it, which was she said, Look, it's not about you. Like I get that you can go over there and keep yourself safe and not worried about your kids or about castle like, I think you're going to be fine. But the politics in our country are shifting so rapidly. That while you're abroad, Chris lemma now that he's decided not to follow the science. No, not critical.

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Andrew Cuomo, sorry for Chris.

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Andrew Cuomo, Governor Cuomo and Governor Christie. They could just decided anybody. You don't even have to be a public health worker. You just if you're really the West Africa, your quality Then what would it do for our ability to mobilize a global response? If Remember, the president's cabinet is in one of those big tents in New Jersey, you know, and so I, you know, it's scary when you once you get in that mindset mindset of, of where others are capable of going and this is even more true today, you know, five years later, you know, they're in madness lies on one level because you can't trust that our that our politics if you're not governed by science, and you're not governed by facts, and you're not governed by epidemiological recommendations, were what's the limit to how wild this could get so she had a really good point and but I still thought on balance to show that we could do it right that we were not afraid even if Remember I said inside outside, even though inside I was like, oh, gosh, is that interpreter who's you know, speaking into my year is there is you know, it was as he's talking, is there anything getting into my ear, their fluid that might be being you know, really because an infection can traveled and a whole host of ways and so, but it did it proved the right thing. And the journalists covered also what these American heroes were doing. And that hadn't been getting sufficient press coverage. So that then became part of the narrative, which of course, everyone likes the story of heroes. And so even though they never really got the proper bipartisan embrace that they should have when they came back, at least Time magazine and others, you know, made them Person of the Year and, and so we every day, we're trying to affect people's cost benefit, right, their calculus about whether it was worth taking that risk themselves or making that sacrifice.

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Let me pivot to New York for the last question. I will open up. So you talk a lot in the book, and I remember from from long ago, about your relationship with Russia, when you're working on the Security Council when you're ambassador and you had a very contentious relationship with the Russian ambassador. Obviously, we were imposed on so many issues. Nonetheless, you describe a kind of personal relationship that you developed with him. I think you took him home for Thanksgiving. Or, yeah, really try to, you know, develop a kind of rapport with him. And it's it was an interesting account that you gave of how you balance your instincts, which at times you seemed almost like you wanted to strangle them. Definitely. And then at other times, I'm sure you did. And at other times you even really worked with him in a very effective way. And so I was just struck by that. And we were talking a little bit upstairs about the difficulty of how you deal with someone who, in some respects, is facility facilitating truly evil acts, and yet is indispensable to very good. So I'd like to hear you just talk about how you kind of navigated that.

35:41

Yeah, I mean, it was that this was it. I write about my relationship with the Russian ambassador at some length because on one level as I went back over it in my mind, you know, it's not it is just similar in a number of ways. Is to our current politics in this country, but it is. Those dynamics are not unfamiliar to us given polarization and how how alienated For example, I feel from the politics of the current president and and Okay, you know, he's not carpet bombing Aleppo. He's not interfering in our elections. He's asking others to interfere in our election. So yeah, it's a decent amount of Center figuring out elections as well. But but like as I went over this relationship, you know, it has similarities in sort of what i would i would call hold your nose diplomacy at times. If, for example, I was a member of congress now and thinking about you know how to work with Republicans on something it would be a virgin hold your nose diplomacy, because in the next breath, they are defending President Trump's quid pro quo. Ukrainian president and, you know, whatever, you know, his precipitous decision on Syria and this and that and and so so, you know, I think I think that it's, it's really worth drilling down I also know from my students and again from my own reflection reflexes that you know, at this moment this question of whether you can be kind or even just civil to people with whom you disagree, it's just feel like it's just getting harder. Like it wasn't that controversy when you and I were last little bit it at least as an abstraction, that being the kind of living your values across the board and trying not to pick and choose to whom you apply to them. That that was at least for the aspiring to and I think it's getting harder. So in in the case of the Russian ambassador, part of it was that he would a lot of it was even sitting sounds like could not get a single condemnation of a coup through the UN Security Council if Russia is going to be till it, I could not aspire to do anything on Syria. Even behind the scenes, nevermind anything through the Council, which of course Russia now has been tilled, I think 13 or 14 Security Council's evolution. So this point, they had done six or seven, during while I was there. But you know, the things that you could do behind the scenes maybe to just reach a, you know, group of people who haven't had food in weeks with Russia support, I mean, even against the backdrop of the things that they were the most obstruction, it's on the very fact that they were obstruction. This meant that they held the key to being able to do anything for people in Syria. So there's, you know, as a sort of unseemly dependence that you had on the people who were in committing the worst acts, they were capable of withholding the commission of these terrible acts and so that was a lot of minute but then You know, as I right, he was also the most creative negotiator. He was very funny.

