Pod Save the World - Samantha Power Hour

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Former Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus talks about Capt Crozier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt and how the coronavirus created a crisis in the Navy. Former US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power explains why a successful US coronavirus response has to be global. And Tommy and Ben talk about how a Chinese lab is raising questions about the origin of the coronavirus, Vladimir Putin’s disinformation campaigns against science and his muddy political future, why the UK has reacted to the pandemic in a more united and less partisan fashion and how China is using water to squeeze its neighbors.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, we got a hell of a show today. We have two guests. Former Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabas, talks me through the Navy's massive problem of coronavirus infecting sailors. We talk about the Captain Crozier, USS Diordoer Roosevelt, disaster, and why the Secretary of the Navy had to quit. And then a former U.S. ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power joins, and we talk about the need for the coronavirus response. to be global in nature and not just focus on the U.S. here. You and I are going to talk about questions around the origin of the coronavirus. Vladimir Putin's disinformation campaign against science and health care generally and how his political future seems a little shakier today than it did a few weeks ago. We're also going to get into how the U.K. has seemed to manage to unite in response to the virus in ways the U.S. hasn't. How Nicaragua is competing for arguably the world's worst response to the coronavirus. And then a crazy story about China controlling water levels in the latest power contest. So, man, what going on.

A lot going on. One important thing before we get to the news is that, you know, this coronavirus pandemic is going to make in-person voting, you know, unsafe for months, if not years. And we really need to act now to make sure that election day is safe and accessible for every voter. So give your member of Congress a call this week. Tell them you don't want to choose between your health, and your ability to vote. They need to pass a fourth coronavirus relief package that includes at least $2 billion in safe election money. We've got to require that states invest in expanded vote by mail and early voting. And we have to make sure that in-person polling locations have the resources they need to operate safely and efficiently.

So we've launched this new call-in tool on Vote Save America that will help you connect directly with your reps. It will give you a script to help you figure out what to say. So just go to vote saveamerica.com slash call. Give it a whirl. This is really important. We'd be grateful if you did. And then one last thing. So on last week's episode, we talked to some travelers who were stranded abroad, sort of in South Africa.

We have an update for them. We will play that at the end of the show. So don't miss it. So should we start with the State Department cables warning about these Wuhan labs? Yeah, no, absolutely. Let's do it. Why not? So the Washington Post reported that two years ago, some U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in Wuhan. It's called the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And those officials sent back to cables, to official warnings to the State Department, to Washington, about inadequate safety at this lab. They said these American officials that the facility had a shortage of appropriately trained technicians and that the research they were doing on bat-borne coronaviruses.

and their potential for human transmission represented a risk of a SARS-like pandemic. It's notable that these Chinese researchers, this research institute, they were receiving assistance from several U.S. research organizations already, but they were asking for more. So it's not like this was a secret facility, but they didn't provide this extra assistance from the U.S., and now it's become an issue. So we talked about how Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas a few weeks ago suggested

that the coronavirus was created as part of a bio-weapons program. He kind of walked that back, and there's just been pointing fingers at this facility generally. No scientist seems to believe that this virus was created by humans. They think it came from bats. And the research facility at issue was designed to prevent pandemics by understanding coronaviruses generally. But the question this article raises is, was someone in this lab working on the coronaviruses, were they the first to get the virus and that the origin was not at this seafood market that has become the Chinese government origin story for the coronavirus. We know from news reporting that the White House Deputy National Security Advisor has been particularly focused on whether this virus emerged from the lab.

I believe the New York Times and maybe also the Washington Post reported that the intelligence community has yet to find any evidence of that. There's circumstantial evidence that suggests The story about the virus originating at the wet seafood market has some holes in it, like the fact that they don't sell bats, the fact that the first cluster of coronavirus cases didn't have a direct connection to the market. On top of that, there's just general suspicion of China, as we've talked about before, the Chinese government has really locked down any information about the virus's origins. They're not providing access to researchers.

So people are just skeptical generally. So, Ben, this story in the post to report named John, Rogen, it seems like a pretty deliberate leak of these cables as part of a broader strategy the Trump administration has taken to blame China in part to distract from the administration's handling of the coronavirus. But stepping back, like, do you think that we should question the official Chinese government coronavirus origin story? And did this piece make you wonder about this lab? Or do you think this seems unlikely to be right? I mean, I think, first of all, we should absolutely question the Chinese government's origin story because the Chinese government

is frequently dishonest about embarrassing information. You know, it's characteristic of that type of authoritarian system that governments try to distort, if not change, you know, the understanding of reality. And in one fashion or another, clearly the initial days, if not weeks, of this outbreak, were handled poorly by the Chinese. That if they had fully acknowledged, the problem on their hands, they could have moved much quicker to some form of lockdown that prevented, you know, this disease spreading. And that in an ideal world, you know, there is a global public health infrastructure that this lab is a part of, you know, the viruses don't recognize borders. And therefore, you would like there to be a collaborative effort in between national governments and

researchers to share information. And particularly if there's a worrisome outbreak of something to immediately shed as much transparency on it as possible. You know, unfortunately, we're in a very difficult world to discern what happened here because the Trump administration, I think, is right to raise questions about China's actions and response, but precisely because they're so belligerent towards China and because there seems to be a political strategy that informs how they talk about China. And we saw, for instance, even in their first ad attacking Joe Biden, kind of awkwardly cut videos to suggest Biden says things that he didn't. And, you know, aspersions that Chinese American, Gary Locke was actually Chinese, that undercuts everything else that they want to say about China.

You know, and so what you want is maximum transparency. What you want is governments that put the sharing of information above political score settling. And instead, what we have is a Chinese government, that has not been forthcoming about what happened. And in a US government that seems intent on fixing blame to China, but is undercutting its own credibility to do that by being untruthful about so many aspects

of the US response to this. And so I hate to say it, but we may just not get to the truth of this for a long time. Taking off your foreign policy guy had for a minute and putting on your political hack hat for another minute, how effective do you think the blame China, xenophobia, strategy is and the attempt to draw in Biden is somehow softer on China. Well, look, I mean, there's always going to be a percentage of people in this country who want to believe whatever

Donald Trump tells them, you know, and this will fit that need. You know, hey, here, look, let me point over here at these guys in China who are already an antagonist who we already don't like and let's just blame them. I think it gets a lot harder, you know, as the reality of our own government's response kicks in, all of the things that Trump is saying, about China, let's say they're true. Let's say, you know, the Chinese totally mess this up. Let's say that they totally mishandled the origin. They've been dishonest. None of that changes the failures in the U.S. The failure to prepare for this, the failure to deploy testing, the failure to be honest about it. And Americans are going to be living with the fallout from those failures,

which unfortunately may continue. And so if six months from now, you know, our government has mishandled this, it's hit us much harder than anywhere else. And that's already the case, you know, just blaming China, I don't think can get him over that hurdle. I think the Biden piece of it, you know, it doesn't add up, first of all. I, you know, Biden wasn't some big softy on China. We can have a separate discussion about that, but, you know, he's pretty conventional. He's both critical of China and skeptical of China on a lot of things, but as by definition, like any senior U.S. official, worked with China as well. What I find to be so disgusting about this and what the onus is on Democrats, is it the person praising Xi Jinping in January and

February was not Joe Biden. It was Donald Trump. He bought us rhetoric, hookline, and sinker. Yeah, there's videotaped, there's call readouts, there's tweets from Trump saying President Xi's on top of this and he's providing great leadership. And I think Democrats are going to have to fight like hell to just not assume that people are aware of the things that Trump said. And to get across it, actually the person who had received. warnings from his own intelligence community that China was lying, that could have had access to some of these diplomatic cables that they're now leaking. That person is Donald Trump. And even though he had that information, he was so focused on the stock market that he was blowing smoke up

Xi Jinping's butt on Twitter instead of calling this out. Yeah. While we're on shameless, dishonest propaganda efforts, let's talk about Vladimir Putin. So the New York Times had this really fascinating piece about how Putin has spent decades spreading disinformation and propaganda about science and health care. And so, you know, we've all heard about election interference, and we know that they do a lot of propaganda around politics. But, you know, this health care or science-related stuff is different and, you know, more disgusting in some ways. So the most well-known case, and we've talked about this before on this show, was a KGB effort in the 1980s to plant stories that falsely claimed that HIV-AIDS was created by the American military to kill black citizens.

