Samantha Power on Learning How to Make a Difference
Samantha Power — former US Ambassador to the United Nations and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Problem from Hell — joins Tyler Cowen on the publication of her memoir The Education of an Idealist to trace what she learned, across war correspondence, advocacy, and cabinet service, about what it actually takes to make a difference. Episode 75, recorded 30 July 2019.
Key ideas
- Listening is the core diplomatic skill — but listening to the right layer. Effective diplomacy requires hearing not just the official instructions a counterpart carries but the individual underneath them: their own instincts, their internal battles within their own system. The diplomat who hears only the diktat mistakes the instruction for the person.
- Storytelling, not talking points, is the instrument of change. Power consistently used her platform at the UN Security Council and in public diplomacy not to deliver rote policy statements but to narrate the experiences of individuals living inside the conflicts under discussion. Human stories break the professional detachment that allows atrocities to continue unaddressed.
- Humanitarian intervention has no single binding constraint — but domestic political legitimacy is the hardest to rebuild. The calculus for any intervention turns on the scale and nature of the harm, international coalition breadth, regional legitimacy, and sectarian complexity on the ground. Yet the deeper problem Power identifies is a shrinking American public constituency for internationalism altogether — the product of Iraq and Afghanistan — which constrains every subsequent calculation.
- China’s ambition at the international level is to rewrite the rules, not just to break them. Beyond its actions in the South China Sea (building artificial islands and simply dismissing the International Court of Justice ruling against it) and the incarceration of over a million Uyghurs, China is working inside the UN system to shift core human rights norms toward state consent and away from universal standards — a structural rather than merely transactional challenge to the rules-based order.
- A memoir requires a clear purpose — and ruthless submission of material to that purpose. Power wrote The Education of an Idealist to convince people, at a moment of retreat from public service, that effort has integrity even when outcomes disappoint. Every scene had to earn its place against that goal. The personal material — self-doubt, therapy, romantic relationships — stayed in because it broke the illusion of the exceptional official and showed that growth in public life and private life are the same process.
Content
The craft of diplomacy and war correspondence
Power opens by identifying listening as the foundational quality of both the diplomat and the war correspondent — not passive hearing but active attention to the situated self of the person opposite: what they want that their instructions do not allow, how they are constrained from within their own system. A diplomat who sees only the cable a counterpart is implementing is working with a fraction of the available information.
She traces her distinctive public style at the UN directly to her earlier career as a wartime correspondent in Bosnia (covered for NPR in the early 1990s). The diplomatic lingua franca is antiseptic by design; Power’s response was to use her public appearances — Security Council speeches, press stakeouts — to narrate individuals she had met who were living with the consequences of the conflicts under discussion. Her argument: counterparts are human beings, as unlikely to be moved by talking points as anyone else, and only the human story has a chance of breaking the professional rut.
She also addresses risk tolerance. Most diplomats, she observes, operate within tight bounds — they can only go as far as they know their head of state has authorised. Her unusual position in Obama’s cabinet, spending enough time with him to feel the shape of the grey areas, meant she could be more risk-taking than a diplomat acting purely on written instructions.
On Richard Holbrooke — the US diplomat who brokered the Dayton peace agreement that ended the Bosnian war — Power refuses the binary of the Packer biography (erratic, self-aggrandising) versus her own edited volume (creative, energetic). He was both, she says, and the detail that most matters is one Packer underweights: Holbrooke spent unusual time cultivating younger diplomats, which Power reads not as ego but as genuine investment in the next generation on behalf of US interests.
Ireland, identity, and the origins of her politics
Power arrived in Pittsburgh from Dublin at nine. She describes the shock of abundance — the scale of everything, the number of television channels — and the categories she carried with her that let her slot the new into the familiar (sport remained sport, just a different set of sports).
On the Irish influence in her thinking, she hedges the counterfactual honestly — she cannot know how much is her doctor mother’s empathy and how much is having come from a small country with a history of oppression. What she identifies as durable is a suspicion of superiority: an instinct that large powers and large personalities are obliged to register the dignity of the people around them, including the population of 10,000 in the UN member state that has no practical way to influence climate outcomes except through what the United States does.
