The Munk Debates Podcast - Samantha Power on the future of international institutions after COVID-19

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, former US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power joins us for a conversation about the fate and future of global institutions in a post-pandemic world.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode we normally provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. But our world as we know it has changed and so has our format for the next few weeks. We're bringing you a special series called The Monk Dialogues. We invite the sharpest minds and brightest thinkers for one-on-one conversations, live on Facebook, to reflect on what our world will look like after the COVID-19 pandemic. These dialogues aim to provide you, the listener, with original insights into the pandemic's impact on everything from our shared values to the economy to international affairs. This week, we bring you Samantha Power, former United States ambassador to the UN and past monk debater in conversation with Redyard Griffiths. This is an edited version of the live event recorded Thursday. April 30th.

Hello, and welcome to the Monk Dialogues. My name is Rudyard Griffith. The purpose of this series is to encourage all of us to think about what is the world going to be like after COVID-19? This we know, at some point, it may be months, it may not be until next year or even longer, but there will be effective therapies. Let's hope there will be a vaccine for COVID-19.

And we will move from this pandemic, this crisis that we're in now, into a post-COVID world, the world that will have changed as a result of this pandemic in a whole host of different ways, from how we work, to the collective values that we share, to our politics, and most importantly, probably to our international relations, our place in the world and the global institutions that we have used over the last 50 years or more to pursue our common objectives and our common security.

Tonight on this, our fourth monk dialogue, we have the opportunity to speak with one of the world's leading thinkers, about international affairs, global politics, and international institutions. She's someone that I had the pleasure at the very first monk debate back in 2008, 2009, to host here in Toronto. Her name is Samantha Power.

She distinguished herself early on after graduating from Harvard University as an Irish American immigrant, as a war correspondent for US News and World Report. She's one of the leading human rights scholars, of her generation. She's had an active career of public service, serving on the U.S. Security Council under President Barack Obama and later being appointed by President Barack Obama as the United States is representative at the United Nations. Well, here's Samantha, power. Let's bring her up and welcome

her to the Monk Dialogues. Samantha, great to have you on the program. Good to be back in different circumstances. Yeah, well, next time, let's make sure that we can do this in person, but really appreciate you joining us for this fourth conversation in our series. We want to spend this hour talking with you, Ambassador Power, about international institutions, about our collective security and how these aspects of the world that we knew before this pandemic will change. So let's begin by getting your reflections, your thoughts on what do you think will be the lasting legacy, not next month, but in the years to come, in terms of how this pandemic will change and reshape and fashion, our institutions, and maybe more importantly, our perceptions and our pursuit of collective

security. What's your view on that? Well, I think human beings are agents in the answer to that question. And so, in a way, it's incumbent on all of us to create the kind of outcomes, the lesson learning, the acceleration of the right set of trends and not the wrong set of trends. But in the short term, there's no question that the U.S.-China rivalry has grown already, just in the few short months of this pandemic, much more severe, much more pronounced. That, of course, translates into gridlock in the UN Security Council, the premier international body for making an enforcing peace and security. Nationalism, which was on the rise anyway in advance of this pandemic, likely will get a short-term boost as certain leaders with illiberal leanings or

xenophobic leadings, point to the pandemic as evidence of what happens if you mingle your fate with that of people who live elsewhere. So I'm sure border closures that you've seen up to this point are regulations that some leaders will seek to keep in place well after the pandemic has passed. In terms of the contest that we've all known awaited us in the 21st century between authoritarian capitalism enshrined in the China model and democracy enshrined. We thought at one point in the American model, but let's just now say in the Canadian model, we still have a democracy here, but it's certainly fraying in certain ways, if not around the edges, sort of at its spine, and we could come back to that. But that model, this is a complicated pandemic in terms of how it

impacts people's understanding of which model of governance delivers for citizens. So you have China's gross mishandling of the earliest stages of the pandemic, the arrest of doctors and public health professionals who were trying to raise the siren of what was unfolding in Wuhan and beyond a culture of fear that shows you and reminds you how dangerous it is to have authoritarian governance in place where people don't feel comfortable sharing truthfully information. The stakes of that cover-up, of course, are now being felt all around the world as the fact that so many outside countries did not begin taking preparations as soon as they should have in part, only in part, but in part because China itself was not fully transparent. And so then,

