Robert Golan-Vilella comments on the bad American habit of assuming that foreign events are somehow our responsibility:

Underlying all of this is one of the most common errors in U.S. commentary on international relations: the casual assumption that everything that happens anywhere in the world is ultimately about America, and that when anything bad happens anywhere, someone in Washington must ultimately be to blame. The story that Baker describes on the right—in which America’s failure to use military force in Syria and elsewhere spurred Putin to invade Crimea—has the benefit of being an easy-to-understand and politically convenient one for those who are opposed to the president. But there is simply no reason to think that it is true.

It is even more remarkable how quick so many hawks are to blame the U.S. for undesirable events abroad when they are usually the last to acknowledge U.S. responsibility for any of its own actions in the world. As long as the U.S. is behaving aggressively, intrusively, and showing “leadership,” the likes of McCain take for granted that it is all for the best no matter how destructive that behavior may be. Their view of what the U.S. role in the world should and must be requires them to treat virtually every foreign crisis or conflict as a “failure” of American oversight and direction, or at the very least as an opportunity to exercise “leadership,” because they assume that the U.S. can and must influence foreign events in a fairly decisive fashion for the better. If something unfortunate happens, it happened because the U.S. “failed” to prevent or ameliorate it, and that “failure” can be explained only by invoking negligence or “retreat.” According to this warped reasoning, the U.S. can’t be blamed for what it does, but it must always be blamed for doing too little.

As long as it is taken for granted that a hyper-active and hegemonic U.S. is absolutely necessary for maintaining order in the world, any violence or upheaval has to be blamed at least in part on the hegemon that didn’t somehow put a stop to it. Because hegemonists have a grossly exaggerated view of how involved in the world the U.S. is supposed to be, they are bound to treat anything that goes wrong as proof that the U.S. is not involved enough. Then again, blaming U.S. “passivity” can sometimes be a way to distract attention from the things that the U.S. has done wrong in a given region, and those are usually the things that hawks have supported in the past. While this kind of criticism superficially blames the U.S., it is usually just an occasion to demand that the U.S. behave much more aggressively than it already had been and to treat increased hawkishness as a panacea. That is, it becomes an excuse to justify all manner of unwise and provocative U.S. behavior. After all, if one assumes that “passivity” is what made the event possible, the response should be “action,” which hawks conveniently define as whatever they want to do.

The U.S. government is responsible for its rhetoric and actions and for the effects of both, but it can’t be seriously held responsible for the outcomes of most internal disputes and foreign conflicts, especially those in which it had little or nothing at stake. The U.S. becomes responsible for events overseas to the extent that it involves itself directly or indirectly in them, and so it should try to act as carefully and responsibly in its dealings abroad as it possibly can. One part of being careful and responsible in how the U.S. acts overseas is to be very reluctant to interfere, take sides, or otherwise involve itself in foreign disputes and conflicts, and to recognize that the U.S. can often do the most good–or at least the least harm–by remaining impartial and neutral most of the time.