The puny superpower

In Syria, we have sat on the sidelines for two years as Assad slaughtered 100,000 of his own people—first peaceful demonstrators, then opposition forces and civilian populations alike. Even today the president proposes to do nothing about this slaughter. “My narrow concern right now,” he has said, “is making sure that Assad does not use those chemical weapons again.” Meanwhile, even this narrow proposal appears not to command majority support among the American public and may ultimately die in Congress.

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Where is the moral outrage from the president, the elite media, the foreign-policy community, or the broader public about Assad’s mass murder of over 100,000 by conventional arms? Where are the liberal protests in solidarity with the victims of the regime in Damascus? Where is the concern about how the ongoing Syrian civil war could affect other countries in the region—potentially destabilizing Lebanon or Jordan? Where is the sense that America has an obligation not just to do what it can to help Syrians, but to prevent the entire surrounding area from sliding into chaos? Except for Sen. John McCain and a handful of columnists and war correspondents, few seem to care about the larger Syrian calamity, which the United Nations has called the worst refugee crisis in that institution’s history. And even fewer call for a humanitarian intervention to stop the Assad regime from slaughtering its own people and flooding the region with desperate refugees…

While Americans may be encouraged by Obama’s assertion that “the tide of war is receding,” the greater Middle East—Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen—is in turmoil; the Taliban rules in many parts of Afghanistan; Pakistan’s border regions are still ungoverned; Iran’s nuclear program marches on; and North Korea has just restarted its plutonium production in order to multiply its nuclear-weapons capability. If America is not to be the indispensable nation any longer, as President Obama has signaled, and if liberal internationalism is in decline, who and what will substitute for American leadership on this vast array of global challenges? For the people of Syria, meanwhile, the question is more immediate: will anyone even try to stop the slaughter?

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