"With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy"
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A crisis that "screams for remedy" is a moral emergency dressed in policy clothes. Michael Johns isn’t just pleading for attention to Central Africa; he’s staging an intervention into the way American foreign policy decides what counts as urgent. The opening clause - "appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency" - is doing sharp work. It assumes decency is not currently the governing principle, or at least not reliably, and it frames that absence as a fixable defect rather than an immutable national interest. The word "appropriately" is a quiet reprimand: any other foundation for policy is, by implication, inappropriate.
The subtext is as much about Washington as it is about Central Africa. "Will not be easily ignored" concedes the default setting of U.S. policymakers: distant African conflicts are, historically, easy to ignore when they don’t threaten oil routes, election narratives, or great-power competition. Johns is trying to replace those incentives with a reputational and ethical cost. He’s arguing that a decent foreign policy would make inattention politically embarrassing, not merely permissible.
Context matters: "Central African crisis" evokes a region often flattened into tragedy in the American imagination - genocide, civil war, displacement - where the scale of suffering competes with chronic media fatigue. Johns leans into that fatigue by personifying the crisis as loud and accusatory. "Screams" implies witnesses, guilt, and the kind of urgency that haunts decision-makers once named aloud. The intent is straightforward: make humanitarianism not a sentimental add-on, but a standard that forces action - or at least makes passivity harder to justify.
The subtext is as much about Washington as it is about Central Africa. "Will not be easily ignored" concedes the default setting of U.S. policymakers: distant African conflicts are, historically, easy to ignore when they don’t threaten oil routes, election narratives, or great-power competition. Johns is trying to replace those incentives with a reputational and ethical cost. He’s arguing that a decent foreign policy would make inattention politically embarrassing, not merely permissible.
Context matters: "Central African crisis" evokes a region often flattened into tragedy in the American imagination - genocide, civil war, displacement - where the scale of suffering competes with chronic media fatigue. Johns leans into that fatigue by personifying the crisis as loud and accusatory. "Screams" implies witnesses, guilt, and the kind of urgency that haunts decision-makers once named aloud. The intent is straightforward: make humanitarianism not a sentimental add-on, but a standard that forces action - or at least makes passivity harder to justify.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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