And it was a wildly successful propaganda effort. These stories ran in 80 countries. This is still a persistent conspiracy theory to this day, and it was incredibly damaging. But that's hardly the extent of it. There have been more overt health-related propaganda efforts more recently. In 2009, RT, which is the Russian English language propaganda channel, featured a conspiracy theory that claimed H1N1, the swine flu, had been created in a lab in Wisconsin.

In 2014, RT highlighted this baseless article that they probably planted that claimed Ebola had been manufactured by the U.S. Department of Defense and then tested on Africans in secret human trials. Then the Russian bots and trolls on Twitter amplify these messages, as do unwitting Americans at times. The article notes that Chris Brown, the singer, rapper, echoed this Russian claim back in 2014 when he tweeted to 13 million Twitter followers, quote, I think this Ebola epidemic is a form of population control. There were also fake news

reports of an Ebola outbreak in Atlanta that just literally never happened. It's just made up. Russian trolls have peddled anti-vaccination misinformation. They're now pushing around lies about the coronavirus. So, you know, I guess, you know, we shouldn't be surprised this is happening. It's still, like, deeply fucked up. But, Ben, do you remember having to deal with these Russian disinformation efforts, either during H1N1 or Ebola? Yeah, I have some big memory of having to deal with it during Ebola. You know, the Russians saw every event around the world as an opportunity to push

some disinformation campaign or another, both to cause problems for their adversaries, principally us, or to just kind of, you know, one of the things we talked about in this podcast is that conspiracy theory mindsets are very useful to authoritarian leaders to deflect, blame to other people, to discredit experts and fact-based information that might pose a threat to an authoritarian's control over the truth. And so the Russians were doing this around Ebola. They just saw, you know, in that time, we're in the Ukraine crisis already. So they're really dialing up all of their information warfare against the United States. And so they just saw Ebola as one other opportunity to try to like score some.

some points in their disinformation campaign against the U.S. And, you know, not surprisingly, a leader who does that in Vladimir Putin also failed to respond adequately to the coronavirus. And so, you know, no surprise that Russia was slow in acknowledging the extent of the problem. We still have no idea the extent of the problem in Russia. Putin is not front and center and being the messenger for his government. He's making mayors and governors, you know, own it.

Sounds familiar. Yeah. So I hope that, look, there's going to be so much fallout from this, but man, people, I hope, are going to get exhausted with this garbage. You know, like this calling facts, fake news and attacking scientists and seeing everything as a prism to run some information campaign against, you know, some government you don't like instead of like caring about your actual citizens. Like, like this, if this doesn't wake us up to the dangers of living in this kind of post-truth, disinformation world that Russia most acutely represents, then nothing will wake us up to that. Yeah. Let's stick with Putin for a minute. So the AP had a smart, interesting feature about how the coronavirus is really screwing up Putin's political plans for this spring. So we've talked a couple of times on the show about how Putin had planned a referendum to get people to vote on constitutional changes that would allow him to basically be president for life. That vote was going to be on April 22nd. They had to push it for coronavirus reasons, obviously. Then there's this big

Victory Day celebration event on May 9th, which celebrates the 75th anniversary of the end of World War 2. And it was supposed to be this huge event attended by a world leader. It's really like a, you know, propaganda effort, frankly. And they haven't decided what to do about it yet, but you have to think that it won't be the big, grandiose version they want it to be, or no other reason then you can't parade a bunch of Russian World War II vets through the streets in big groups right now. I mean, you would be, you know, killing them. So, you know, meanwhile, like the price of oil has collapsed. The economy in Russia is going into lockdown. Apparently Putin gave a major address. Last week, I believe, where he compared the coronavirus to invading armies from the 10th and 11th century

and the speech just got mocked on social media. So it'll be interesting to see how Putin handles this. I mean, my fear with him always is that when things go badly internally. He lashes out externally at real or made-up threats. But I don't know. Do you have any predictions on how he might manage through this? Well, I think he's got a big problem on his hands because, look, the Russian economy has been suffering for years. The sanctions after 2014 on Russia over Ukraine had a big impact on an already structurally messed up economy. You know, it's an economy that is overly reliant on oil and gas that is rife with corruption. So, you know, cronies of Putin enriching themselves while there's rampant inequality

in the country, employment problems, brain-drained problems where some of the best and brightest are leaving Russia to go to Europe. So all those things were already present. And the way in which Putin dealt with those is being unable to fix the economy, he spaced out these big tests of strength and shows of nationalism. You know, so you have the Olympics and then you have the annexation of Crimea and then you have Putin, you know, front and center on the world stage. And so things like this anniversary of Russia's victory in World War II, they're pretty fundamental to his ability to sustain this kind of steady diet of nationalism that he's feeding his people to kind of distract from the fact that things are not particularly well in Russia. If you take the economic shock

of the coronavirus, putting aside even the public health shock, which hopefully isn't too bad, but could be considerable, you haven't already, we've, economy that's going to be hit by the drop in global consumption of oil, further unemployment, obviously, in a situation where people are already hurting, there's no way in which that doesn't in some way damage Putin's standing. And if it damages his standing and he has a harder time regaining his footing through things like, you know, his role in the world stage or him presiding over this great celebration of Russian history, it gets harder for him to maintain his political position.

So I do think that this will likely create huge problems for him. And I think you're right to raise the question, which is when that's happened in the past, he's usually tried to find some way to redirect people's attention through an international crisis or by lashing out in their neighborhood. But even that is a little more tricky in a coronavirus environment. You know, I mean, how much does everybody want to get ginned up about, you know, Russia intervening in like Moldova? is that really what the Russian people are looking for right now?

You know, some of the stuff that might have worked from a few years ago is going to be so far away from what is actually on the minds of ordinary Russians that it might not be as effective. So I think Putin is a good example of the fact that this is not necessarily a boon for authoritarian leaders and, in fact, could really, you know, show that the emperor has no clothes. Yeah, good point. Interestingly, it has been a boon for a lot of leaders. in terms of their approval rating.

So let's talk about the UK for a minute. So some good news out of the UK. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was released from the hospital after what was ultimately described as a literal life or death fight against the coronavirus. So we were obviously very happy to hear he's okay. But, you know, like there are also a lot of questions

now being asked about whether his team was transparent and forthcoming about his medical condition during that period, questions about whether he'll be able to get back to work soon. And, you know, more concerning is that the UK is dealing with a very bad outbreak. As of Tuesday, more than 12,000 people in the UK have died. People are raising a lot of questions about why the government response was slow. You know, much like the U.S., they were slow to ramp up testing, slow to put in place social distancing measures. But what is interesting to me is how the country as a whole has responded, political magazine did a fascinating piece on how the coronavirus reaction in the UK has really been

unifying. And they juxtaposed it to how things have broken on not at all surprising partisan lines here in the U.S. So you and I talked, I think last week about the Queen's message to the people and how that inspired a lot of folks. But it also notes that there was basically universal concern and well wishes for Boris Johnson and not like the Chaudenfreida that you might expect if Donald Trump were sick on Twitter, right? Like, I bet there would be a lot of heinous shit. It's also coming at a moment where there's new leadership in the Labor Party after years of Jeremy Corbyn, so people might be excited about that. But, you know, a lot of world leaders have seen this rally around the flag polling bump. Johnson's, though, is up nearly 30 points. Like,

he's massively up. And then 94% of the British people support social distancing, support for basically every British institution is up, including their NHS. So, Ben, you know, I just thought it was so. notable and fascinating about how COVID was able to break through like partisan divides in the UK that have been just as vicious as ours since Brexit. And as much as I would normally blame Fox News in the U.S. and partisan media and like media being balkanized here, like I think you could argue that the UK media is worse in some ways. So I don't know, do you have any theories for why the UK has seemed to be able to like rally together and come together? And,

and we just have not. Well, look, I think there's something like deeply, deeply, deeply ingrained in the British psyche around, you know, we have a stiff upper lip and we pull together in crisis. You know, this is the country that kind of its defining moment in its 20th century history was the Blitz and, you know, the Battle of Britain and night after night of bombs dropping on London. and the thing that everybody takes such pride in is how Brits beststood that and how they went on with their lives and they resisted literally. And so I think there is something in the British psyche that there's this kind of baseline of national identity that everybody rallies around in an extreme crisis that might exceed what we have. I think we've also seen it at other times, Tommy.

