While realists and liberal internationalists typically argue about whether the goal of foreign policy should be to achieve pragmatic objectives or to support our fundamental beliefs about the value of human lives, adherents to either school likely would agree that working to end the scourge of the North Korean slave trade meets the threshold for action.

With his novel concept of sovereign obligation in A World in Disarray, Richard Haass makes an important advance in the search for peace in a disoriented world. But its advances fall short, unable to grasp the essential moral quality of world order.