A lot of people seem to have been ridiculing President Obama's commitment to help Haiti - if they're your neighbours now, why did the US not do more in the past to help one of the poorest countries in the world?
The answer's simple
Whether we like it or not, one of the central principles of international relations is the concept of the sovereignty of the territorial state. Haiti maybe only a couple of hundred miles off the US coast, but it is still a separate state.
This is the same reason that meant that the international community could not, a couple of years ago, stop the Mugabe's violence against the MDC in Zimbabwe.
Therefore the US could not have involved itself in Haiti without being asked to do so by the Haitian government.
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