you know, the American model, of course, which has been an almost unmitigated disaster in terms of the top-down handling of the pandemic. But that stems as much from qualities of the particular leadership that we have in the United States right now as it does from anything inherent, I think, in the democratic model. So we have a president who, as it happens, it doesn't have a lot of respect for science, has ridiculed expertise within his own administration as, the deep state doesn't really appreciate the utility of a free media and frowns upon and indeed is quite hostile to global cooperation and international institutions. So that set of qualities don't come necessarily with democracy, but they have come with this president. And then the last thing

I'd say just in terms of global institutions, which are more likely to face gridlock if the U.S. and China, for example, can't learn to cooperate on the U.N. Security Council. There's never been a crisis in my lifetime, at least, that better underscores the necessity of global cooperation and the need to invest far more in emergency preparedness, in the pooling of resources, in the creation of solidarity funds that will look out for the most vulnerable at times like this. And so we're going to have a really hard time staging anything resembling a full recovery, particularly on the economic front, if we aren't looking out for developing countries and vulnerable communities around the world.

And so that is going to be a very stark reminder of the need to solve the collective action problem that international institutions are there to solve, where each country gives a little so that we look out for those who don't have anywhere near the self-sufficiency or the infrastructure that the United States or Canada would have to deal with a crisis of this nature. What's your view, Samantha, when it comes to the WHO, which really, in some ways, has become the center of a very heated debate, not only about its decisions, but about the perceived utility of a potentially critical global institution and

a perception, I don't know whether you share it or not, that one country in particular, China has undue influence over this organization and has pursued its own kind of narrow national interests when it comes to managing this pandemic internally within China and more importantly, trying to shelter China, the perception that being from blame around the origination of the pandemic, its sources and their response or lack of response to its rapid spread. Well, I think the first thing to remind ourselves about it is that it is an intergovernmental organization. I mean, I think people know that on one level. And yet at times like this, we sort of wish there were authorities there that transcended state power. But it is an organization of

194 member states. And the United States in the Trump years has, of course, pulled away from international organizations generally, but also the World Health Organization specifically. And there's no surprise there. Again, it's reflective of the Trump administration's view of science. It's reflective of its broader attitude toward international organizations. I think the presidents of the view that these organizations rip America off and that we give more to them than we get. It's only at a time of a pandemic that one realizes just how important it is to have such an organization, I hope at least that that realization happens. But I mentioned this because, you know, when the United States doesn't pay its dues on time, when it leaves its executive board

seat at the WHO vacant, when it continues to succond public health professionals to the WHO, as the Trump administration did, for example, from the CDC and the Health and Human Services Department, those succumbents are incredibly important, but those officials are there. They know what's happening. They could be exerting significant influence within the WHO, but they're the deep state. They're the people that Trump had been marginalizing and attacking, and they would not have had great confidence that they would know what Trump's message would be, should be in the midst of a crisis, given that Trump himself publicly was himself praising Beijing and President Xi for the response and himself downplaying the pandemic.

So in terms of the U.S. ability to influence what was happening with. in the World Health Organization, it would have been at a mid-level, so it wouldn't have been at a sufficiently senior level. And if the individuals who were working at the WHO were simply mimicking President Trump's talking points, that would have led the WHO to take the very actions that it took, which were actions that I think in the early weeks were too reticent when it came to jumping up and down and really expressing in an almost emotional way, in a way that went beyond the bureaucratics, beyond the declaration of a global health emergency, but in a way that really underscored that this was a four-alarm fire that was afoot.