39:06

You know, and I, in order to build up trust initially, but then you know, when you work with somebody over four years, the relationship takes on a life of its own, but it didn't develop into a genuine friendship. It was a friendship that often, you know, from which I had to call timeouts, like very explicitly, I can't, I can't talk to you, I can't believe what you just said, I don't know how you can live with yourself, you know, and have those dimensions. But then I would, you know, unless I wanted the entire Security Council to shut down, I would sort of go back and make an investment in that in our friendship, and at or at least in a relationship, when he died. Very suddenly, just after I left the office, he died and it left in January 2017. Of course, when Trump came in, and he died just a few weeks later in February, and I tweeted, innocuously, it was a huge shock to me. I mean, again, a new cast. I think his wife and his kids grown but you know, we we chose four years of the most intense work together. And you know what i the water I was able to pull from a stone the stone that is Latimer Putin was water that I was able to pull because of this relationship. I'm because he became an advocate on behalf of things that his son was very skeptical. So I tweeted something that just expressed sadness over his death. And you know what, now Twitter, Twitter, but I you know, what I got back was as if I was endorsing the siege of Aleppo or Russia's interference in our election or the invasion of Ukraine or, and so it really struck me and that's why I wanted to reflect on it just said, we can't, it can't be that way. I mean, I mean, we have to that that indispensability that I described in this narrow circumstance of you know, cohabitate in a work environment where you really it is like Mutually Assured just Because you can both block anything that the street council does. But that's kind of a metaphor for also our political life on one level, like we can just have gridlock for the rest of time. Or maybe at some point, you know, preferably the Democratic Party from my, according to my politics, but we'll have a supermajority will be able to do things on behalf of people who needed their millions. But, but so, you know, thinking through how do you how do you disagree, you know, even just vehemently on the most fundamental issues is basic decency, but still find a space to be able to converse and see if there are things that you can do together. But I guess for me that was that's part of the education of idealist I guess,

41:46

to temper a few questions. I know of course, I'm great. Okay. So, some of you know, we like to start off with questions from students. So let me see handsome students.

41:58

Thank you so much for being here.

42:00

As a third year law student is calling your career some sometime. Very inspiring of how it's starting here.

42:10

I was wondering if you can comment on a company ministrations place decision,

42:15

northeast area? And be how do we reconcile that what seems to be no like a seasonal portrayal the curves that we have, especially since we are so reliant on them, and how do we rebuild that relationship once a democratic?

42:34

So the question was, in effect, react to President Trump's decision receiving decision related the Syrian Kurds in northern Syria, and then seek about the seasonal the trail, the seemingly seasonal portrayal of the Kurds by the situation but also add it goes further back and of course, the currency saying, You know, Friends of the mountains? And that's what they're feeling like today. And then how does it affect more broadly, the ability of the next president to engage with them? And I think the question also raises larger questions of trust and credibility and how enduring the blow to our credibility and you know, how enduring the blow is just put it in broader sense. So on the narrow issue, I guess I'd start with a little bit of sympathy for the predicaments and don't extend very long before to have enough that large a person but but, you know, there is a core challenge, which is that we have US troops deployed so many places around the world. I mean, I have a fact that the back of the book about US forces being involved in something Kind of counterterrorism mission in 40% of the countries on the earth and the president. And that's against the backdrop of no domestic debate, no commercial authorization or anything like that. So we're way over militarized foreign policy. So there's that kind of backdrop. And and of course, Trump only cares about Trump is thinking about his own, you know, sound bites and disabilities that we do hit the elephant and then we left and the troops are home and, and but the problem with that self that you know, sort of singular self regard through which he filters all decision making, is that it takes no account. First and foremost of the ongoing ISIS thread it takes, which is real and which the Syrian Kurdish defense forces have been continuing to try to navigate in northern Syria. It takes so so If they were to go away or to get defeated or to flee even positions that they took up in partnership with the United States, there are 10,000 ISIS prisoners who are in their custody 10 thousands. But there's also that whole block of territory, which it's not, you know, it's not clear at all what happens is they if they make those decisions, or what happens if the partnership, if you call it that between the United States who's been providing them with intelligence and arms and kind of tactical advice, air support at times in the past, if that partnership goes away, again, what what does ISIS just resurface? So that's like added back to the sort of the practicalities of our values of living our values. That's just a practical dimension of in a precipitous way with no

