[S]amantha Power, the former ambassador to the UN, gave an ominous assessment of the state of global politics under President Donald Trump at a public discussion in Burlington Saturday.
She takes a dim view of Trump’s international policy stances. “There is no captain in the democratic world right now,” she said.
There is now a global “power vacuum” that emerged as American foreign policy tilts toward what Power calls “Charles Lindbergh” isolationism.
That vacuum gives China an opportunity to become the No. 1. world economic power. “With the stage vacant, there is only one player licking their chops right now,” she said.
Power, now a professor at Harvard University, came to Nectar’s in Burlington Saturday to support Mayor Miro Weinberger’s third campaign for mayor of Burlington. The two sat on a stage of Nectar’s bar with craft beer in hand as Power spoke about the state of America to over 100 Vermonters.
Under Trump, basic diplomatic certainties based on alliances and trade agreements have been undermined, Power said.
Power said she has hope that Congress, the courts and local and state governments will maintain the nation’s democratic traditions.
”Our narrative as a country is getting built alongside the Trumpian narrative,” she said, “but our narrative is also what our governors and our mayors are doing, our private sector, our Congress and our courts and the unprecedented number of women running for office.”
Last week, the Justice Department demanded policing policy records from the city of Burlington. The federal government has targeted Burlington as part of a nationwide crackdown on sanctuary cities. Federal law prohibits jurisdictions from instituting policies that prevent officials from sharing information with federal authorities about the immigration status of residents. Burlington is one of 300 sanctuary cities in the United States.
Weinberger has said he will turn over records, but he stands by the city’s decision to refuse to help the federal government implement “draconian immigration policy.”
“Part of a mayor’s job, increasingly in the last year is becoming part of immigration issues,” he said. “We just want to police Burlington in the way we’ve done for decades.”
Power said that she thinks it will be up to young people to rebuild diplomacy. She pointed to the new movie she became a part of, “The Final Year,” which began as a look at Obama’s last year in office and became mainly about his foreign policy. Power said the movie is a way to reach out to young people who will be essential to rebuilding American foreign policy.
“We are going to have to have to have a major reclamation of our diplomatic apparatus very soon,” she said.
The documentary was released Jan. 19.
Weinberger met Power in the office of the Yale radio station 30 years ago. The two went on to finish their undergraduate degrees together and eventually became housemates in graduate school while at Harvard. Power became one of the most significant friends in his life, Weinberger said.
After college, Power went on to become a war correspondent in the 1990s, covering the Yugoslav war. When she returned to the United States for law school, the two would jog each day and talk about foreign policy, he said. Her book, “A Problem from Hell,” about American inaction during the genocides in Eastern Europe, won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 2003.
Power became the ambassador of United Nations under Obama from 2013 to 2016 and made her diplomatic mark by emphasizing human rights, Weinberger said. He watched as their discussions on morning jogs during graduate school became the international policy of the free world, he said.
Correction: Weinberger is running for a third term, not a fourth, as stated in an earlier version of this story.