Like the analogy I'd use is like on both sides of the political spectrum, there have been moments even in the last couple years where, you know, people said, wait a second, we don't want to go that far. You'll remember that, you know, when Boris Johnson was seeking to kind of ram through Brexit, you know, by like disbanding parliament, he got some pushback among conservative lawmakers. And he may have fought with them, but unlike the Republican Party here, like there was clearly a low that people weren't going to go to. There was kind of a bottom, you know, that people hit and came back up.

And I think similarly in the Labor Party, as much as people hate Brexit, you know what? They're accepting the results of these elections and now they're moving on to something else. And they have a leader who, you know, has a different style of politics than Jeremy Corbyn. And so I think what you see is that there is this kind of bottom in the UK. to how low their politics can go. There is this idea that people rally together in a crisis. And it's very telling that it's hard to identify that centering point of national identity for us in this crisis.

I mean, for me, it comes when I watch videos of people in New York like cheering for health care workers. You know, that makes me feel like proud to be an American and not because of any political idea. I think the problem is, you know, Trump doesn't even try to, foster that kind of possible response because he's always attacking somebody else. And Boris Johnson, as much as I have all kinds of problems with him and frankly think he handled this very poorly and the run-up to his illness, at least says the right things, you know, about coming together, you know, credited the

NHS, the National Health Service with saving his life, you know, like he's able to at least, you know, go through the motions of being a unifying leader in a way that just about everybody in the can, and I think the extremity of our circumstance in the Trump presidency makes that much harder here. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. He's got two speeds. He can do happy and sad and angry, and Trump can only do raging at a podium. Yeah, exactly. Okay, let's take a quick break and we come back. We'll have my conversation with former Navy secretary, Ray Nabis, about the crisis in the Navy right now because of COVID-19, Captain Crozier and the Navy's handling of this health care disaster. I am honored to be joined today by Secretary Ray Mabas.

He served as governor of Mississippi from 1988 to 1992. And then also more recently as President Obama's secretary of the Navy from 2009 to 2017. Sir, great to talk with you again. Great to be with you, Tommy. So, sir, on March 30th, you know, we've talked about this incident of Captain Crozier and the USS Theodore Roosevelt a couple times on the show. But just to catch folks up, I mean, on March 30th, the captain of that ship, Rick Crozier, sent this letter to 20 of his Navy's superiors,

begging, imploring, you know, choose the word you want, them to help him get his nearly 5,000 sailors off of the aircraft carrier, off of the Bureau of Roosevelt, and into hotels or other temporary lodging in Guam to make sure they could practice social distancing. Before that letter, getting into the press, Crozier was fired from his post. And then if you fast forward to today, we now know that Captain Crozier himself has COVID. Nearly 600 of the Roosevelt's crew members also have this disease, including one who tragically died from complications of the coronavirus. So I just want to start at the

beginning. I mean, Secretary Mavis, what did you think when you read that letter from Captain Crozier? Well, the first thing you think is that he did this as an act of desperation. You know it wasn't the first thing he did. You know that somebody with his experience, with his future in the Navy, with his responsibilities, that he would have been begging his chain of command, his immediate superiors all the way up to let him do this. And when he was failed somewhere by that chain of command, and from the reporting that I've seen later, it looks like it started with the strike group group commander. who was an admiral on board the Roosevelt.

But he had to know when he wrote this letter, when he hit send, that it was probably going to cost him his career. But he put his sailors in their welfare in front of his career. And you can't be a better leader than that. Yeah. So I'm glad you raised this question of his strike group commander. I mean, so there are some who, you know, before we get into more of the detail of this, you know,

challenge for the Navy. I mean, there are some who defend the sentiment of Crozier's letter and his clear desire to protect his sailors, but say, yeah, but he went outside the chain of command, right? Specifically, you mentioned, I don't think he copied his direct boss, the strike group commander who works on the ship, which must have made for some awkward staff meetings, but that's a different question. Can you help us understand this chain of command issue and how it's supposed to work in this instance and why it's such a big deal within the organization? Well, the chain of command is. is vitally important to the military.

And so the way it would work for Captain Crozier, you've got the strike group commander who, as you just pointed out, is on the ship with him. But he commands not only the Roosevelt, he commands all the ship in the strike group. So seven ships and all. Right above him is the commander of the seventh fleet. Above that person is the commander of the Pacific Fleet.

And above that person is the command, is Pacific Command. And that's before you get back to Washington, to the Pentagon. And so for him to go outside this chain of command had to be extraordinary. I mean, here's a person who'd been in the Navy for 30 years. If you get to be the CEO of a carrier, you're almost certainly going to make Admiral. And you would not violate that chain of command unless you were pretty desperate. And at least what the New York Times said in a story done yesterday, he got turned down.

First by the strike group commander, I don't know if anybody further up turned him down. But the last thing about this chain of command is the acting secretary of the Navy, Secretary Modley, invited him to go around the chain of command. He gave him his own cell number. He had his chief of staff calling. So the secretary, which is the very top of the food chain, in this before he sent the letter, he said, you know, you can go around the chain of command if you need to.

And then when he did, he fired him. So you mentioned this New York Times report. I read that earlier too. It sounded like Crozier suggested essentially offloading 4,500 of the 5,000. guys from the ship so they could deep clean it and then you leave a skeleton force of maybe 500 sailors to run the nuclear reactor, protect the weapons, etc. Does that sound like a reasonable proposal to you? That sounds like exactly what you have to do. And it's been shown that doing this sort of piecemeal just had worked. You've got, as you said, almost 600 people who have tested

positive, you've got one sailor who died and died on the ship. He was not on shore, I believe, according to the reports. He was found unresponsive on the ship. And so it not only needs to be done or needed to be done on the Roosevelt, it needs to be done probably on every ship in the Navy right now. And the notion that somehow if you do that, you won't be ready, you won't be available if there's an emergency or if we start shooting, is, look, Crozier said in his letter, if there's a war, we'll just ignore the virus. We'll go.

We'll put everybody back on the ship, and we'll get out of here. But we're not at war right now. And this notion that started with the Secretary of Defense, that we're going to do both. We're going to do all the missions we're supposed to do, and we're going to try to protect our people. You just can't do that. You got to protect your people first.

There's going to be a drop in readiness, but it would be for a little while. If we don't do that pretty soon across the Navy and across the military, we're going to be down on readiness so much for so long. It's going to be a really, really serious problem. Yeah. So let's talk about Thomas Modley, the now formerly the acting secretary of the Navy. he reportedly flew 35 hours round trip from Washington to Guam. He arrived in Guam, delivered a speech over the Roosevelt's loudspeaker system,

which by the way, I think he could have just gotten piped into via phone, but that's a different question. In that speech, he brayed to Captain Crozier, called him stupid, naive. I guess he was there for less than an hour, took no questions from the crew, flew back. Hearing about that trip reminded me of you and how much time you spent downrange meeting with sailors, because you and I had previously talked about how much you enjoyed, like, spending time with the rank and file, like the fact that he flew back after an hour, it was wild to me. The trip cost $243,000. Mowdly is now self-quarantining because he was exposed to the

virus. The speech leaked. Apparently, he was trying to be decisive in a way that he thought would please Trump. I mean, that gets me to the question, all that background. It sounds like he was doing this because he had an audience of one, Donald Trump. How much does that worry you about these folks sort of catering to Trump's political wills? I can't overemphasize how much that worries me and how much it ought to worry everybody in this country that Trump is doing this, and that people are trying to meet his, whatever his wishes, desires, expectations are because you're right about Motley. I mean, that speech was astounding. But if you're, you're, if you listen to it, which I did a couple of times, he does all the Trump stuff.

