Genocide "doesn't seem to matter much" in American foreign policy, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy executive director Samantha Power charged at an Institute of Politics talk Tuesday afternoon.

"The U.S. has never intervened in a genocide," she said. "The odds are against meaningful actions when there are any costs to any perceived interest. Ultimately, the political risk of going in exceeds the political cost of staying out."

Power is writing a book called The Quiet Americans chronicling America's responses to genocide since the Holocaust.

Describing her book as "cynical as much as idealistic," Power said that she hoped to demonstrate what could have been done had the American public and government responded and intervened in genocides.

Power decried what she said was a move away from value-based judgements regarding intervention in favor of decisions based on national security. She pointed to four cases of genocide in the modern world--Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda--in which a vocal minority opposed to U.S. intervention won out against a passive majority.

Talking about the Rwanda tragedy, Power castigated the U.S. government for not even holding a cabinet-level meeting about the slaughter and also criticized the U.N.'s handling of the crisis.

"The U.N., inexcusably but understandably, insisted that they not reinforce the [U.N. peacekeepers] on the ground, and indeed withdraw them," Power said.

Power also said that the U.N. rejected a request to jam the hate-radio transmissions that were inciting the violence.