Samantha Power, former US Ambassador to UN: Closing USAID was soft power suicide

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Hello, I'm Katrina Perry, BBC News Chief Presenter.

And this is the interview from the BBC World Service,

the best conversations coming out of the BBC.

People shaping our world from all over the world.

If you're not a little bit afraid,

then you're not paying attention.

You have never seen a people so united.

Do not make that boat crossing.

Do not make that journey.

Being born in America, feeling American.

I haven't people treating me like I'm not.

We're more popular than populism.

For this interview, I met Samantha Power,

former American ambassador to the United Nations,

who led the US Agency for International Development,

USAID, until January 2025.

Her tenure there ended with the inauguration of President Trump.

Shortly after, funding for USAID was drastically reduced,

and the agency was effectively closed down,

with any remaining projects transferred to the US State Department.

You're going to hear her thoughts on the challenges facing the United Nations

in today's shifting world order,

as well as her devastating take on the decision to close USAID.

It's referred to widely as soft power suicide.

An enormous own goal for the United States' credibility.

Again, now with the Trump administration bombing here and there,

and with the tariffs, and threatening Greenland,

and plenty of other soft power suicide,

and hard power blunders, a foot.

So maybe the destruction of USAID now kind of recedes in people's memory.

There's a lot going on.

But this is lasting because the capillaries of this people-to-people assistance

went, spanned countries, spanned generations, so many people you meet,

you know, got a scholarship in the 70s or the 80s because of the USA grant,

and then they turn up as a minister,

and then you go to them wanting to negotiate something else,

and they have a very positive impression in the United States

because of that relationship that goes back.

Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service

with Samantha Power.

I'm interested in your views on how you see the United Nations now,

how strong or weak it is, because again, we have those calls relating to Iran.

We had many calls from the UN and various agencies calling for ceasefires,

for help humanitarian aid and Gaza.

It seemed pretty ineffective in that scenario.

How do you see the UN placed now for these kind of big global conflicts and tragedies?

Well, I think you look at the Security Council as the kind of executive branch

to the United Nations, and when you have a permanent member of the Security Council,

starting back in 2014, invading Crimea, Ukraine, launching a full-scale invasion in 2022,

just four years ago, that's going to really complicate the business of the Security Council.

When a veto holder commits aggression of that magnitude against a neighbor,

and I lived at firsthand the difference between pre-Ukrain and post-Ukrain,

how much less functional the Security Council became.

Obviously, the United States on the Security Council also running a blocking motion

for the State of Israel, not only after October 7th with the war that unfolded,

but for many, many years before.

And then, of course, the People's Republic of China making no secret of the fact that if not

this year or next year, that it has as an objective, taking over the country of Taiwan,

and all that will unfold in the wake of that.

So, if the Security Council is the primary organ for maintaining and forcing

international peace and security, that's not an auspicious set of national interests as they're

being defined and enacted, and it's going to create what it has created, which is a gridlock

within the Security Council. The UN is still doing unbelievable work through its humanitarian

agencies. Much less of it, because the United States has cut so much foreign assistance,

USAID was spending $14 billion a year. My last year, as USAID Administrator,

in managing an unprecedented number of humanitarian emergencies around the world,

that number was cut by $10 billion by the Trump administration.

And so, that's tens of millions of people who don't have access to rations or to shelter,

or to medicine that did very recently. That doesn't look good for the UN.

So, in both of these examples, I'm offering, it's an example of countries,

the state's powerful states that constitute the UN, having the greatest impact on the performance

of the UN as such. When you are Administrator of USAID in the wake of October 7th, and very quickly

afterwards, USAID sent humanitarian aid to Gaza at a later point, tried to get a maritime

option up and running, which ultimately was unsuccessful after a period.

How do you square that with the other side of the administration continuing to support Israel

with military aid, causing some of the problems that humanitarian aid is then needed for?

It was immensely challenging to square that throughout, and it wasn't just the obstruction

of humanitarian assistance, which USAID and our diplomats sought to create breakthroughs on every day

with limited success. But it's also the number of civilians who were killed.

You know, here's this horrific event, monstrous attacks carried out on October 7th.

I met with the families of those who were killed in the Cabuzzi's, you know, near Gaza,

and with people who had loved ones who had been taken hostage.

But in the wake of that, the attacks on civilians were incessant, the attacks on humanitarian aid workers,

the killing of aid workers, the lack of accountability, the impunity around that.

