The Human-Rights Vacuum

I am currently reading "A Problem from Hell-America and the Age of Genocide," by Samantha Power. The book was a National Book Critics Award Winner. Ms. Power is is a professor of Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy's School of Governement and has won a Pulitzer Prize. Her writing is well worth reading...(She is the author of this article).

Rebel troops stampeded an african Union base in Darfur, Sudan, last month, murdering 10 African peacekeepers. That same week in Burma, the military regime killed a Japanese photographer and turned its machine guns on unarmed, barefoot monks. The violence in Darfur and Burma met with widespread international condemnation but scant concrete action. The perpetrators will almost certainly get away with murder.

What is going on? Even in an era of connectedness, when such outrages are beamed into living rooms around the globe, the world's major powers can't seem to agree on what should be done or who should do it. While many foreign critics of the U.S. express relief at the erosion of American influence, events in Burma and Darfur show the downside of the U.S.'s diminished standing: a void in global human-rights leadership.