45:57

plan of handing off to to Another small training for sort of partnership force. It's just policy by women policy by tweeting just can leave something quite catastrophic from the exam for the narrow standpoint of ISIS, and the threat that it poses and what we saw in 2014 was ISIS, unencumbered by confrontation and or by military and other forms of pressure, you know, it can use any small with their various escape in terms of their technology, no way more dispersed than they were back then. But, you know, they can use very limited basis and operation to create an impression again of a larger than life force. They could they could recoup, not all no way anywhere near the momentum that they had in 2014 2015. But they could recoup sense of identity and a sense of down but not out, it would not take that much. And we saw in San Bernardino, you know it doesn't you don't have to be physically in the region to be empowered by that. If that if that ideology has a Twitter feed, and if there were receptive minds and hearts, anywhere in the world 2000 of the 10,000 prisoners that these forces were holding were foreigners, many from Europe, you know, and of course from all around the world. So that's something ISIS. He said your point about the season of the trail with the Kurds, which is whether it's these Kurds of the Kurds in Iraq, is a recurring theme through history. I mean, I think if you're them, they lost. You know, estimates vary, but thousands, they say 10,000 soldiers in fighting ISIS. You know, the United States has taken minimal casualties in that struggle, because they were the ground force and we were providing intelligence arms and they were approximately in effect. And so who is going to be our ground force when we need a ground force? If there's a sense that if you take 10,000 casualties and then the rug gets pulled out from under you, and it doesn't just get pulled out, it look last night is it the US presidents was was licensed CEOs president was licensing the Turkish Government to go in and crush these these former partners who lost 7000 7000 people. So and then lastly, I just go up from this narrow credibility issue to the broader one, which is, you know, traditionally when American presidents make deals with other countries or with this doesn't happen as often but non state actors like the Syrian Kurds, there is a recognition by a succeeding presidents that the word of a prior president even if you wouldn't have made the same deal, that it has to matter, or you destroy potentially the word of future present, you destroy your own word, because, you know, Trump's like, I'm going to make all these deals. Well. Why would anybody believe that Trump seals are going to sick You know, if Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren or whoever comes in or even, you know, Mitt Romney or whoever some sensible republican ever comes to prominence again, why would they seek to Trump's whimsical words? I mean, if there's a sense that American credibility isn't a value that finds American leaders and and if there isn't that kind of Institute, that sort of systemic understanding that that, you know, you get when you rip up the Paris Agreement, when you rip up the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, whatever you think of it, when you rip up the Iran nuclear deal. When you just ripping, ripping and ripping ripping, you're also creating the sector of somebody else ripping up what you've done. And and so your question about the Kurds is viscerally kind of localizing the lives of human beings who are now extremely vulnerable to Turkish attack. The systemic issue is almost as great

50:01

And and you know, people ask them, How do you what you know what is going to restore you, especially because it's merely changing leadership doesn't deal with this structural legacy that that Trump will have left? And the only answer I have, which isn't very satisfying, because it's so hard to bring about, but is that in 2020, there has to be not only the feet of the part of the current president, but also a sufficiently wide margin that we at least have a plausible case to make, that this was an anomaly and that Trump ism has been repudiated, as well as this particular president. But we're a long way as we can see, the current moment from from that and repudiation and the republican party could have a huge amount, I mean, wouldn't have a huge amount to do with that. If they were standard bearers for a set of principles that would be enduring, which is what you know, Laurie on foreign policy for all the differences one would have largely expected prior to these laughs Couple years,

