According to this dictionary site, “Nowadays, sympathy is largely used to convey commiseration, pity, or feelings of sorrow for someone else who is experiencing misfortune. This sense is often seen in the category of greeting cards labeled “sympathy” that specialize in messages of support and sorrow for others in a time of need. You feel bad for them … but you don’t know what it is like to be in their shoes.” Empathy “is now most often used to refer to the capacity or ability to imagine oneself in the situation of another, experiencing the emotions, ideas, or opinions of that person.”
In international affairs, it helps to have more empathy than sympathy, especially for citizens in the West. Empathy stresses understanding, knowledge and capability to put oneself in others’ shoes. Of course, this is much easier said than done. Relatively speaking, sympathy is simple and easy, because all you need is to have some subjective feelings toward something, and you can take that something at the face value rather than digging deeper.
Why does international empathy matter more than sympathy? Because knowledge matters when things are far away. You cannot invest the matching amount of your time and energy to try to understand things far away with no direct personal consequences as you would domestically. Not only that, it costs at least twice the efforts to gain the genuine knowledge. Most people thus give up on even trying or pretending, especially when the physical, cultural and emotional distances are large and big.
But pure subjective sympathy can create messy consequences! One reason is that parties may leverage and manipulate sympathy of others to distort the truth. One may also lose his/her rationality or allows it to be overtaken by emotions.