Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? S01 complete (1080p, soft English subtitles)

After the fall of the Soviet Union, America stood alone as the world’s only global superpower, but what responsibilities came with that power? Rare archive and in-depth testimony from decision-makers gives an insight into the workings of the inner sanctums of the White House to better understand not the 'what', but the 'why'.

Contains graphic violence and disturbing scenes.
Images of genocide from the start that some viewers may find disturbing.
Deals with sexual abuse

E01 Iraq – For Every Insect There Is an Insecticide
After the Islamic revolution and the capture of 50 American hostages, Iran became a bitter enemy of the United States. To counterbalance Iranian influence in the region, the White House turned to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. US support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war ignored massacres, such as widespread use of chemical weapons against both the Iranians and the Kurdish ethnic minority in Iraq, as Washington maintained its close relationship with Baghdad. But with the end of the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait turned his American ally into an enemy. Would the US now intervene to help the Kurds?

E02 Bosnia – Our Soldiers Are Not Toy Soldiers
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George HW Bush declared the age of a new world order, where the 'rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle'. For a new generation of leaders, the west’s victory came with a responsibility – to use force to make the world a better place. Bosnia was their first test. Communism had held the disparate ethnic communities in the Balkans together as Yugoslavia, but following the seismic political changes in eastern Europe, the country deteriorated into a series of bloody wars. Should the incoming young President Bill Clinton and the then US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright use force to save innocent civilians from a genocide whose brutality and horror was being captured on the home movie cameras of its perpetrators?

E03 Rwanda – That Was a Local Thing
Why did the entire world stand by in 1994 as nearly one million people were murdered over one hundred days of incomprehensible terror in Rwanda? American diplomats describe events on the ground and in Washington as this tragedy unfolded. What did the White House know, when did they know it and why didn’t they act? The horrendous results of ignoring the genocide in Rwanda haunts the Washington decision-makers to this day. President Clinton refers to it as 'the greatest failure of my life.'

E04 Kosovo – In the Name of Our Future
Three years after the civil war in Bosnia, the world looked like a very different place. The Bosnian genocide had been stopped, but Muslim separatists in the Kosovo region rekindled old conflicts that led President Clinton’s White House to consider Serbian President Milošević’s regime a threat to their own civilians. With post-Soviet Russia in crisis, Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president, criticised at home for being 'an American puppet', strongly opposed any western intervention against their old allies in the Balkans. Nato did intervene, but at what cost? Boris Yeltsin is forced to resign, leaving a young and promising KGB officer named Vladimir Putin to take his place.

E05 Darfur – Carrots for a War Criminal
In 2003, the Sudanese government began a widespread ethnic cleansing campaign in the western part of the country. With the memory of the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda still fresh, hundreds of thousands of Americans went out to protest and demand protection for the citizens of Darfur. Despite the US being bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration did not stand aside, but couldn’t take the US into another war. Following Obama’s 2008 election success, many of the people that fought so vocally for Darfur came into office. Could they make a difference?

E06 Libya – If You Break It You Own It
Barack Obama's first presidential trip abroad was to Cairo. He turned to the younger generation in the Arab world and told them 'you, more than anyone, have the ability to remake this world'. A year and a half later the Arab Spring broke out, but when Muammar Gaddafi declared his intention to go to Benghazi and 'disinfect it, street after street and house after house', Obama faced a dilemma. Should he heed the call to save innocent civilians from a potential massacre?

E07 Syria – The Risk of Doing Nothing
In his acceptance speech for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama stated: 'I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans'. When the Arab Spring-driven demonstrations against the Syrian regime were brutally put down, Obama, stung by failure in Libya, did not want to be dragged into another war in the Middle East. But when the Syrian regime began to consider the use of chemical weapons, Obama warned they would be crossing a red line.

E08 Syria – A Loop of Imperfection
America’s unwillingness to act after the chemical attack, caused Syrian rebels to despair; no-one would come and save the day, leaving a vacuum that would be filled by the forces of Isis, turning Syria into hell on earth. Obama’s conclusion was that there was no scenario where intervention in Syria would give a desired outcome. With over half a million killed and millions of refugees fleeing Syria’s borders, Obama's vision of a Middle East where the youth would create a democratic and free world for itself, had collapsed.

First broadcast:  6 August 2024  
Duration: 1 hour per episode    
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