From Democracy Digest:

How to temper idealism with the demands of responsible statecraft—without abandoning our commitment to democracy and human rights? is the question posed by Ivan Krastev, the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, and Leonard Benardo, vice president of Open Society Foundations.

Max Weber contrasted the “ethic of conviction” with an “ethic of responsibility”—the idea that politicians should be judged not on the motives that pushed them to undertake certain actions but on the consequences of their actions. This concept holds the key to the major—if inadvertent—lesson of Samantha Power’s book, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir: Idealism is effective only when it understands how power operates—particularly when it recognizes the limits of American power, they write for The American Interest.

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