Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.

Rising anti-Semitism is rarely the lone or the last expression of intolerance in a society.

In the absence of full-fledged Congressional investigations, American policymakers rarely look back. They are bound by continuity and fealty across administrations and generations.

We no longer live in an era in which foreign policymakers can claim to serve their nations' interests treating what happens to people in other countries as an afterthought... What happens to people in other countries matters. It matters to the welfare of our own nations and our own citizens.

We are not accepting that countries just get to sit back and let the United States meet threats that are going to roost in their worlds just as easily as they are in ours.

At the U.N., I routinely encounter countries that do not want to impose sanctions or even to enforce those already on the books. The hard-line sanctions skeptics have their own self-interested reasons for opposing sanctions, but they ground their opposition in claims that America uses sanctions to inflict punishment for punishment's sake.