He berates the media. He belittles people, in this case, Captain Crozier, who all their sin was standing up for the people that they're responsible for. And Motley in interviews said that he fired the captain before. an investigation was undertaken because he wanted to get out ahead of Trump because he knew that the previous secretary, Richard Spencer, had been fired for not acceding to Trump's wishes quickly enough. And that this sort of thing, this notion that the president should get down into the weeds in the military, He should violate the chain of command, which we were just talking about, is so dangerous in a democracy.

And Trump has demonstrated it over and over again. I mean, he pardoned a bunch of war criminals. Then he decided that who got to be a seal, who got to keep their trident in the Gallagher case. He calls flag officers, my generals. You must have military parades in his honor. It's a very odd, very disturbing, very dangerous course of action that he's undertaking. And you see it all the way down through the chain because Esper is clearly modeling what he does. Secretary of Defense, Esper is clearly modeling what he does on what he perceives to be Trump's wishes.

Motley clearly was doing that. And that has more harm, does more harm to the American military than almost anything I can imagine. So you alluded to this earlier. I mean, there are now reports that three other aircraft carriers, the Ronald Reagan, the Carl Vinson, the Nimitz, have had sailors testing positive for coronavirus. As Navy Secretary, what would you do about that? I mean, that seems like it could become an acute problem very quickly. Well, I think it will become an acute problem because,

as has been pointed out on the Roosevelt, people do not have any way to social distance on any Navy ship, but particularly a carrier. You've got almost 5,000 people here. And they literally are on top of each other. Right. And so what I think the Navy ought to do now, and it's distressing that it doesn't look like they have a plant. But I think what they need to do is bring every ship in, offload, like the captain said, offload most of the crew.

And you can do this a little bit in a rolling fashion. But offload most of the crew, leave a very skeleton force on board, sanitize the ship, quarantine people for two weeks, make sure nobody's got COVID. And then once they go back on that ship, whether it's in port or it's going to see, they don't get off the ship until COVID is, until this crisis is mitigated, is getting close to being over. And it's going to be hard because they may be in Port in Norfolk or San Diego. and once they go back on the ship and the ship is COVID-free, they're not going to get off to see their families.

They're not going to be able to get off to just go back into the community. But if we don't do that, I think you're going to see the situation that played out on Roosevelt play out over and over again, not just on those big ships, but on virtually every ship that we have in the Navy. Yeah. My last question for the secretary is, you know, during your tenure as Navy Secretary, you are known as someone who thought not just about beating Al-Qaeda or, you know, more ships than the Russians, but things like climate change. Does the fact that this virus could take multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers offline make you feel like we need to rethink our spending along other lines? Oh, I think we've got to rethink our spending in a lot of ways.

I mean, I think that this is, this broadens the, what you know is national defense. I mean, as you pointed out, I tried to broaden what people thought I was national defense because I thought climate change was one of the existential threats that we had and that we as a military had to, had to respond to it and had to be active. And that's why I tried to take the Navy and Marines off fossil fuels to the maximum extent that I could. But this is the same thing. We've got to spend a lot more money on emergency preparedness. We've got to spend a lot more of our time

and our effort and our thinking on this. And to your point that these huge aircraft carriers, I think we've also got to begin to think a lot differently about how we spend our traditional national defense money. We probably need a lot more but a lot smaller and a lot more unmanned. crafts. We need to have smaller units. We need to make them way more agile. We need to, we need to think about networking and stuff like that. And one other criticism and problem that I've

had with this administration is they just keep throwing money at defense with out a notion of what's the money for? That's input. And that doesn't matter. that much. Output doesn't matter that much. It doesn't matter how much, how many ships you have, how many aircraft you have, how many weapons you have, unless you can predict the outcome, unless those ships, those aircraft, those weapons, those ground troops, whatever it is, you know how they're going to be used and you know how they're going to keep you safe. And I think we're fighting not just the last war but wars decades ago right now and that wars

are looking different. We've got an enemy right now. It's invisible, but it is very, very deadly. Yeah, agreed. Secretary Mavis, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. And I mean, hope these guys get healthy quickly. Me too. And y'all stay safe. Be healthy, time. Thanks, you too. Okay, Ben, let's talk about Nicaragua for a minute because they are competing for maybe the worst government response to the coronavirus imaginable. So according to a report in the Washington Post, the government in Nicaragua is literally encouraging citizens to go to the beaches. They are organizing pro-government rallies, including one called Love in the Time of COVID-19, which is a very

bad novel to be. Their soccer and basketball leagues are still playing games. Meanwhile, Danny Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, has not been seen in, I think, a month. Instead, his wife, the vice president has been doing these daily interviews and saying things like we don't have community transmission, which is almost undoubtedly not true. And even if it were true, it would only be because they're not doing testing and they won't reveal anything about the testing the government is doing and they won't let private hospitals test people for COVID-19. So Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the hemisphere after Haiti. The only silver lining here is that Nicaraguan citizens seem to be taking precautions on their own

despite their government's advice. A bunch of churches canceled holy week activities. So Ben, I get, I think it's dumb, but I get the desire by leaders to act like things are okay in an effort to protect the economy or to try to keep tourists coming. But this is like borderline homicidal. I mean, like organizing big rallies

to bring people together, that seems like it's criminal negligence. Yeah. I mean, you know, Danny Ortega is such an interesting character, right? I mean, he is basically, you know, a left-wing revolutionary kind of figure, guerrilla figure, and the battles of the 80s. And that still kind of shapes his political ethos. He kind of reappears, if not rehabilitates himself to some extent in this kind of second act

that he's had where he's, you know, served a couple terms as president. But, you know, he was kind of a bizarre figure when we dealt with him in government. Like his wife played an increasingly prominent role, even in, like, you know, meetings with President Obama. Often Ortega would take a back seat to his wife. It was very strange. And, you know, sometimes these guys who are guerrilla leaders, like, they don't really care about governing and they don't really know how to govern. And that's certainly the impression one gets from Ortega. And, you know, the guy hasn't been seen in public for over.

a month, so God only knows what's happening with him. But it just shows you kind of, this is an example where you have kind of the absence of the government doing anything constructive and at times sending the wrong messages in a very vulnerable country, right, without a lot of public health infrastructure in some places with people living in very close proximity to one another. And frankly, a lot of migration into and out of Central America. So I think, you know, this should be a concern. my hope is that, you know, the Central American countries and their governments cooperate very closely. There's a high degree of integration among different governments there. Hopefully, the other governments in Central America can try to pull Nicaragua up to, you know,

what they're doing around social distancing and how they're approaching it. And so that's one way in which you might try to improve this is just from the peer pressure of the other countries that are part of that grouping of nations. But yeah, I mean, if we ever, you know, hear from Danny Ortega again, I think one lesson we've learned is like governance is not really what's been the motivating factor for him because he's been totally MIA here. Yeah, maybe MIA for Danny Ortega is the best it can get. All right. So here's a fascinating non-coronavirus story. So residents in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, parts of the world that you love Ben, have been struggling because of these record droughts and low water levels in the Nekong River region. And so these researchers at an organization

called Eyes on Earth, which monitors water resources, figured out that this was the result of a not a big drought that hit everybody, but because Chinese engineers were holding back water via a series of dams that they'd built upstream, the water starts in China and flows down to the sea. So during last year's rainy season, it was apparently so bad that, you know, upstream, the China portion of the Macon River was at basically average levels. But the drought downstream was at literally a historic low in places the riverbed had dried up entirely. So Ben, I mean, I remember, you know, seeing unclassified intelligence pieces about water resources back when you and I were working together at NSC. It does seem like, you know, I know we're all coronavirus all the

time, but climate change is still out there. And fights over resources, especially water, are hardly new. But this feels like something we're going to see a lot more, especially with a country like China withholding water as part of a power play, basically. Yeah, so I'm going to nerd out here for a second. I got very into this issue the last couple of years. So as you mentioned, I got very focused on Laos. I was, I think the high ranking White House official to travel there in like decades when I went in Obama's second term and I went a few times. And this was actually the issue that I heard about the most in Laos. And the way it was basically described to me is, and by the way, the same thing in Vietnam,

where I got very involved in our Vietnam policy, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam really depend on the May Kong for their livelihoods. the fishing that is done in that river is what feeds a huge portion of their population. The energy is drawn in part from the dams along the river. The connection of the people in those countries to the Mekong River is extreme. And what China's basically been doing is these giant dams upriver that are used to generate energy that is then imported into China. And it's been eating away at the livelihoods of these countries that literally depend on the fishing done in this river to survive. And so you started to see some of the most organized and active civil society and protest type groups in countries like Vietnam that have a closed political system.

The government couldn't contain the anger of China over this dynamic that has been building for some years. And it's also tied in some cases to corruption because I think there's a suspicion among a lot of these populations that the Chinese kind of bribe, you know, government officials to grease the wheels for these dam projects. And then, you know, they screw the people. And so they, you know, bribe some Lao officials maybe to do some dams in law territory in ways it end up hurting the Lao people and not to mention Cambodians of Vietnamese. So this is a real point of tension in Southeast Asia. And as you say, it's also a good indicator of what's actually going to be necessary to preserve natural resources so that climate change doesn't ravage people's food supplies causing, you know, famine or migration. It's also the case, frankly, that an enormous amount of the pollution that goes into the oceans, which is another

huge environmental crisis, comes from these big Asian rivers. And so there's no way to get at that pollution too if you're not getting at how to clean up the Mekong. It's a kind of thing that the U.S. should be focused on. Under Obama, we had something called the Lower Mekong Initiative where we were trying to help these nations preserve and clean up these resources, but we started budding up against the problem with these Chinese dams. But I think it points to the fact that there's a very real risk for China of backlash to the heavy-handed ways that China pursues infrastructure projects, not just in Southeast Asia, but along this whole Belt Road Initiative that we've talked about. Because often they pay no attention to environmental effects or effects on

local populations. And so we could really see this creating some backlash against the Chinese, not just in these countries, but in others in the years to come. Interesting. Well, we'll absolutely follow this one because it does sound like China's willing to relent in any way based on the stories. Yeah. Okay, Ben, I'm going to throw China controlling all the water in the world on my list of things to be anxious about now that I know more about that. All right, I'm going to do two more stories that are going to account for goodish news before we get to our interview with former U.S. ambassador of the U.N. Sam Power. So the first one came out of the Washington Post. And it was about sort of how all these bad actors are actually trying to help out when it comes to the coronavirus. So they talk about

how the Taliban dispatched health teams to deal with the coronavirus. In Mexico, drug cartels are offering aid packages to people who are hurt economically. In Brazil and El Salvador, gangs are enforcing curfews. You know, look, Al-Shabaab, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, they're still the worst people in the world. They're still blaming foreign invaders for the virus. They're making it part of their propaganda. But it was notable that the state department put out a statement welcoming the Taliban's efforts to raise awareness about the fight against coronavirus, praising them for offering safe passage for health care workers. So this is by no means a good news story. These are still bad actors, like gangs are threatening people with baseball bats and favelas if they don't go home. And

and observe the curfew. So maybe it's a story about how human beings get through things in the absence of any sort of viable government. But it was notable. I haven't seen the State Department praise the Taliban in this way in a while. Yeah, well, I think that what it does show you that's kind of interesting, right, is like what is the actual power structure in different places around the world because, you know, what it shows you is that, like, governments aren't the final authority in certain places. Like, there's favelas in Brazil that the gangs are the final authority. There are places in Mexico where the cartels are, and there are certainly places in Afghanistan where the Taliban is. So it's, you know, I welcome anything anybody does to try to minimize the

harm here, even if I wish that those types of actors weren't the source of power in those places. I think that, you know, you do want to try to like take advantage of shifts in behavior that happen in crises. So one of the questions is, you know, if there's some kind of weird cooperation that has to emerge or dialogue between governments or citizens, for that matter, and some of these entities, can those kind of lead into discussions of other subjects and ways to not revert back to the, state of conflict that existed before the crisis and whatever relationships are built between some local Mexican authorities and the cartels in fighting coronavirus, can that be rolled over into ways of avoiding, you know, return to violence? In the same way that I'm sure the State Department is thinking, well, let's try to take advantage of this gesture to advance our peace initiative with the Taliban. By the way, I wish,

that they saw this as a way to work with the Afghan government as well instead of just threatening to cut off assistance but you know that that is another side of the story so I think you know as this all shakes out I mean where can where can new contacts and new constructive actions by some of these bad actors transition into other constructive efforts you know an opportunistic government it wherever it is should be able to do that. And maybe that can be something hopeful that comes out of all this. Yeah. Well said. Last thing that sort of counts is almost hopeful. So last week, Saudi Arabia announced a unilateral ceasefire in the war in Yemen. We've talked about this a bunch. It's this

five-year horrific Saudi-led effort to fight the Houthi rebels in Yemen that has just had unbelievable humanitarian consequences. This ceasefire was supposed to allow for peace talks to occur. And and also stop the spread of the coronavirus. The Houthi rebels who were fighting the Saudis, they released a peace plan right around the same time. The UN is hoping to convene talks. So, you know, the two sides are not close to an actual peace agreement. There is some indications that the ceasefire has, you know,

at least partially broken several times. More cynical people are wondering if, you know, Saudi Arabia's goal here is just a, find any way to extricate themselves from this quagmire since, you know, Mohammed bin Salman and Vladimir Putin decided to collapse the price of oil by starting a price for right as the coronavirus hit and then further collapse the price of oil, which is their only means of income. But man, then if like this war ending could come out of the coronavirus, that would be like the smallest silver lining, but still a silver lining. Yeah. And put me among the cynics, but there's

hope in the cynicism, right? And the hope is this, which is that this Saudi war isn't complete unmitigated catastrophe. It's a humanitarian disaster. It's taken, you know, untold lies, risked famine among millions of people. You've got children starving to death. And strategically, it's been a disaster for the Saudis, too. It hasn't, you know, eliminated the Houthis or Iranian influence or whatever the stated Saudi rationale is. So you need a face-saving way to end this war. And if basically the face-saving way is, oh, there's a coronavirus, so we're just going to stop the war. And, you know, I'll take it. And so I think the best case may be that if the Saudis are seeing like, you know what,

there's no way we're going to achieve these objectives that we set militarily. And it's unlikely, frankly, that we'll achieve them in a negotiation. But we can just kind of stop the war using coronavirus as the mechanism that explains and justifies why we did that. That would be a great outcome. So my hope is you can, you know, slap some, you know, agreement on top of this and just stop the fighting. And again, maybe this can be something good that comes out of this, which is that the war just doesn't resume because, frankly, the Saudis realize it's no longer in their interest to fight it. That would be my hope.

Yeah, mine too. Okay. When we come back, we'll have our conversation with former U.S. ambassador of the United Nations, Samantha Power. We are thrilled to be joined now by our dear friend, the former U.S. U.S. ambassador to United Nations ambassador, Samantha Power, also the author of a fantastic book, The Education of an Idealist and Memoir. Sam, is great to see you on this Zoom. Great to be here, Tommy, despite the circumstances. Yeah, we got Ben all the way over in Venice as well, looking good. He's much cooler headphones than I do. Yeah, no, I stole my wife's headphones, that's why.

