About Samantha Power: Samantha Power is an Irish American academic, author and diplomat who currently serves as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
We know that often holding those who have carried out mass atrocities accountable is at times our best tool to prevent future atrocities.
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 acco...
Virtually all of Darfur's six million residents are Muslim, and, because of decades of intermarriage, almost everyone has dark skin and African features.
Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.
Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.
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.
Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.
American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term.
Democracies are expense-averse and they think in terms of short-term, political interests rather than a long-term interest in stability.
One of the things that a president needs in the face of genocide is resolve.
My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.
Since 9/11, there has been a huge leap in people wanting to get personally involved in public service and international affairs.
There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have ...
International institutions are composed of governments. Governments control their own military forces and police.
No more than a surgeon can operate while tweeting can you reach your potential with one ear in, one ear out. You actually have to reacquaint yourself with concentration. We all do.
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 invol...
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.
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.
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.
I believe the United States is the greatest country on Earth. I really do.
