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

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1:07Caitriona Perry:Go to cachava.com and use code NEWS for 15 % off. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com code NEWS. 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. We have never seen a people so united. Do not make that boat crossing. Do not make that journey. Being born in America, feeling American, having people treat 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.

2:06Caitriona Perry: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.

2:36Samantha Power:It's referred to widely as soft power suicide. It's just 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 suicides and hard power blunders afoot. 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 spanned countries, spanned generations. So many people you meet got a scholarship in the 70s or the 80s because of a USA grant, and then they turn up as a minister.

3:23Samantha Power:And then you go to them wanting to negotiate something else, and they have a very positive impression of the United States because of that relationship that goes back.

3:34Caitriona Perry: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 in 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?

4:07Samantha Power: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, eastern 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 it firsthand, the difference between pre-Ukraine and post-Ukraine, 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.

4:56Samantha Power: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 and all that 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.

5:42Samantha Power: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 states, powerful states, that constitute the UN having the greatest impact on the performance of the UN as such.

6:21Caitriona Perry:When you were 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?

6:48Samantha Power: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 kibbutzes, 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.

7:34Samantha Power: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.

8:14At least we were able to run a hospital where people were

8:19Samantha Power: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 achieves something, but next to the humanitarian toll, it felt very small.

8:33Caitriona Perry: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 Center, amongst others, that 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 causes?

9:15I think it is the destruction of USAID is not only one of the cruelest acts that I've

9:25Samantha Power: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.

10:14Samantha Power:And then that scholarship program is destroyed because Elon Musk, in a fever dream, decided to destroy the agency. or never mind the girls' 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. U.S. 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.

11:08Samantha Power: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 and the American people. Our 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 feint almost, that you rely on America, and then we just pull the rug out from under you.

12:07Samantha Power: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 makes 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 it's going to be very hard to dig.

12:42Caitriona Perry: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. What do you say to those criticisms?

12:54Samantha Power: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 micromanagement 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.

13:53Samantha Power: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 percent of them are just made up from whole cloth, part of the disinformation machine that we know accompanies destructive acts. But those that actually were USAID programs that seem problematic, probably they came written into law and appropriated by some member of Congress in a manner that left our teams very little discretion.

14:41Caitriona Perry:Now that it is essentially gone, how easy or what's the likelihood of someone starting it up again, another president, Republican or Democrat?

14:51Samantha Power: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 ceding 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.

15:22Caitriona Perry: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?

15:33Samantha Power: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 suicide and hard power blunders afoot. 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 spanned countries, spanned generations. So many people you meet got a scholarship in the 70s or the 80s because of a USAID grant, and then they turn up as a minister.

16:20Samantha Power:And then you go to them wanting to negotiate something else, and they have a very positive impression of 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.

17:05Samantha Power:And when USAID or something like it is reconstituted, making sure that those very members of Congress who are insisting that this happened in 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 whim.

17:32Caitriona Perry:You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service.

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18:15Caitriona Perry:I travelled to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts to meet Samantha Power, where she teaches classes straddling 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, Mark Carney at Davos in January, said the world order has been ruptured.

19:02Caitriona Perry:Do you agree with that statement?

19:03Samantha Power: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.

20:07Samantha Power:You know, 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 1 ,100 NATO citizens who did not come from the United States who died in combat. I remember post 9-11 the rally wasn't the rally 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.

21:03Samantha Power:I believe there are many Republicans who are practicing what we call preference falsification at the moment, muzzling 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.

21:58Caitriona Perry: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 U.S. isn't as engaged as it should be, and that Europe needs to step up and take over the role of what was once a close ally?

22:20Samantha Power: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 U.S. aid programs that were helping Ukrainians repair energy infrastructure, helping Ukrainians put their agricultural goods back out on market so farmers could make a living, but also to keep prices down in developing countries.

23:14Samantha Power: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. 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 in pressing on foreign policy as it's being currently conducted.