Obama is feeling lonely at the top because he doesn’t have the U.N., NATO, or even the British behind him this time. Still, it is more than a little odd that he is turning for companionship to the Congress that has made a mockery of his every initiative until now. And Obama has not been consistent in this policy. “If from the beginning he said something to the effect of, ‘I’m a constitutional scholar. I think the Constitution intends for the use of military force to be justified, and Congress has to approve. So I will use my presidency to make that a precedent,’ then fine, no one would be seeing it as an abdication,” says one scholar of the ethics and legality of war. “Instead, it came across as ‘I need top cover because our closest allies ever won’t follow us on this one.'”

What also smacks sadly of the appeasement era of the 1930s is all the talk about “war weariness,” from Obama and others. “I know well we are weary of war,” the president said Saturday. “But we are the United States of America, and we cannot and must not turn a blind eye to what happened in Damascus. Out of the ashes of world war, we built an international order and enforced the rules that gave it meaning.”

Yet that international order is what is now in some danger, 74 years later. After all, it was just this kind of war weariness that created Neville Chamberlain, and his foreign policy of “positive appeasement” as he called it, in the years after the terrible bloodletting of World War I. If one becomes unwilling to strike dictators and mass murderers, all that remains is to appease them.