We, as Americans, have an interest in ensuring that the only people who get to vote for our elected leaders are our citizens, and not some foreign people who think that they have an interest in skewing our election in one direction or another.

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.

I was working in the same building as U.S. News & World Report, and I banged on the door and said, "I'm ready to go." And they said, "What's your combat experience?" I said, "Does my parents' divorce count? It was pretty rough." Then they said, "What's your reporting experience?" And I said, "I covered the women's volleyball team in college exceptionally well." The guy was like, "You are so not ready to be a war correspondent."

When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war.

You could be in the United Nations office all night every night and still feel like you were not making a sufficient dent in the world's problems. I think the key is prioritization. But every job presents the tyranny of the inbox, of allowing the urgent to crowd out the important. So we have to have our lodestars.

We, as Americans, have an interest in ensuring that the only people who get to vote for our elected leaders are our citizens, and not some foreign people who think that they have an interest in skewing our election in one direction or another.

As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites.