A golden age for intervention?

Could the fact that both Ms. Rice and Ms. Power have taken very public stances on the importance of humanitarian intervention mean they will shift American foreign policy in that direction? The consensus among experts and their ex-colleagues is that not much will change. Ms. Power’s appointment represents continuity, and neither of them differed publicly with President Obama on foreign policy issues.

“It will certainly change the content of the conversation, but at the end of the day Barack Obama was president before these appointments, and he is still,” said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “I don’t think it changes the equation.”

Ms. Rice has repeatedly and publicly castigated herself for her failure to push harder for intervention to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda while serving on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. It was Ms. Power who provided damning evidence, in a 2001 article in The Atlantic Monthly, that Ms. Rice had asked in a Washington teleconference whether characterizing the mass slaughter as “genocide” might hurt the Democrats in midterm elections…

Mr. Luck guided the United Nations’ effort to adopt a new global standard known as “the responsibility to protect.” It stipulates that the international community should intervene in wars to stop genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing once diplomatic efforts fail. Both women have been staunch supporters of the idea, which was the basis for the NATO intervention in Libya that resulted in the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Ms. Rice pushed through the critical Security Council resolution that authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. Russia, backed by China, has rejected anything remotely similar in Syria despite far greater carnage.