And of course, the reason the World Health Organization didn't sort of talk about the virus at that time in that way, though it did declare it a global health emergency at the end of January, was that it was trying to secure access to get to China. And again, in an ideal world, not only the United States, but Canada, European countries, Republic of Korea, Japan, all demonstrable. democracies together would have been clamoring for that access. But in a world where we're not teaming up as democracies anymore, that does create more of a vacuum that China is perfectly prepared, just as the United States always tried to fill every vacuum that it encountered in the international

system. So too, China's doing the same. But to be clear, the U.S. contributes before their funding cut of, contributed 20% of the World Health Organization's budget. China, 2%. So to the degree that the United States was not exerting leverage and pressing the technocrats and the civil servants who run the WHO and who staffed the WHO to be more forthright as of course they should have been. I mean, in a way, that's on us. That's on all of us, all the other countries within the WHO who were allowing the single nation of China, which was responsible for just 2% of the budget, to be stonewalling the WHO as it was seeking access. So more candor from the civil servants at WHO for sure, but also let's look inward and examine the positions that we were taking and how

hard we were pressing each of us, the organization, to do more. And by February, I think when you look back, the WHO response tracks with probably what you would have wished from it. It is true that the health regulations that the U.S. helped draft 15 years ago do frown upon, you might say, the sort of travel closures and the border closures that have been put in place by many countries. And so that's one of the other things that President Trump complains about. But again, the U.S. wrote those regulations. And at no point did the W.H.O condemn any country that put in place those closures. It just has a policy that asks countries that impose border restrictions to justify those restrictions publicly to explain in a transparent way how they're doing the cost benefit between economics,

public health, et cetera. And so I think, again, the early weeks, WHA was trying to get access. It thought that by being nice to China and very polite and kind of holding its fire, that it would be better off. But when you're dealing with an authoritarian country, you are almost never of right mind in playing their game rather than your own. We're going to go to audience questions in a sec. But let me just squeeze one more in before we do. And I guess to have you think a little bit for us about collective security because, you know, you spent time on the National Security Council of the United States as an appointee of President Barack Obama. you served in the United Nations interacting with the Security Council. How does this pandemic change how we'll pursue our security? Because I guess what some people are positing is that this is a moment where nation states have really reasserted themselves, which is kind of interesting because, you know, there was a period there up to this crisis in the decades before that people thought maybe the nation state was waning, the forces of globalization, were making it less important. the nation state was better off seeking out its interest through multilateral institutions. That kind of seems like it's being pressure tested those previous ideas against a resurgence of the

nation state. Well, as somebody who had the privilege of working for an American president who really believed in the importance of strengthening global cooperation, of working through the United Nations, for example, on the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris Climate Agreement, the very robust Ebola response that the U.S. helps spearhead in support of the people and the countries of West Africa. That's my, you know, my experience is working for that guy, not this guy, but that guy. And what I can say is the nation state never went away, even in the Obama years. You know, as one who helped President Obama assemble, use the United Nations as best we could to help assemble new international law, for example, to stop the terrorist financing of ISIS

as one who at least supported the President Obama's efforts to secure that Paris climate agreement. How did the Paris climate agreement come into existence? The U.S. and China, you recall, did a bilateral deal first in order to create the nucleus of a deal and then went to the Europeans, to the small island states, you know, and sort of together, and of course very much with the support of U.N. officials, picked away at other countries that might have been skeptical, particularly India, which was one of the last outliers. And so, I mean, really, the nation state is not going anywhere. And the pandemic, as you absolutely rightly say, underscores the fact that the capabilities that citizens rely on for their health,

for their lives reside in government, in their own governments, right? There's, you know, yes, it's true that the WHO has dispensed 2.2 million masks and gloves in the developing world. But that's only because those developing countries, governments have failed to provide that precious PPE. And so it's those vulnerable communities whose states can't deliver. I mean, the United States, you know, for much of the last few months, hasn't really been delivering. And there, because the federal government was failing, our states, the 50 states, have had to take on functions that they always imagined at a crisis like this would be taken care of by the federal government, like negotiating with foreign countries as our governor of Maryland has done.