51:01

they're showing a little bit. It's one of the only

51:03

Syria Yeah, they're going crazy on it's fine to like, basically use the White House to advance your own political fortune by asking the foreign government to make up allegations against your political partner over there. But But yes, somehow the Syrian Kurds, that issue really gets under their skin,

51:23

both the red line?

51:25

Yeah, that's the red line. Exactly. Okay. So we're very short on time. We can take a few

51:30

questions, short questions, and some very,

51:32

maybe short. Yeah,

51:35

she's got a tight schedule. This is gonna sound silly, but so let's, I'm going to take one right here. I'm going to take a stand I see over there. And let's take one more right here. Okay, so why don't we start at

51:48

what can you talk to us about the clash between in between an idealist and hold your nose diplomacy, I mean, how much for those diplomacy and ideas and how do you decide Whether you're achieving enough to persevere. Great

52:04

question was also on bulldozer policy. Has there been a time where you can't hold your nose anymore? And you just snap I know, through the readings, you mentioned the HCR, a proxy with Russia on a

52:18

time where you just can't handle it anymore.

52:23

And is it too late or can you and

52:29

it's too late today.

52:34

Okay. Thank you so much. I'm so I'm Irish originally. And so there's no prospect of me running for president because you do in like a bizarre rule. You have to be native born to run for president. I'm going to go out on a limb here and think that Donald Trump is not going to be the guy to orchestrate the Mrs. To show arrangement for nominated for

53:06

I don't know if it's just me

53:09

but I would love to serve again and I don't know what form it will take but I hope to be able to do so they do write about my kids and the time away from them that being in high stakes national security job entails these trade offs. So many working parents are living no matter what their line of work. And so I'm right now in apartment because 10 book tour I'm trying to make up for lost time with my kids. And so that's my focus. In addition, just trying to make this world of public service more accessible to people. That's that's my my focus. And then, so just working backwards, you reference something that you've been good you've already read the book. But one instance where I kind of just couldn't go along to get along with The Russian ambassador and it was an instance where there is a long standing practice in US diplomacy whereby in un elections, we vote routinely, for the permanent members of the student council, even though the two of the permanent members are Russia and China and don't show our values. So we go to the Russia, China, United Kingdom and France and I got my instructions. There was nothing special about my instructions, very little thought had been given to them. They didn't come from Obama, or even directly from Secretary Kerry was just on autopilot. This deal had existed and it was widely understood that the other four members of the council permanent members for voting for the United States when we were running for elections, and so it was deemed worthwhile to be able to count on these five votes including our own. But after Aleppo after the annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine and the lies about the Malaysian airline jet and, you know, multifaceted interference in our election.

55:06

That was the idea of following my instructions just seemed too hard. And so I tell the story of the book of that dilemma because I'm, you know, I'm a general, even when I lost internally on debates about what we should do about different things. I saluted, argued, argued, argue and keep arguing, even after the debate was close to publicly. And in my outward facing role, there was my response to the President, pleasure the president, but on this one I thought that everybody would understand except Putin, and so and they end up losing by sort of the equivalent of one vote. And so it was also I use the story in the book as a reminder of individual agency and how important it is to find your own version of that moment and to know that even though it feels Like any elections, we forgot one votes matter. And Russia has never lost a major election in the entire 70 year history. It's time at the UN prior to losing that one. So that was interesting. I guess the only other time, I mean, there's plenty behind the scenes where I just couldn't engage with him or, or talk to him or try to work constructively on other issues. But it would be short, because I still need to get peacekeepers into South Sudan. And I have to get the, you know, Molly peacekeeping mission re ups and I have to get people who've been accused of sexual assaults in Central African Republic purged from the DC commission and all these things Russia because of the original, you know, sins or decisions of the founders of the UN, Russia has a lever over all of them. And so but the only other example of really losing it is when I lost it publicly in a moment that the came a kind of viral moment, I guess where my own problem My only viral moment is Ambassador where I just was looking at my friend, the Russian ambassador and just saying, Have you no shame? Is there literally nothing that creeps you out? You know, is there is there nothing, not even the death of a child that makes you, you know, stop and think, you know, I won't do this. And And so, again, I go into that in the book, always wondered how he kept going in the way that he did. But he even though I think personally was pretty repulsed by some of what was happening. It's my impression, probably, if I didn't have that impression. I couldn't have maintained the the, the extent of the relationship. But I also know that he and he was an insight into Russian, the Russian public generally. But he really felt like who was bringing Russians from their news, you know, that idea like Russia dignity, having been assaulted after the defeat in the Cold War, which we did hearing about for all these years, and we were kind of oblivious to we, over the decades, I think in the United States. So. So that was a public moment of explosion. But by and large I was I needed to keep going back to the well, because I had so much I wanted to get done before I was done in my in my time. And then, you know, I think the it's exactly the right question about but I certainly answered it in part, you know, the clash between the idealist and hold your nose diplomacy. I mean, I'd start with something that's not that intuitive, which is,

58:37

you know, if you're, if you're trying to promote human rights, or you care about the human life that is at stake in a conflict area, even when a country like Russia is doing something that seems totally antithetical to what you're trying to promote. on a given day, they can still make things worse. So in a funny way, it's also like, you know, even preserved A terrible status quo on one level and which was part of it, you could hardly say that the recording with my ideals is to preserve, you know, this type of situation and, you know, some part of Syria. So for example, I negotiate with fatale, a resolution to bring food into the northern part of Syria that previously it had to be routed through Damascus through the government. And I did that. And it was really the strength of our relationship with God that turned him into an advocate, I think, with Moscow to get that done. Now I did that it wasn't even half of it was like, you know, a slice, you know, you know, in a loaf of slice white bread, it was a slice because the enclosed areas, the communities that were any place other than along the Turkish border, the Syrian government just wouldn't allow food in at all. I mean, they're just starving people to death. And so here I'm doing this that he could have a little slice of a loaf with him. It reaches you know, close to a million people over time, this food that wouldn't have gotten there otherwise. So it was worth doing. And at any point, man, when I'm judging him or excoriating him or having my Bible showdown with him, there's a risk that he's going to turn off the spigot to the other part of the country. So, you know, and again, I want to be really clear, because I guess I haven't made this point, the education and idealist that I described, my book is not one of becoming more accommodating to evil or like, you know, conceding that the world is a dark and dangerous but I knew all that, of course, the world is a dark and dangerous place. Of course, it's hard to advance your ideals and promote human rights like there's, you know, years and years of gravity and special interests, everything pushing in the other direction. What I'm trying to do is figure out, you know, how to do the best I can given the messiness of the world and what I try to describe is how to become more effective in you know, in advancing the cause of human rights and in advancing a sensibility around human consequences. So, you know, I don't given the vast range of issues on which Russia had influence. You know, again, I know it can sound like a rationalization, he could always get worse. And there was always some scope. If there wasn't, then we would just negotiations would end on certain issues, but many issues that were very, very hard. There was some scope and I think it was borne out by the results, where you could just move him this much, and that would be some number of people who might be fed who are and I think about it as a parent also, some number of parents might be able to deal with the growl and stomachs of their children which is like a haunting thing is like to imagine being a parent in these communities and not be able to feed your children and cast would say every time I because I talk about why didn't resign because our series policy wasn't producing results. 500,000 people were killed. I mean, it was just the most horrific situation including all the knock on effects in Europe with the migration and the and the Exodus and what that did for European politics for generations to come, maybe. But cast every time I would leave in the morning, he'd be like, just go help one, you can figure out how to use the tools that US government help one person do that. And so it's counter cultural at the moment, you know, because we're all I feel very drawn to the the need for transformational change. But I also know that it's a set of small steps that need to be taken in order to get to that destination. So

1:02:44

thank you so much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai