Roosevelt's conditional case for humanitarian intervention

Roosevelt argued that the United States should usually correct corruption, lawlessness, racial violence, and other failures at home before lecturing foreign societies. He nevertheless allowed that atrocities on an exceptional scale might justify action, with the response limited by both the severity of the crime and America's ability to change the outcome. His examples included violence against Jews, persecution of Armenians, misrule in Macedonia, and discrimination against American passport holders in Russia. The passage exposes both the humanitarian ambition and the paternal, self-exculpating assumptions inside the wider intervention doctrine.