But my point is simply that the pandemic has exposed something that has always been true about the workings of international organizations. And that is it is the governments that comprise those organizations and particularly, of course, the powerful governments that are going to dictate whether those organizations are effective in standard setting, in holding countries accountable when they're not meeting those standards, and in looking out for public goods. that vulnerable, developing poorer, countries lacking in capacity themselves

don't have the wherewithal to provide. And so when you ask the question, what will it be like after the pandemic and when the dust is cleared, I think your predisposition says a lot about how you're going to view this crisis. I think the Donald Trump's of the world and Stephen Miller, his anti-immigration advisor,

they will look at this and say, we have to pull up stakes even more. We have to, you know, pull up our supply chains out of countries that have created a vulnerability to disruption. You know, we have to rely on one particular brand of American, a kind of homogenous 19th century look for America, you know, where those family connections that I mentioned earlier don't exist. That's one way to look at this. But I think if you look at, again, the nature of global pandemics, the nature of global terrorism, the nature of global climate change, there simply is no way

for the nation state to tackle any one of those problems without a vehicle for cooperation among other nation states. Samantha, I've got a whole bunch of audience questions that have come in via email and through our friends watching on Facebook. So I'm going to take these one at a time, read them to you so you can answer. This is from Rosemary McCarney. She's asking you, what are the three most pressing national security issues related to the pandemic that are keeping you up at night?

So, Samantha, maybe like all of us, we're not sleeping that well. Do you have additional reasons to not be getting as much shot eye maybe as you wish? What's your top three concerns? I'm sure if we could read everybody's mind who's participating in this tonight, we could have quite the competition for the spooky doomsday scenarios that are keeping us up. I don't think there's ever been more insomnia in my household or among my peer group. But I would start with the deterioration in the U.S.-China relationship. And again, that's not a novel thought, but whether it's China planting conspiracy theories and really throwing its weight behind misinformation at a scale that we've never seen before around the allegation, the false allegation that the United States was responsible for the virus, or whether it is President Trump and his rhetoric, you know, calling it the Wuhan virus from the beginning, refusing even to agree to a G7 statement showing solidarity on the patent.

pandemic because he was so insistent that it be referred to as the Wuhan virus. You know, out of that grows intimidation, for example, of Asian Americans in this country and even violence and other forms of really quite severe harassment that I think we have to worry about in terms of the trickle down and the stigma that, you know, we need to count on our public officials to combat and not to exacerbate. But, you know, one wonders, as Democrats and Republicans alike, rightly, point to China's mishandling of the pandemic at the outset and rightly, you know, get very defensive and angry about the steps that President Xi is taking in terms of stirring nationalism and anti-foreign or anti-American animus among the Chinese. You can agree,

again, that that needs, all of that needs to be called out, just as the mass incarceration of the Uyghurs needs to be called out and unfair currency practices. But there still needs to be be scope in the U.S.-China relationship for cooperation. And the scope for that cooperation on issues like climate change, where China is the world's largest emitter and is still building coal plants as part of the Belt and Road initiative, but with whom we are going to have to figure out how to negotiate a sequel to the Paris Agreement once the United States has lived up to the Paris Agreement from which it is attempting to withdraw. We are going to have to continue to cooperate on issues related to global health. We are not going to be able to wind the clock back

and disentangle from China, which owns such a large share, even of American debt. I mean, the ties that bind us are enormous and complex. And so as, again, this sort of demonization spirals escalates a little bit, I just get worried just that that space for cooperation, which has to coexist alongside the absolute need for accountability for China's transgressions, its repression, it's cover up in the case of this pandemic, I worry that that shrinks and that our national security is imperiled

by that inability really to walk and chew gum at the same time. And it may just be that this is a period in time, but there are some deeper dynamics at work that make me think that this outright hostility borderline, you know, potential ultimate kind of quasi-cold war, could endure for quite some time. You're listening to the Monk Dialogues, a special edition of the Monk Debates podcast,

where we invite big thinkers to reflect on what our world will look like after COVID-19. This week, a former UN ambassador and member of Obama's Security Council, Samantha Power, on the future of international institutions post-COVID-19. Let's go to another question that was emailed into us. When COVID is over, where do you think we'll see a dramatic rise in nationalization? populism, and anti-globalization sentiment. So where is that likely to occur? We've already seen Europe struggle with this in the last couple of years,

a rise of the right in Europe. Are there other geographies, Samantha, that you're keeping an eye on to see where, whatever you want to call it, populism, far-right politics take hold in, as you say, this period of instability, economic, food security, and otherwise that will spill out from this pandemic in the years. to come. Of course, it's hard to say, but I think that there will be elements in each of our countries that will point to this pandemic as grounds for hardening one's borders. I think it is an open

question as to whether the illiberal rights, if we put it that way, whether there is still much scope for growth. And I don't want to be complacent by any means. I mean, and my politics are evidently having worked for the Obama administration, but just let's say if we correlate, you know, illiberal right-wing parties with xenophobia or with an unwillingness to speak out against racism and other things, I mean, it can really cause a vicious spiral in terms of human rights abuse and hate crimes and other things.

And we've seen that in places that the far right has gained traction. But, you know, we were before the pandemic starting to see what appeared to be, I mean, I think also in Canada, but in many parts of the world, potentially people were speculating that maybe it was the high watermark had been reached, and now there was a tapering in part because these illiberal forces, when they're actually given the authority and the mandate to govern, tend to centralize power, not address the inequality issues that were the ways in which they rode to power in the first place, but they're not fundamentally that interested in equality. They were interested in rising to power. And so you were starting,

to see some correction. And the best example of this was in Hungary in the recent parliamentary elections. But you've seen that, I think, in other parts of the world. Countries that have been really generous opening their borders like Colombia for the Venezuelan refugees, I think again, you're likely to see a hardening of those borders. But there's a lot of economic interdependence. And so whether that can even be pulled off much beyond the pandemic, it's not really clear. But that would be, I think the most likely manifestation would be more mainstream parties becoming more drawn, again, to border controls. And so not necessarily embracing the illiberal rhetoric or a kind of exclusionary tone, but the notion of borderlessness, you know, maybe coming to feel a little old fashioned, a little 20th century. I think that that trend, though, can coexist with many, many countries deciding to, you know,

invest more in political international institutions. And so I don't know that all good things are going to go together, all bad things are going to go together. I think you're going to see some seemingly almost conflicting trends. Great. Great analysis, great insights. Let's go on to another question. It's from Ralph. He's saying several leading countries seem to be moving towards greater self-reliance. What can international institutions offer these countries that play into their nationalist tendencies while fostering international cooperation? How can those groups and people and constituencies within society that, as you say, are interested in throwing up borders that are wanting to retreat from the burdens of collective security, what's the way to talk to them? What is the argument, either, you know, both emotional and rational, that you can use to pull them back into an understanding that in a complex, interdependent world, security is a collective exercise.

not an individual exercise at the end of the day. Yeah, well, you know, again, I think that when it comes to economic globalization, those countries looking to be more immune to disruption, and I'd say the United States is probably high on that list, you know, out of this crisis, we'll be looking to make sure that we can manufacture medical supplies that are vital to our health security within our borders so that we're not dependent on factories in Wuhan for what we need to keep our citizens save. So you could see a kind of recalibration there. And then there will be

elements in this country and perhaps in yours as well that will want to go much further and will want to pull up stakes. But the businesses that, you know, we're not talking about state-owned enterprises in the United States or Canada. And so companies themselves will have a vote on that and, you know, moving the manufacturing base closer to home or home, that also will be a business decision. And so there'll be a lot of chefs in that kitchen, shall we, day, and it'll be very, I suspect, case-specific and very hard to unwind the clock or go back in time, again, as some would have us do. But I think the question is quite sophisticated about, in a way, how to message and talk to people who have that impulse, which is to pull up stakes and kind of

seek to, in fact, go back in time. And so I suppose what I would say is, I mean, it won't be hard. We will have countless examples that will show just how the extent to which the American economy benefits from our trading relationships, the extent to which prices go up, you know, when the wages that are paid to the workers go up. And so that's, again, a tradeoff that may be worth making when it comes to certain industries, but it's not without a cost for the consumers, and consumers are going to feel that. So I think there's an all things considered cost-benefit discussion to be had. But also, because the question was specifically about international organizations, I mean, I think international organizations could do a far better job.

And, you know, this has to do also with developing countries who are often recipients of financial assistance or in this case medical assistance. But of making it clear that they are a tool, they are a resource, they are a set of capabilities. So the World Health Organization has diagnostic tests that it can make available to a sovereign state that wants those tests. And you've already seen well before the pandemic, you know, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa really pushing back against the old school understanding of what international institutions were. You see, for example, in the Sustainable Development Goals, much more language of partnership and much more pushback by local and national actors in countries that are reliant to some extent on assistance from the UN and other agencies. But the conversation already has changed and country plans now really needing to. come from the actors in those countries themselves instead of being bequeathed, you know, by outsiders as was so often the case.