Sam, there's this intense and understandable focus right now on combating the coronavirus here in the United States. Obviously, we're behind in a lot of ways. But you wrote this fantastic op-ed for the New York Times about how the United States need to lead a global coalition to combat this pandemic if we really want to prevent both catastrophic loss of life abroad and here, but also to make it possible to restore sort of a semblance of normalcy in the U.S. Can you just explain to folks who might not have read the piece why our response outcome relies on the response going well globally? Yeah, I mean, I think that because our current president has the mindset that you can build walls to shield the United States, you know, it's kind of been lost even on people who are critics of President Trump, the extent to which our supply chains alone, you know, in terms of U.S. manufacturing or U.S. imports, rely on places like Bangladesh, India, parts of sub-S. Africa. and so the idea that we're going to get economic normalcy, even if we can eradicate or

eviscerate the virus in the United States, that's just wishful thinking. And if the virus is raging in pockets, in hot zones, in developing countries, that is going to have bearing on our ability to recover, how quickly we recover and whether the recovery begins to approximate at some point, a full recovery. So we can't build a wall around ourselves and we can't wish away the humanitarian catastrophe that awaits developing countries and vulnerable communities who have far less of a cushion. I mean, there is no $2 trillion stimulus awaiting people in the Central African Republic or in Kenya. There is very little social distancing available to people in the favelas of Brazil or the slums of India. There are three billion people in the world who

don't have access to running water in their homes. So even just the simple act, which is hard enough to train people in developed countries with plenty of running water to do, but to wash your hands and to take these precautions is impossible. And already, Tommy, you know, you see because of our focus on our own plight, which is an extreme plight and needs the kind of focus that was not forthcoming for too long, but you already see, you know, severe cuts in humanitarian in assistance. You see aid workers pulling up stakes, understandably again. And you see these countries kind of left to their own devices. They're not able to compete in the global battle, the scrum for PPE and other means of combating the virus. South Sudan has four ventilators. They're not going to be

able to increase that number anytime soon, at least while this virus is raging. And so, you know, I think there's a humanitarian dimension to this because the lethality of this virus just could be so much greater because of the close quarters that people in poor communities are keeping, people in Idlib or people in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. But also because of the global interconnectedness of the world, the idea that the United States can turn its back on that when we have family ties to Somalia, to India, to Nigeria when we have trade ties, and then again, because of this global supply chain, it's just, it's just naive. So, Sam, when you look at the global response, I mean, when I think back to Ebola, you know, I remember you cajoling diplomats organizing

UN meetings with dozens of countries shared by the U.S. to essentially secure commitments to fight Ebola. Obviously, the United States kind of taking some degree of responsibility almost for the functioning of the World Health Organization, and it's getting better at fighting Ebola. I'm watching this, and I have not seen a single UN Security Council session on this. The WHO's role has been kind of curious. They're front and center, but they still feel like a supporting actor relative to the national governments. And if you look at our government, you know, basically Trump, you know, has attacked the WHO and kind of lumped them in with his anti-China rhetoric.

And just for the listeners, I think sometimes it's hard for people understand that these, you know, UN agencies are kind of what the member states make of them. So how should people think about what is just the role of international institutions and the WHO in particular? What do you make of Trump's threats to kind of cut off aid for them? How does that interact with the type of international response that you're talking about? And just kind of what's it like to see the UN and its component agencies kind of totally absent from, you know, how most people are thinking about the response to this.

Well, let me go back in time, if I may, and it's, I never thought I would refer to the period of Ebola as a happier time. It certainly wasn't for the for the people of West Africa, that's for sure. But just to take note, going back, you know, in a in a time capsule to 2014 and the summer of, of 2014, before President Obama was personally involved chairing meetings internally in the U.S. government virtually every day with the CDC, with our diplomats, with HHS, and the people looking out for trying to convince states, U.S. states within the union to take certain precautions. So before that time, then the U.N. is back in 2014, it bears a lot of resemblances to the current UN.

Insofar as there is a collective action problem that the UN wakes up with every day in the morning. Richard Holbrook, you remember the late great U.S. diplomat used to say that blaming the UN for a crisis is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the Knicks play badly. It's a building. And the effectiveness of that building

is going to ebb and flow on the basis of whether powerful countries decide to invest it with authority where they decide themselves, to contribute resources, to take leadership. And so in 2014, in the early days of the Ebola epidemic, the WHO was very late in declaring first a global emergency and then, you know, actually jumping up and down and warning that the disease was likely to spread and potentially become a pandemic.

And then when the United States, thanks to President Obama's leadership, decided to send 3,000 troops and health workers into the eye of the storm, I mean, those were some of the most gratifying days of my diplomatic career because when a major power, the major power of the United States, has made a decision like that, then as you say, we get to go pound the pavement, knock on the door, just say, okay, China, you want to be part of a P2 with the United States. You want a seat at this table. Well, here's what we're doing. Now, what are you up to? How many Ebola treatment units are you building? How many labs are you going to construct on the ground in West Africa?

The U.S. took leadership over Liberia, and we were able through doing that to get the United Kingdom, which has great expertise to draw upon to take leadership in Sierra Leone, and the French who have far less experience and expertise in global public health, stepped up, at least to a certain extent, in Guinea, which were the three countries that were affected. So there was a kind of division of labor. You remember Ben distinctly the role of Cuban doctors in the Ebola crisis, more doctors and health workers sent by Cuba per capita, of course, than any other nation in the land. But that's what multilateral action looks like when it happens.

There is a catalytic leader, a kind of team captain, not the world's policeman, but a team captain who is a first mover who convenes countries. President Obama convened the heads of state at the United Nations in September of 2014. In order, again, to bang the drum and to just say, this is not going to end because the UN Charter says it's bad. This isn't going to end because we all wish away a devastating virus. And so to your point about the current response, we in 2014 declared Ebola, the spread of Ebola, a threat to international peace and security, using the Security Council for the first time in that way as a way of issuing a global siren. In this crisis, which is a far graver

threat, given the extent now of the lethality and the reach of this virus, which has already hit 203 countries and territories, I believe, when I last looked, and there's more than 2 million cases. So it's gone way further than Ebola. The Security Council did meet. You missed it because they didn't achieve anything. It was last week, and they met online, and it was one of the more pathetic meetings in the history of the UN Security Council, where there was a refusal, remains a refusal.

on the part of China to allow this to be declared a threat to international peace and security. So China had blocked for weeks the UN even convening, even having that meeting. Finally, a compromise was put forward by Estonia, where Estonia said, okay, we won't say it's a threat to international peace and security, even though we all know it is, but we will say it may be a threat to international peace and security. So we have the legitimacy and the sort of hook we need to meet. then in meeting there was a desire to potentially endorse the Secretary General's call for a global ceasefire, arguing that the last thing that anybody should be doing right now is fighting against one another. We should all be pooling our resources and our wisdom and fighting this virus. No, United States, China, Russia, none of these three powerful countries on the Security Council tasked with enforcing peace and security were willing to get behind that. very belated meeting occurred. The press is waiting outside. What is the UN Security Council,

this body charged with setting norms and enforcing norms, and, you know, where the world's eyes are looking to see a show of global unity, absolutely nothing came out of it. All that they were able to issue was what are called press elements, which is kind of the lamest thing that can come out of any meeting. And the exact language in the press elements were the members of the security Council expressed their support for all efforts of the Secretary General concerning the potential impact of COVID to conflict-affected countries and recalled, they couldn't even agree on, in fact, declaring, but they recalled the need for unity and solidarity with all those affected. So to this day, the UN Security Council has not even called for unity.

