The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 19 tute for addressing crises early, doing high-level preventive diplomacy, and going all-out to support those efforts; both the U.S. and the European Union need to develop more effective methods of early crisis identification and monitoring. We also need to be prepared to form “coalitions of the willing,” perhaps working through NATO and other organizations, when the U.N. voting system blocks action — as we did in Kosovo. For their part, the media also need to make a greater commitment to covering con- flicts like the one in Darfur and to do so early, prominently and in-depth, with some examination of their larger implications. For American foreign policy and for America’s stature as the leader of the world, the implications of all this are staggering — yet they are not counted in any real way by either our leaders or by much of our public. Some observers have concluded that in the post-9/11 era, the American public is preoccupied with domestic terrorism. It is also suppos- edly disillusioned about conflicts that seem to have no end, particularly those (like Iraq) into which they feel they may have been improperly led. In the process, we seem to have grown inured to others’ suffering. Yet a recent opinion poll conduct- ed by the Chicago Council for Foreign Relations is instructive. While 76 percent of Americans oppose playing the role of “world policeman,” nearly the same propor- tion (75 percent) support the use of U.S. troops to stop a government from committing genocide against its own people, or in a purely humanitar- ian crisis (72 percent). Such findings at least suggest that the resistance to foreign intervention so often cited as an excuse for looking the other way is a canard. The next time there is a genocide — and each Darfur paves the way for the next — I hope and pray the next administration will not just say the right things, but follow up with action. Nothing less than the moral authority of the United States is at stake. Harry Blaney, a retired FSO who served at the U.S. Missions to NATO and the European Community, and on the Policy Planning Staff and in the White House, among other assign- ments, is the president of the Coalition for American Leadership Abroad (COLEAD), an alliance of more than 50 nonprofit U.S. foreign affairs groups that includes the American Foreign Service Association. These views are his own. S P E A K I N G O U T