Samantha Power on US and the Rwandan genocide
… I think what makes the U.S. response so chilling, for anybody who’s gone back and looked at it, is that these are precisely the people you would have wanted in those jobs at that time. If you go almost person by person, you would say here are people who are not realists in the sort of Henry Kissinger tradition, and who believe that American power should only be harnessed on behalf of America’s vital economic and security interest.
So when it comes to the president, and at least his top foreign policy adviser, you really couldn’t have asked for more. I don’t think that one could really make the same claims about the Pentagon. … The Pentagon not only is itself steeped in a post-Vietnam, a realist mindset; I mean, not only did the Pentagon believe indeed that American troops should only be deployed for interests that are deemed vital to Americans, but, of course, the Pentagon was coming off the tragedy in Somalia.
So the combination of both Vietnam, realism, the belief that only vital national interests are what should move American foreign policy and Somalia meant that there was an ingrained resistance to doing anything that might result long-term in deploying U.S. troops to a country that wasn’t intrinsically in America’s vital interests.
-link (the entire interviews is well worth reading); see also, Bystanders to Genocide
President Obama Meets the Peacekeepers | The White House Blog
Via Undiplomatic, which notes the significance of Samantha Power writing this post.