China: the South China Sea, the Uyghurs, and rules rewriting
Power frames the South China Sea not as a territorial dispute but as a test of whether an ascending power would accept the rules of the road or assert that might makes right — a question she notes recurs whenever there is a major shift in relative national power. The Obama administration’s response combined freedom-of-navigation exercises, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (designed to signal regional alignment against Chinese unilateralism), and the International Court of Justice — whose ruling China simply dismissed.
On the Uyghur incarceration (she is speaking in mid-2019, when estimates of detained Uyghurs in Xinjiang were already over one million), Power calls the coverage and criticism ‘woefully insufficient’ relative to the scale of the harm. She distinguishes several reasons: no US government human rights policy as such under Trump; corporate and academic financial exposure to China making institutions reluctant to speak; and — she finds this the most intellectually honest concession — the sense among advocates that they lack a confident prescription, and that advocacy is most spirited when policymakers feel one step away from a different choice.
Her larger framing: China is not yet in full export-your-values mode, but it is actively working within the UN to shift the rules of international human rights away from universal standards and toward state consent. In that context, human rights advocacy is not soft American moralising but an exercise of comparative advantage — the thing the United States and its democratic partners can offer that China cannot.
Democracy in the Middle East
On why democracy is rare in the Middle East, Power points to two factors beyond the structural: the winner-takes-all mindset of elected leaders who fear they may not get a second chance (Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after Mubarak’s fall), and the willingness of their successors to use exactly that logic as justification for excluding the previous winners from any share of governance (Sisi after the Brotherhood’s year in office).
The counter-example she cites is Tunisia — where the Islamist party that won the first post-revolution election recognised the depth of social division and negotiated a pacted transition rather than using its majority as a permanent licence. The lesson she draws is not structural but individual: the character and judgment of specific leaders at specific moments matter enormously.
On Iraq, she accepts that some economic dimensions look better over time but insists no self-respecting historian could describe the original US intervention as competently prosecuted — the degree of bloodshed was unprecedented even relative to Saddam’s rule, and the outcome is despite the US operation, not because of it.
The limits of humanitarian intervention and the deficit of diplomacy
Asked to identify the scarce factor that constrains beneficial humanitarian interventions, Power resists the single-variable answer but circles back repeatedly to domestic political legitimacy. She uses the East Timor intervention (Australian-led, near-universal local support, UN Security Council backing, small population, manageable complexity) and the Syria non-intervention (the highest humanitarian trigger since Rwanda, paired with factional complexity that shattered any simple cost-benefit calculation) to show that no single variable explains the outcome.
Her substantive recommendation, embedded in The Education of an Idealist, is a rebalancing of the US foreign policy apparatus: the United States employs almost more people in military marching bands than it has diplomats, and its military leaders are among the first to say they cannot address the underlying causes of conflict — socioeconomic tension, land grabs, climate-driven resource scarcity. What is scarce is not military capacity but diplomatic and institution-building capacity. The implication runs through her critique of NATO burden sharing (she finds German under-spending on defence ‘outrageous’), her support for right-sizing the US basing footprint (800 bases in 70 countries, counterterrorism operations in 40 per cent of the world’s countries), and her concern that Congress has abdicated its oversight role — still operating under a war authorisation dating from 11 September 2001.
Memoir writing and the education of an idealist
The final thread is about writing, and specifically about why memoirs fail. Power’s diagnosis: writers either do not know their purpose at the outset or lose it along the way. Her own purpose was explicit and pointed: to write a book that restored faith in the integrity of effort at a moment when public service was being ridiculed and abandoned. That purpose governed what material survived the cut.
She describes writing in the first person as the hardest thing she has done — harder than A Problem from Hell, which required research and argument but not the presumption of the self-portrait. The Irish do not like the first person even in therapy, she says. What eventually freed her was accepting that building a recognisable human character out of the material of her own life was a literary exercise, not self-indulgence — and that readers needed to be able to root for the character if they were to share the ideals.
The personal material — therapy, romantic relationships, the ‘bat cave’ of self-doubt — stayed in because she saw that students in her classes post-Obama had constructed her into a different species of person: the senior official who must have had everything together. The memoir’s job was to collapse that distance, to show that growing up in public and growing up in private are the same process of stumbling toward competence.
Related
- Samantha Power — guest; author and former US Ambassador to the United Nations
- Tyler Cowen — host