All advocacy is, at its core, an exercise in empathy.
Samantha Power
History is laden with belligerent leaders using humanitarian rhetoric to mask geopolitical aims. History also shows how often ill-informed moralism has led to foreign entanglements that do more harm than good.
We know that often holding those who have carried out mass atrocities accountable is at times our best tool to prevent future atrocities.
Changing the DNA of a large, multilateral organization such as the United Nations to deal effectively with modern threats is not easy. Indeed, when the United Nations was created in the wake of World War II, threats came almost exclusively from one state carrying out acts of aggression against another.
Don't take for granted that the worthiness of your cause will win you allies; bring it down to a scale that people can relate to.
Knowing one thing well empowers you and gives you a set of tricks to the trade that you can apply across the board. Go deep, and it will serve you when you make your choices about where you want to leave your mark.
The key to U.N. reform is giving Americans a clearer picture of what the U.N. is and what it isn't, what it can be and what it can't be.
International institutions are composed of governments. Governments control their own military forces and police.
The performance of international institutions will be symptomatic of the domestic political priorities of influential member states. International institutions don't really have a life and a mind of their own.
Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.
When we blame all Muslims, all Syrians, or all members of any other group because of the actions of individuals, we fall into the trap of asserting collective guilt. We empower the narrow-minded ideology that we are trying to defeat.
I think Obama is right when he talks about the rule of law as a cornerstone of what the United States should stand for. That can encompass our elected officials' adherence to law and our country's return to the Geneva Conventions.
What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.
Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.
In many college classes, laptops depict split screens - notes from a class, and then a range of parallel stimulants: NBA playoff statistics on ESPN.com, a flight home on Expedia, a new flirtation on Facebook.
Serving in the executive branch is very different than sounding off from an academic perch.
The U.S. government engages with many countries around the world in official dialogues on human rights.
Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.
The United States should not frame its policy options in terms of doing nothing or unilaterally sending in the Marines.
The United States and the Obama administration have consistently opposed the delegitimation of Israel. We've also consistently pushed for legitimation of Israel across the U.N. system. We uniformly oppose one-sided actions designed to punish Israel, and we will continue to do so.
I think I would like the sort of job where you can work away in obscurity to try and improve things, without being caught up in the political maelstrom.
My career is not well thought out. Every choice has been instinctive and, quite literally, impulsive in many ways.
When dictators feel their support slipping among adults, it is not unusual for them to alter school textbooks in the hope of enlisting impressionable youths in their cause.
Re-examining our reasoning is not something that has come naturally to American statesmen.
I like to think that as I get older I'm getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with.
Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.
If your aim is to attack the United States, it is hard to imagine a more difficult way of getting here than by posing as a refugee.
President Obama, like every other leader on Earth, is still going to be looking out for national and economic interests. States don't cease to be states overnight just because they get a great visionary as their new president.
I worry about Zimbabweans. They bend, they bend, they bend, they bend - where do the people break? How long can they go on scrounging for food in garbage dumps and using the moisture from sewage drains to plant vegetables?
The way governments treat their own citizens matters; it matters because it can have a direct impact on international peace and security - and on our respective national security interests.
Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth. But much anti-Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others.
Half of Syria's refugees are children, and we know what can happen to children who grow to adulthood without hope or opportunity in refugee camps. The camps become fertile recruiting grounds for violent extremists.
I would like to put forward a simple thesis that should no longer be at all controversial: it is now objectively the case that our national interests are increasingly affected not just by what happens between states, but also by how people are treated within states.
When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war.
In the absence of full-fledged Congressional investigations, American policymakers rarely look back. They are bound by continuity and fealty across administrations and generations.
All we talk about is 'Islamic terrorism.' If the two words are associated for long enough it's obviously going to have an effect on how people think about Muslims.
I got into journalism not to be a journalist but to try to change American foreign policy. I'm a corny person. I was a dreamer predating my journalistic life, so I got into journalism as a means to try to change the world.
Influence is best measured not only by military hardware and GDP, but also by other people's perceptions that we, the United States, are using our power legitimately. That belief - that we are acting in the interests of the global commons and in accordance with the rule of law - is what the military would call a 'force multiplier.'
On the rare occasions when U.N. blue helmets have made the news in the past, it has unfortunately too often been in the context of situations where peacekeepers have failed to shield civilians, or even when the peacekeepers themselves have been involved in abuse.
Over the years, Western governments have been criticized for working with foreign police who have proved abusive or corrupt.
Virtually all of Darfur's six million residents are Muslim, and, because of decades of intermarriage, almost everyone has dark skin and African features.
Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call 'issue ownership.'
President Reagan, of course, did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security.
In the 2000 election, George W. Bush, who had shirked military service, succeeded in presenting himself as more reliable on national security than Al Gore.
America needs a sensible, sustainable Iran policy that can meet U.S. security and economic interests, command international support and withstand the shifting Middle Eastern sands.
Engaging Iran won't guarantee improved U.S.-Iranian relations or a more stable Gulf region. But not engaging means more of the same.
Zimbabweans are severely malnourished, and deaths from starvation occur even in the cities. The country has not yet suffered nationwide famine only because international donors have stepped in.
As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites.
The economic dynamic in Zimbabwe is perversely robust: while ordinary people suffer, black-market dealers and people with foreign bank accounts prosper, making them powerful stakeholders in the perpetuation of devastating economic policies.
The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.