All they've done is recalled some prior call for unity. Anyway, this is inside baseball. But if you combine that with the G7 pettiness in trying to. make this the Wuhan virus when you know that that's going to blow up any prospect of securing a joint statement statements aren't going to change the world they're not going to heal people they're not going to provide ventilators for anybody but the absence of unity alongside all of the dog eat dog solitary unilateral actions that are being taken by country after country you know that's what what really matters is the the actions the countries are taking and the failure to embrace again the point

that Tommy made at the outset, which is that we are connected. We do not live in the 18th century. We are not going to be able to durably and sustainably return normalcy to any of our countries while this virus is raging elsewhere. And that is an occasion where a country like the United States with unmatched military, economic, and cultural power has to be the team captain because China has no muscle memory to perform that role. It acts bilaterally. We know that some of what it's sending abroad is extremely

important and some of it is faulty and is not even going to do the trick. We know that they want to rehabilitate their reputation by leading, being seen to lead the world, but they just, they don't have the wherewithal to do it. They don't have the equivalent of the CDC and the ability to send that number of experts who can converse with local people through the embassies, who can focus also on the governance dimensions of the response, the fact that the Bangladeshi government, for example, doesn't allow the internet in refugee camps? How's that going to work when you try to do public education? Can you see the Chinese government diplomat badgering the Bangladeshi government about internet freedom and public education through the internet? I don't see it. So it can't be China.

The day may come when it will be China, and Trump is certainly hastening the day where President Xi at least will move to try to make that happen. But, But right now you're not going to see even Chancellor Merkel or European leaders like her, certainly Jacinda in New Zealand. You can't imagine other countries performing a role that only a country with the experience and the reach of the United States can perform. We were chatting before we started recording about potential bright spots in the world of things that are going well or good news stories just because the world is so bleak right now.

and it's always good to try to raise up these things. I mean, I've seen some reporting on the fact that when you look around at some of the best responses and the most capable leadership, it's countries like Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, Denmark, Taiwan, countries that are led by women. So I think that's an interesting narrative in observation that's emerging. You were mentioning that Portugal and Canada have been doing some really cool things in leading. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, I mean, this is another role that I think a global coalition can perform is to be sharing best practices and ways to accelerate the response and the solidarity even at a citizen level.

But sadly, again, those venues don't exist for passing along such best practices. So POTSave the World will have to become the equivalent of the United Nations for sharing best practices. but I was very struck by the Portuguese government. They have about nearly 600,000 immigrants living in the country, a share of which have applied for asylum or have applied for permanent residency, but don't have it. And they announced several weeks ago now that refugees and asylum seeking applicants

basically will be treated like Portuguese residents, like Portuguese citizens. So they'll have access to welfare, to the National Health Service and so forth. So that could make an enormous difference. Again, both from an altruistic standpoint, from the standpoint of these individuals who are too often treated as invisible,

but also from the standpoint of Portugal's own interests. And so it's, again, that recognition that we are all connected. I think in India, I don't want to talk about Modi's response, which was very, what's the word, I don't want to say spontaneous, impetuous almost, and gave people a very, very short time to plan around the moves that he made, moves that were, I'm sure, necessary, but nonetheless, I think that could have been rolled out in a very different way. But to see what local citizen groups are doing, there's a really interesting initiative that mirrors some of what's happening in the United States called Caremongers, India,

where it's a Bangalore resident who created this network, and it's now spreading across the country to help disabled, elderly ill people, those with young kids, and where people just volunteer, again, sort of like the shopping angels and the mutual aid societies that are cropping up in the United States. I think Taiwan is completely fascinating and will be studied for many years to come.

Taiwan and Hong Kong, of course, both share something very important. They knew from the start not to believe, the Chinese government because of their own experience. Yeah, exactly. President Trump has an awful lot to learn from Taiwan about how to deal with China. They also put in place, and this is controversial, it would be controversy in many Western countries, but fines to combat online disinformation. And that happened in advance of the Taiwanese election. So this was a pre-existing law, but it has really kicked in because of all of the disinformation around the coronavirus and the conspiracy theories. There is also trust.

in government in Taiwan, particularly in the wake of the recent election, confidence in government, centralization. So there isn't that same kind of party polarization that we see in a lot of our countries undermining the response. But just again, early on not believing what was coming out of China proves the best predictor of whether you're able to get out in front. And they put in place travel restrictions starting on December 31st when they heard about the first case. So they didn't believe any of this non-human-to-human transmission or any of these reports. And then another example just finally is because it really could be something we applied here, is in Canada, you have these funds that have been made available as here for people who are now unemployed

and who are nervous about whether they can feed their families. The difference is in Canada, you don't have to file, you don't have to prove anything through paperwork. You're basically automatically enrolled. you automatically receive these funds, and only later after the crisis is passed, they're going to do the equivalent of an audit to try to root out whatever fraud there is. But basically, in order to smooth the path for people who are vulnerable to get access to the funds they need to survive, in some cases, they've just made the default that you get the money and basically are operating on an honor system. So we have so much to learn from one another, and unfortunately right now,

there aren't the obvious mechanisms for that learning to occur? Well, you know, one follow up to this, Sam, is, first of all, I think what you just walk through, we could call upstanders. And I think everybody should check out the education of an idealist if you haven't already. Sam does a great job of taking us, not into the situation at the UN and the Obama administration, but when you were courting that term of upstanders, basically people who were citizens or government officials doing the right thing to stand up against atrocities and genocide. And we see today people like just in Ahern, people, you know, like the leaders of all the countries time mentioned, to happen to be women who are doing a great job. I think one of the

things that concerns people like you and me that we talked about in this podcast a little bit is the idea that this event could be used by autocratic leaders to give themselves more power. We've seen that already in Hungary. Could be used by the Chinese to try to, you know, discredit democracy generally, O.C., an authoritarian model works better to respond to things like this. Look at how chaotic the U.S. response has been. Even as we see some very inspiring democracies, including ones like South Korea and Taiwan, that may not be the first countries that people think about when they think of usually Western democracy. It's a reminder that democracy can function everywhere.

How do you think about the long game geopolitically from this? there's going to be a huge fall, public health, geopolitical, economic. How do we do people who care about democratic values try to assure that whatever world emerges on the back end of the multi-year crisis we're entering into is not one that just devolves further into authoritarianism, nationalism, but rather that this is somehow a catalyzing force for a pendulum to swing back? You know, what is a way to try to reinvigorate you know, democratic values in a world where they'd already been suffering in a post-coronavirus environment? It's a million dollar question. There are several million dollar questions, I think,

floating around right now, but it's really hard to know, for starters, of course. But where I would start is the sort of tragic dimension of this. And this is the sort of, worrying dimension is, you know, here you have, for example, President Trump having completely mishandled this from the start. He tried to lash out at governors. He tries to lash out at Democrats, at the media. And then he hits upon, you know, what appears to be, at least with the Republican base, a winning target, the World Health Organization. So the truth is, a significant component of his mishandling was the absence of international coordination, the absence of leadership, for example, within the WHO, pushing back on some of the worst instincts that

exists among bureaucrats, which is to cater to the loudest voice. And in that case, because there's no U.S. voice in most multilateral organizations these days, that was the Chinese voice. And so you did see some terrible decisions out of the WHO. But now Trump is kind of fastened on a fall guy or a fall institution. And so with a significant chunk of the United States, this issue is going to get demagogued. And so out of this, right, one lesson should be, gosh, we really need to strengthen our international global health architecture. We need to revisit the rules for emergency response. We need to take note of the fact that, and this is something not many people understand, that the WHO doesn't really have a programmatic arm. You know, it's about setting standards and

issuing warnings, which it did not do adequately in this case. It's about sharing data, but in terms of actually being out there in the world and helping vulnerable countries, let's say, at this time, there's a gap in the international architecture, and it's a gap given our own connectivity to people around the world that the United States has a vested interest in filling. So you could imagine a world, in a sane world in the wake of this, you would be looking to fortify mechanisms for cooperation, but instead, when you're looking for a scapegoat, you could see something else entirely unfolding, which is a further retreat and this further kind of delusion that international institutions just work by themselves,