Great. So we'll go to some of our Facebook questions, a question from Uno saying the United Nations seems to be slipping into obsolescence. So Uno has a view here, take it or leave it. How can the UN be made more effective in handling future world crises like COVID-19? And I guess just to build on that, Samantha, I mean, there is a feeling, at least in the news reporting in the sense of where the action to fight this pandemic is coming from seems to be places other than the United Nations. Am I wrong to characterize the United Nations as kind of

missing in action these last six to seven weeks? Well, I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but the UN is an intergovernmental body comprised of countries. The two most powerful countries in the UN or the United States and China. Yeah, are fighting. The United States is completely AWOL from international leadership, and even if it was present and attempting to lead the world, you know, right now the only thing the United States is leading on in relation to the pandemic is the number of deaths caused by the pandemic.

So that's probably not the kind of leadership that at least some countries are looking for. And China wouldn't even allow the issue to be brought before the UN Security Council because in order to come before the Security Council, something is supposed to be a threat to international peace and security. And China was so defensive and remains very defensive of its own reputation. And so it blocked the Security Council from acting. You know, I actually, I think Antonio Gutierrez, the Secretary General, former Prime Minister of Portugal, who knows a thing or two about international politics,

but has had a pretty unfortunate hand dealt to him with the three of the five permanent members of the Security Council being Donald Trump, President Xi, and Blanche, Vladimir Putin. But I think Kutaris has done his best, actually, to agenda set. Right. So he has called for a global ceasefire. I think more than 70 countries have embraced that call, or at least the idea that themselves not embracing the ceasefire, but embracing the idea that the whole world should get behind a ceasefire. And so far, the Security Council, because of the opposition of the United States and that of Russia, have resisted endorsing that, which is, again, at a time when we all need to be fighting one war, and that is the deadliest pandemic we've seen in more

than a century, is a great shame. Gutierrez has also called for the easing of sanctions against countries that are suffering terribly in the pandemic, in part because of their inability to access humanitarian supplies from outside, so countries like Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe. That call also has been largely ignored, principally by the United States, of course, which is interested in ramping up sanctions against Iran at the time of the pandemic. So, you know, it's easy to say the UN is obsolete, but say we start a new organization, are we going to get away from the fact that the United States and China are the two most powerful countries in the world?

They will dictate the extent to which the world will rally, you know, politically and rally resources to deal with any threat irrespective of whether that's a building that's called the UN or a building that's called 21st Century Central. So, you know, I did do one, this monk debate before at the very beginning. And I believe it was with Richard Holbrook. That's right, the late Richard Holbrook. Richard, who passed away tragically nearly 10 years ago, was on our debate stage together. And Richard used to say, and I don't want to let the UN off the hook, but I will offer you this quote from him.

And I have this discussion of this in the education of an idealist. But he used to say that blaming the UN for a crisis is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the New York Knicks play bad. that on one level you're blaming a building. And I think the WHO needs to be held responsible for the fact that its Director General was not as outspoken as he should have been. But when I compare his responsibility or influence or his intelligence gathering capacity

to that of the President of the United States and the U.S. intelligence agencies, you know, it's night and day. And so I think to think about it more constructively, the answer going forward is how can we get, and I'm obviously very political here in the United States, so how can we get a different president who recognizes that you can't turn back the clock,

but who also recognizes that these international institutions should be functioning with more nimbleness in the 21st century, that they should be more fit for purpose, but that member states themselves are the ones who write the rules for these organizations. So if the international health guidelines are going to change at the WHO, it's going to be U.S. negotiators and Canadian negotiators and Chinese negotiators that are in a scrum

and hopefully we can do a better job rallying the world's democracies to be part of a coalition and to be acting more together because as influential as China is, you know, it's easy to forget just how powerful democratic nations are and could be within international institutions if we did a better job getting back to strengthening our alliances and got away from this kind of doggy dog, each man for himself approach that President Trump has popularized. Great answer. Well, I'm speaking with Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the book, The Education of an Idealist, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a member of the U.S. National Security Council under President Barack Obama.

