In the previous issue of The National Interest, Nikolas Gvosdev and Ray Takeyh warned about the “triumph of the new Wilsonism” spurred on by the Libyan intervention. Leslie Gelb responds in the new issue:

In sum, I think a good case can be made that we are not entering a period where the floodgates to intervention are opening but a period where floodgates are probably closing. I see increasing caution and opposition to intervention worldwide, and especially in the United States.

Pat Buchanan made a similar argument:

However, to contend that Libya represents a “template for future limited interventions,” a “paradigm shift” or a “doctrine” that may reduce realists to political irrelevance goes more than a bridge too far.

For Libya seems less a rule than an aberration.

Buchanan and Gelb are most likely correct. When the Libyan war began, Gideon Rachman said that it was more likely that it represented the “last hurrah” of Western interventionism rather than the beginning of a new era of it. We may hope he was right. Restraint seems to be prevailing this year despite constant agitation for some sort of Western-led or Western-backed Syrian war.

Compared to what the U.S. and major European powers were willing to do in the 1990s, there appears to be much less political will for large-scale, sustained interventions in foreign conflicts. That is because of reduced fiscal resources, the drain on military resources caused by Iraq and Afghanistan, and the related loss of public support for wars of choice. Despite greater formal consensus in support of the idea of the “responsibility to protect” just a few years ago, Gelb is right that there is much less support for military intervention in Western states than there used to be and there is virtually none at all elsewhere. As for Syria, there appears to be a growing international consensus (rejected by three of the Republican presidential candidates) that even providing military aid to the opposition there would be a serious mistake that would worsen conditions in the country. Regional governments may want to fight a proxy war in Syria, but there does not seem to be much appetite among Western governments for one.

On the other hand, intervening in Libya seemed very unlikely up until the last few days before it happened. At this time last year, the idea that the U.S. and our allies were going to attack Libya seemed implausible if not absurd. The administration was being hammered by interventionist critics for its inaction, and for once it seemed as if the U.S. would not be involved in yet another unnecessary conflict. In a matter of days, all of that was turned on its head. The bombing began just a few weeks after it appeared that there would be neither U.N. authorization for military action nor U.S. involvement. Public support for the war was always very weak, but the administration simply ignored this and it waged the war without receiving approval from Congress. That suggests that future administrations may be able commit the U.S. to new foreign wars similar to the one fought in Libya on very short notice without encountering much serious resistance.

For that reason, I’m less persuaded by the argument that the U.S. wouldn’t repeat something like the Libyan intervention if Obama were no longer President. Later in his response, Buchanan asked:

Would President Romney back the ouster of a pro-American autocrat facing mass demonstrations if the successor regime might be Islamist? Has any Republican candidate offered Libya as a model?

If we assume that Romney’s positions on the administration’s policies towards Mubarak and Gaddafi tell us what he would be likely to do in office, the answer to both of these questions has to be yes. Unlike Santorum, Romney has not railed against Obama for giving up on Mubarak. On the contrary, Romney called for the administration to pressure Mubarak to step aside just a week after the protests in Cairo began. Romney’s position on Libya has been less clear-cut, but on the whole he supported the intervention while faulting Obama for the way that he managed it. Based on what he has said about Libya, he favored a more aggressive U.S. role in the conflict, and he has been pushing for providing weapons to the Syrian opposition. Romney would not cite the Libyan war as it was fought as a model, but he agreed with the decision to intervene, which suggests that he would probably be willing to order similar military action.