you know, that there's like an automaticity that you don't have to play and be part of them and invest in them and help write the rules in a manner that are going to make them function in a way that's conducive for humanity. So, you know, as with everything in terms of the United States, I think you're likely to see a split. And again, if you and I were watching Fox News 24-7 and hearing what Fox News watchers are hearing about the WHO, we'd be pretty skeptical probably about those kinds of investments as well. And so these echo chambers don't do anybody, any favors

in terms of getting the country on the same page and building a kind of solidarity around a plan that will ensure we are better prepared the next time. Now, you asked specifically about the democracy piece, but I think it's analogous insofar as, you know, if you have a conspiratorial mind and you're already thinking in these directions, who can you blame? You blame people that cross borders and bring diseases. And that's already the play that Victor Orban, Donald Trump, and others are making. And so it is likely, I think, to fuel. You're already seeing it, of course, with Asian-American suffering. terrible discrimination in large parts of this country. You're seeing it in China with Africans being mauled, you know, by local officials, because there's the Chinese claim now is that they had kicked the virus, and then it was those Africans somehow who brought it back, which is, I think, probably false in the extreme. So you see xenophobia and racism and the use of the virus to justify

crackdowns and purges and deportations and so forth, you're already seeing that. And I think on the back end, again, depending on your predisposition, you're either going to use this to try to enhance crackdowns that were already underway, or, you know, if you're just into Ahern, you're going to look and see, okay, what can we learn and, you know, how can we think constructively and productively about how to be better prepared and how to strengthen our democracy out of this. After Pete citizens have themselves shown up to be part of the... of what needed to be a comprehensive society-wide response. What a time in the wake of that to strengthen democracy and in a way to take advantage of the fact that we'll all be at ground

zero. And then the last thing, I guess I'd say, is just on the surveillance front. You know, you've seen some particularly Asian countries taking advantage of big data and surveillance and being able to track people on their cell phones. And in some instances, that surveillance has correlated with effective responses. And in some instances, you know, it was the, you know, making of four million masks a day, perhaps in Taiwan, more than the surveillance. You know, somebody's going to have to unpack.

Was it surveillance or was it the fact that everybody wore face masks on public transportation from the very start? I think a lot of the successful examples are multifactoral. But as I think you've noted on the program before, at the same time, you look at people like Victor Orban, who'd like nothing more than to extend his reach into the private lives of Hungarian citizens and, you know, will use this virus, this crisis, this actual emergency to justify the hoarding of emergency powers that he was already accreting, you know, for many, many months and indeed

years beforehand. I guess just in terms of the good news out of all, of this, where this thing is getting kicked, it's getting kicked because of citizen action, citizen responsiveness. And, you know, yes, last year and the year before really were the years of the protest. Yes, protests now, those outlets are not available, you know, to citizens at this moment. But we're all getting a lot more fluid using technology to do things we haven't done before. Joe Biden's going to have to get a heck of a lot more digitally savvy in a hurry in order to compete with some of the financial advantages that Donald Trump has. But, you know, if we go back to this sort of core point that it's your predisposition as a government that is likely to dictate whether you learn from this crisis and whether you seek to come out of the crisis

with your democracy and your governance stronger, or your predisposition will dictate whether you want to demagogue the crisis and whether you want to use it to scapegoat and to take advantage of state media, you know, to perpetuate your narrative, let's recall, again, I always come back to this, but that in 2016, 7% of the voters who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 stayed home. And so the core question in the wake of this, Ben, I think the best predictor of whether, we know that the predisposition is going to dictate what the leader does, but the best predictor of whether they succeed is going to be,

whether or not citizens are again once able to come out of their homes or prior to that using other tools, again able to organize, to gather, and to participate in themselves being agents in where this goes, in whether we see an even greater shift in the direction of more autocratic, more repressive policies, or whether we see the kind of contestation that citizens were offering before this struck in country and region after region around the world. Well put. I feel a little more uplifted. I feel uplifted.

I heard some good things today. This wasn't all dark and gloomy. If you want to hear more good things, check out the education of my dealist. It's a fantastic memoir. Ambassador Samantha Power, it's great to see you, great to hear from you. We all wish you were kicking the shit out of various foreign governments at the United Nations. maybe next administration. I won't float that here.

I can promise you one thing, and this is a very low bar. The Security Council certainly would have declared this a threat to peace and security. I think I would have had to retire from diplomacy if I couldn't pull that one off.

I mean, yes. It's just too painful to watch from afar, but it does underscore just how, I mean, this whole crisis, Maybe just one last bright spot is just how much public service matters. You know, how much these health experts, you know, who could have quit the federal government,

so horrified were they by the contempt for science and who soldiered on, notwithstanding what they saw of the defamation of other civil servants who came forward in the impeachment crisis. You know, the people who are just battling it out to try to ensure that sound facts, evidence, science, drive the policy. You know, it's just a reminder of what we all know, which is that public service is selfless, it's necessary, and most of the, many of the good things that we have in our lives day to day, we owe to our teachers, to our police, and now to a new kind of, a new breed of public servant in the minds eye, which is the nurses and the frontline healthcare workers. But don't forget about the deep state, because I can only imagine how hard, if you believe in

science and we're all foreign policy people imagine if you came from a scientific background you know just hanging on in that administration and and trying to show up every day for work and try to try to be heard and so it's a reminder that elections matter but also that expertise matters and that's what we need to go back to amen to that ambassador power great to speak with you again as always uh see you soon i hope via zoom absolutely i hope so too the world. This is Shannon Euclum and Carl Klein, and we were on last week's episode, stuck on the ship in the harboring Cape Town, South Africa. We've made it back to the States, as well as our friend Richard, who was also on the boat. Our flight left on Thursday, the 9th. Yeah, and a little bit about

the process in coming back to the States. Once our repatriation flight was confirmed, we were finally approved to be cleared by the South African Customs to enter the country, and we were finally able to get our passport stamped early the morning of the 9th and go to a local collection point where everyone from the area that was taking the repatriation flight would receive our first medical checks. Immediately upon arriving at the collection point, we were met by staff from the U.S. Embassy and consulate from Cape Town, who happened to know us all by name since our situation had been such a big priority for the local office. One of the big focuses throughout the process was ensuring that everyone was healthy, so our temperatures were taken every time we got to a new location

and we were eventually given risk bands showing that we were symptom-free. All in all, the whole process of leaving the boat and arriving in the U.S. took us about 36 hours. Coming into the U.S. was really interesting experience in comparison to South Africa and our work with the embassy. There was really poor social distancing. We did fill out one health screening, but when we had gotten off the plane, we had folded it in half. So when we handed it to the immigration officer, they didn't even unfold it or look at the answers. It kind of went in a big stack of paper. The immigration officers weren't wearing masks. There wasn't really a lot of PPE generally

throughout the airport. Overall, everything just seemed pretty relaxed compared to what we had been hearing in the media and reading online. After another flight, in a total of about 48 hours, we arrived to Mammoth, California, which is where we are self-isolating currently. I am looking for health care work and hoping to help with the current outbreak in some way. And we are working on what we are going to do for next steps. So thank you so much and we really appreciated being on the show. Thanks to Samantha Power. Thanks to Secretary Ray Mabas for joining the show today. Thank you, Ben, for being the only human I will speak to this week besides my wife. It's been nice. Yeah, I look forward to this all week. It's like my one outlet.

How are the number of views of Frozen 2 versus Frozen 1 at this point? We had a bit of a backlash. We had like our first Frozen backlash and retreated into heavy show rotations, Doc McStuffins, who has a toy hospital where she fixes her toys as if she's a doctor. I don't know if the coronavirus has seeped into the psychology of my kids, but they now basically are serving as medical doctors for their stuffed animals. Oh, man. So it's a very constructive television watching that's happening here. That's great. That's great. They got an MD now. Yeah, yeah, basically. Well, I will let you get back to them and see you next week. Yeah, you too. Pottae of the world is a product of crooked media.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Special thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.