In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Tom Chandy, head of Save the Children in India, articulated the fears of the advocacy community: “The impact of the American economic meltdown will be experienced everywhere.” His views were echoed by Steve Radelet of the Center for Global Development who noted that US foreign assistance for strategically unimportant countries would likely be vulnerable. “The government won't take a dime out of funding Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan,” Radelet said. “But they will be unlikely to spend money in, say, Tanzania or Senegal.”

In this book, I have argued that material conditions and constraints do not explain cases where states supported social movement demands despite facing high costs. I have emphasized the importance of morality and other motivations that were not strictly instrumentally rational or self-interested and how those concerns could lead to costly acts of altruism when policy gatekeepers believed those values to be important. In examining Japan's eventual support for debt relief, Japanese and Canadian ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, and French and British ratification of the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, I focused on how advocates successfully framed the issues as tests of international citizenship, tapping into desires for prestige and conceptions of national roles on the world stage. In discussing US actions on debt relief and HIV/AIDS, I went further and suggested that moral motivations were important in cases where countries faced permissive economic conditions or had other self-interested motives for supporting causes championed by principled advocates.