You're listening to The Monk Dialogues, a special series of the Monk Debates podcast. each week for the next few weeks, we'll bring you one-on-one conversations with the sharpest minds and the brightest thinkers, reflecting on how COVID-19 will change the world as we know it. If you're enjoying this podcast, write a review on iTunes. Check us out on Twitter or Facebook for the date of our next live monk dialogues. And send us your questions for our guests in advance at dialogues at monk debates.com. Now, back to the episode. Let's go to another question from our audience. It's from Sean.

He's saying, it seems the president is moving to open the economy and lift restrictions sooner than the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau. How do you see U.S. Canada relations moving in the coming months as related to trade, non-essential travel and policies, etc.? I guess, you know, Sean's getting at an issue here that's top of mind, Samantha, for many. Canadian is the world's largest undefended border, a historic relationship between our two countries now stretching back centuries. We've now seen that border reintroduced and hardened in a way that we had never have expected in our own lifetimes. What's the future of Canada-U.S. relations in the

years to come? I think what will prove really important for Canada in the near term is close coordination with the governors of states in the northern part of the United States, because in terms of, that's not the only issue. What happens in the U.S. as a whole, of course, given that people can cross the border having come from anywhere. But, you know, it is the case that those states that border Canada directly, each of them right now are having their own debates internally about how quickly to move. You know, I think we have the ability to learn from one another. We can learn from countries like Denmark that have sent kids back to school. We can learn from a country like Taiwan that's producing more masks per minute per capita than any country in the earth.

And so, you know, maybe Canada also can learn from some of what happens in Georgia, Oklahoma, just as we in Massachusetts are trying to. There is a way in which the sort of staggered spread of the pandemic gave us lead time that we didn't exploit, sadly, to put in place the preparations we needed. But now maybe that experimentation at the state level can allow us to glean some lessons. I think the future of U.S.-Canadian relationship, it will turn in significant measure on what happens in November in this country. And, you know, this is a very challenging time for electoral politics to play out. There are real questions, as we saw in Wisconsin, about how to balance, you know, the importance of going forward with an election,

with the safety of those being asked to vote in person. and those questions are going to persist into the summer and maybe, depending on the pandemic, maybe into the fall. But in a world in which Trump continues to view the world in such zero-sum terms, even the thick bonds that we have between us are fraid over time by that attitude, by a belief that somehow what's good for you just must be necessarily bad for us, rather than the positive sum approach that I think successive U.S. and Canadian leaders had brought to bear. And, you know, one plea, I guess, that I would have irrespective of what happens in U.S. politics and maybe one silver lining, we're not experiencing the silver lining yet, but one potential silver lining that could come is that as the U.S. has pulled back,

there is an opportunity for middle powers to be pooling their wisdom, leading together, if the European powers combined with Canada, Korea, Chile, Colombia, you know, if countries that are, you know, really trying to practice good governance and democratic accountability were to coordinate and cooperate, even with the U.S. on the sidelines, I think you would see the ability to learn from one another, for example, as to how to prevent misinformation and cyber attacks. I mean, actual core conversations about national security that can happen with the United States on the sidelines. Those conversations should be happening. So my hope is as important and as critical as the U.S.-Canadian partnership is that Canada also remembers

how much it has to offer potentially as a model of good governance, democratic accountability, standing up for human rights at a time when our leaders are more quiet on those matters, and being a kind of independent voice as relations between the U.S. and China deteriorate in the hopes that all of global cooperation doesn't shut down just because of the tensions between two superpowers. It's an important point, the opportunity to create new and different networks of kind of constructive global leadership. Let's squeeze in one more question, Samantha, just to get a last question in from

Lauren, who said, what advice would you offer international organizations given their response so far to this crisis? So, Samantha, you alluded to that earlier in our conversation, that there might be some things that you could see that international organizations could do to more effectively position themselves. Maybe if you could answer specifically to the public and to people like Lauren, who are out there right now, trying to understand the value of these institutions, both to this crisis and to their lives more generally. On the international organizations, you know, I think that Antonio Gutierrez, the Secretary General of the UN, as I indicated earlier, I feel for him because he's had to spend a very significant share of his time as Secretary General just working the politics

to try to ensure that Trump doesn't cut off funding to the UN and trying to maintain a good relationship with President Xi. And so it's not an easy job to have. But I think for him to do more of what he's been doing lately, which is not waiting for permission from the United States and China, for example, before staking out a position. And, you know, this gets back to some of the lessons that Canada taught the world in terms of international organizations and what they could be. I mean, to really, you know who's writing the checks, you know, who's buttering the bread. I mean, there's no getting away from the influence that donor countries have to the UN and how inevitably that's going to be in Gutierrez's head and his concern about the UN getting defunded is a very

legitimate concern. But I think to carve out an independent voice on behalf of the UN Charter and to really own the impartiality and the independence of that position. I think the same would be true of Tedros, the Director General of the WHO. Yes, there are these 194 countries that comprise the WHO, you know, as I kept stressing in this discussion, these are intergovernmental organizations. but you're the one person who's carrying the flag for the global health principles and for the health of humanity that don't have the power of the United States and China. And so, you know, the worst thing that happens is the United States and China, one of them gangs up on you and you lose your job. But, I mean, how does that compare to looking back and saying, I wish I had done more in the face of a pandemic?

And so, again, I think both Tedros and the Secretary General have found their voices, more as this pandemic has gone on, but I would encourage more independence of spirit. And again, countries like Canada, democratic coalitions, can buck up the leaders of international organizations and remind them how many countries would be with them. But then lastly, on individual agency,

I have this expression that I come back to in the book, The Education of an Idealist that I wrote, which is very much oriented for the young at heart and young people, but people who are really thinking about how to try to make a difference in difficult circumstances. And the concept I ended up honing in on having been a war correspondent and a human rights activist and a professor and then finally landing as a diplomat representing the United States came from a book that I love that I recommend for everybody called Switch by the Heath Brothers,

a Stanford and Duke pair of brothers. And the idea that the Heath Brothers offer is this idea that when you're feeling small and when the problem just feels so much bigger than you can handle, shrink the change. You know, think about what is within your reach. It might require a stretch. You might have to go beyond what you ever thought you were capable of, but what is within your power to potentially make a difference on shrink the change? And when I was UN ambassador and I was sort of lamenting the human rights recession around the world, and this was in the Obama year as well before Trump, that could get overwhelming. And so my team and I, we just settled on a campaign to try to secure the release of 20 female political prisoners. So it was not going to change the world.

It was 20 women around the world. And yet, by shrinking the change that we sought, we were able to get supported by others, including our Canadian friends. But 16 of the 20 women were freed from jail, and they went back into their communities and raised their voices and continued to try to tackle corruption and other things. It was tiny, but it was something. And it was tangible. And there's a sort of virtuous cycle that can take hold where you think, okay, So that's one very small thing now. What is the next task we can set for ourselves? And so I think with a pandemic, there's nothing bigger than a pandemic that is jeopardizing

the lives of millions of people, but well beyond social distancing and washing our hands, I mean, it really lends itself to shrinking the change at an individual level. But what more can we do to try to change the trajectories that, as we talked about at the beginning, really could go in either direction. And often that's about civic organizing. It's about educating people around us. in my case is very much about politics, shrinking the change to something small, but when you add up different people shrinking the change in different ways, it can make a profound difference.

Well, thank you, Ambassador Powers. That's a great, optimistic, actionable insight that we can all take away from this discussion. And just again, to have someone with your breadth of experience, your knowledge of international institutions and global affairs on this, our fourth dialogue has been a sincere pleasure. Thank you for having me. I'm grateful. Love Canada. And that was Samantha Power. I just want to remind our viewers that these dialogues are brought to you entirely as a charitable exercise that is the result of the leadership of the Peter and Melanie Monk Foundation and its sister foundation, the Aurea Foundation, that were established to promote the monk debates and to promote informed, thoughtful discussion about the world of ideas, public policy, and the challenges we face as a conversation. country. So thank you to both foundations. The Monk debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Redyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers.

The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.