And so what we tried to do, and President Biden and the whole team tried to do,

is leverage the military assistance that was being provided to try to secure breakthroughs on the

humanitarian front. But again, it was extremely difficult to see progress. I will say that when

the United States transitioned then to the Trump administration, and there was almost no effort

made to get humanitarian assistance, where the blank check was written, the military assistance

provided, then we could look back and see, okay, well, we actually, at least we got some assistance

through, at least we were able to, you know, run a hospital where people were cared for or use

our leverage to make sure that organizations like Doctors Without Borders or UN agencies were

not expelled. So you could look back and say, okay, well, that leverage achieved something,

but next to the humanitarian toll, it felt very small. And when we're talking about humanitarian

crises, of course, it's not just Gaza. There are many, many places in the world where there are

millions of people at risk of famine, in famine scenarios, displaced at risk of gender-based

sexual violence and so on. Since USAID has shuttered, and there are estimations from the Rockefeller

Centre amongst others that, you know, millions of people more now will die because those programs

aren't there. Five million children they estimate by 2030. How does that sit with you having

spent so long as the administrator of that agency and so much of your career working for those

missions, for those humanitarian poses? I think it is the destruction of USAID is

not only one of the coolest acts that I've seen in my career, but of course also one of the dumbest.

It hands over American soft power to China and to other actors that often don't have the

interests of civilians in mind. Estimates are 14 million people at least. That number is likely

to go up. Will die, who would have been kept alive if the assistance had continued to flow.

But honestly, Katrina, that doesn't even capture it. That doesn't capture the end of power Africa,

which had electrified 150 million homes for 150 million people. It doesn't capture what it means

to take away a scholarship where a kid had just received the letter knowing they were actually

going to get to go to college. And then that scholarship program is destroyed because Elon Musk

in a fever dream decided to destroy the agency. Or never mind the girl's education

happening in parts of the world where the authorities or society would not have embraced that mission.

But because the United States was there nudging it along, mothers and fathers were able to find

a place for their kids to go. Democracy is in retreat all around the world. Human rights are in

retreat all around the world. US democracy programs run by USAID 98% of them terminated.

That means no support for independent media, anti-corruption organizations, legal clinics,

counseling for women who've survived sexual violence. In other words, it's not just the

lives lost. It's the lives worsened and in some cases destroyed by this, again, incredibly

short-sighted and very unpopular decision by Musk blessed and embraced by President Trump. So

it's been very hard to watch. I feel like this organization created by John F. Kennedy had built

trust in so many communities, trust in USAID, but really trust in America. The American people

are slogan was from the American people and it really had that sense of kind of people-to-people ties.

But for the communities who one day were able to get access to medicine and the next day weren't,

it feels like just one big setup. You know, a faint almost. That you rely on America and then we

just pull the rug out from under you. So we talked about the damage caused by military operations

around the world that don't have authorization and that don't seem to have much planning behind

them. But if you combine that sense of the wild wild west and might make right that is one feature of

the Trump administration's policies, if you combine that with the cruelty of ripping that rug out

from under tens of millions of people around the world, it is a huge hole out of which is going

to be very hard to dig. Critics would say that USAID parts of it weren't being very well-run,

that there were budgetary overspends and programs being funded that perhaps weren't in American

interests. So what do you say to those criticisms? I have to keep my temper in check when I hear

those criticisms because the most frustrating part of running USAID was that we were earmarked

by the U.S. Congress at around a rate of 96%. So there's not one sector that we invested in

or program that Republicans and Democrats together didn't have to come together on to approve.

And were there things that I would have loved to have done differently? Yes, but by law and by the

micro-management of the appropriations, I had to go up and to negotiate with very influential

members of Congress and many of them had their pet projects. That said, 65% of what USAID did,

totally uncontroversial, life-saving humanitarian assistance, global health work, HIV work,

malaria, TB. I don't think anybody quibbles with that work. And probably 30% of the rest of the

work is on energy, electrification, democracy and governance, other forms of primary health

programming and the like. So really the kinds of small examples that might be cited, I'd say,

from what I can tell, about 70 or 80% of them are just made up from Hulk Law, part of the

disinformation machine that we know accompanies destructive acts. But those that actually were USAID

programs that seemed problematic, probably they came written into law and appropriated by some

member of Congress in a manner that left our teams very little discretion. Now that it is essentially

gone, how easy were what's the likelihood of someone starting it up again, another president

Republican or Democrat? I think there's no question the United States is going to have an assistance

arm again in the world that is very robust. One of the few things that Republicans and Democrats

can agree upon in this polarized world is the importance of not seeding the world to China's

governance model. China has stepped into the breach in many of the places the United States

has pulled back in a non-transparent way, in a way that is hostile to the inputs of civil society

in a manner that often includes surveillance. And if you're talking about soft power, was this

essentially a bit of a gift then to China and others where the U.S. left and that soft power

has been diminished, that there's a vacancy? I think it's referred to widely as soft power

suicide. It's just an enormous own goal for the United States' credibility. And again, now with the

Trump administration bombing here and there and with the tariffs and threatening Greenland and

plenty of other soft power suicides and hard power blunders a foot. So maybe the destruction of

U.S. aid now kind of recedes in people's memory. There's a lot going on. But this is lasting because

the capillaries of this people-to-people assistance went, spanned countries, spanned generations,

so many people you meet, you know, got a scholarship in the 70s or the 80s because of the U.S.A. grant

and then they turn up as a minister and then you go to them wanting to negotiate something else

and they have a very positive impression in the United States because of that relationship that

goes back. So I think there will be a reconstitution of robust U.S. assistance. I hope it will

come with more flexibility to design from scratch what is needed for today and for 10 years from now

and 20 years from now. But there's no question that the American people saw themselves in some of

the work that was happening, sort of appreciated, valued the show of compassion that the United States

was doing, but it's also clear that the case has to be made. And when U.S. aid or something like it

is reconstituted, making sure that those very members of Congress who are insisting that this

happened and this part of Africa and this happened in Vietnam and this happened in Peru, that they

themselves as well are making the case to constituents so that that vulnerability doesn't exist

to one man's will. You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service.

