The point is that President Obama has sketched a remarkably broad military mission for the world to undertake, at the very moment when the world is finding it expedient to cut military budgets. Even the United States, which spends more than forty percent of all the money spent on defense in the world, has found itself stretched. When we decided to lead the attack on Libya, for example, we dispatched one of the Navy’s precious command ships. We only have two, and they are decades old. (Two more were on the drawing board, but have been canceled: budget cuts.)

And yet our military might continues to dwarf that of the rest of NATO combined. Over the long run, the world is unlikely to be able to handle the responsibility President Obama has handed it. This in turn leads to the unspoken moral issue with which we might one day have to deal: What should we do when the world thinks we are wrong? After all, the president cannot possibly have been arguing that what Gaddafi is doing to his people is outrageous because the rest of the world is outraged. That would amount to allowing others to decide what it is immoral, transforming Obama’s admirable policy to one of following rather than leading.