The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. So when you want to reach the right

professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over one billion professionals,

including 130 million decision makers and that's where it stands apart from other

ad buys. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role,

seniority, skills, company revenue so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

It's why LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B return on ad spend of major ad networks.

Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get $250 credit for the next one.

Just go to LinkedIn.com slash broadcast. That's LinkedIn.com slash broadcast, terms and

conditions apply. Craving the coffee flavor you love. But without the caffeine,

Kachava's got you covered with their newest coffee flavor. This all-in-one nutrition shake

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and nutrition your body craves. Go to kachava.com and use code news. New customers get 15% off

their first order. That's KAC HAVA.com code news. I traveled to Harvard University in Cambridge,

Massachusetts to meet Samantha Power, where she teaches classes,

rattling politics, law and international relations. She doesn't do many interviews now that she no

longer holds public office, preferring, for the moment, to educate the next generation of leaders.

But her office is still full of memories from those days, photographs with presidents,

images of her on the world stage, memories of a career on the front lines.

Okay, let's return to my conversation with Samantha Power.

When you're talking about the place in the world that the US has right now,

the Canadian Prime Minister Marcarniet Davos in January said the world order has been ruptured.

Do you agree with that statement? I mean, if I were living in one of the countries

that were part of the NATO alliance, and I heard an American president threatening to take

Greenland by force, when I saw that tariffs were being imposed all around the world,

but that the highest tariffs by and large were reserved for our closest allies.

And indeed, the Russian Federation managed to evade tariffs for whatever reason.

And I would certainly be inclined to think that this was a break from which it would be very hard to recover.

That said, everyone benefits from more, not fewer friends.

I benefit from it in my own life. I'm sure you do.

I look back on the war in Afghanistan and see it very differently than President Trump has described it.

I see 2,500 Americans who died in combat and 1100 NATO citizens who did not come from the United

States who died in combat. I remember post 9-11, the rally.

It wasn't just the rally around the American flag. It was a rally around the flag against aggression

and for democracy and for freedom. That is a reason that we have alliances.

It's a reason that we think in terms of shared and enduring interests and prior to President Trump

in a bipartisan way. Look to see what those interests were that would transcend politics.

I believe there are many Republicans who are practicing what we call preference falsification

at the moment, musling their actual views of NATO, their actual views of the President's foreign policy,

their actual views of the invasion of Iran, in fact.

So I do believe that there is still a critical mass and a constituency in this country.

The challenge is going to be to convince our Canadian, our European, our East Asian allies

to believe in our staying power and not to expect more whiplash from one presidency to the next.

And that set of commitments convincing people that those commitments can be sustained

is going to be America's biggest challenge in the decades ahead.

You can see how Europeans are concerned though in the case of Ukraine when they hear

the President talk about kind of both sides about Ukraine and Russia when one clearly invaded

the other and they feel that perhaps the US isn't as engaged as this should be and that Europe

needs to step up and take over the role of what was once a close ally.

They have reason to be upset and to feel betrayed just as Ukraine does.

When Ukraine was invaded, the United States stood with Ukraine because it has a history of standing

up against aggression and not perpetrating aggression.

And what has happened over the course of the last year is not only an end to military assistance

and a shift to requiring Ukraine to buy the weapons that the United States is providing,

but a termination of US aid programs that were helping Ukrainians repair energy infrastructure,

helping Ukrainians put their agricultural goods back out on markets so farmers could make a living,

but also to keep prices down in developing countries. And just last month at the United Nations,

it was the Trump administration trying to water down language in UN resolutions in support of

Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty. That absolutely Europe has every reason to be

aghast at these developments. The only good news, again, is that the policies being carried out

by the Trump administration are not broadly reflective of the views of the American people.

And we do have a midterm election coming up where I'm hopeful that the Democratic Party will have

more leverage financially and even impressing on foreign policy as it's being currently conducted.

So for as long as we have a democracy, we do have a chance to have course correction,

but it will take a long time for the people of Ukraine and the people of Europe who are now

have gone from providing 50% of the assistance to Ukraine to 90%, it will take a very long time for

them to forget. Thank you for listening to the interview. For more compelling conversations,

search for the interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You'll find episodes from the UN

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine,

plus many, many others. But until the next time, bye for now.

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