Max Boot makes an extremely tedious claim:

If you want to see what a post-American world looks like, Syria is it. This is what lack of American leadership produces: a catastrophe of unimaginable and growing scale.

This is more of the same perverse thinking that I responded to last week. Interventionists are generally indifferent to the catastrophes and humanitarian crises caused by U.S. “leadership” and action, but they are quick to blame the U.S. for the harm done by conflicts in which the U.S. is less involved. Specifically, interventionists are eager to pin the damage from the conflict in Syria on a “lack of leadership” from the U.S., which presupposes that the U.S. could have prevented it by providing more “leadership.” This identifies “leadership” with military intervention in foreign conflicts, and treats such intervention as the default, proper response to any conflict, and if a president “fails” to respond in this way he is charged with “not leading.”

This holds the U.S. responsible for the abuses and wrongdoing of other governments because the U.S. has “failed” to stop their behavior, but lets the U.S. off the hook for things that it and its allies and clients actually do. Interventionists don’t fault the U.S. and its allies and clients for the support they have provided to anti-regime forces, despite the fact that this support has contributed to and intensified the conflict, but they do object when the U.S. refrains from direct military action. Of course, more outside intervention in Syria would produce more refugees, more civilian casualties, and more devastation overall, but then the plight of civilians in Syria or anywhere else is beside the point for most interventionists.

Boot laments that Syria’s suffering is what a “post-American world looks like,” but this isn’t credible for many reasons. While the U.S. may be less involved in the Syrian conflict than many hawks would like, it has been involved to some degree for years, and its clients have been even more deeply involved. If the world has become “post-American,” our foreign policy hasn’t taken that into account very well, since the U.S. keeps trying to “shape” events in other countries that it should be leaving alone. The U.S. can’t control and can’t be held responsible for all events around the world, but should be held responsible primarily for how it conducts itself in the world.

There have been worse wars and humanitarian crises that took place during America’s so-called “unipolar moment” and some took place with the tacit approval of Washington. The wars in Congo claimed millions of lives, and the wars and their aftermath have inflicted enormous suffering on the civilian population there for most of the last twenty years, and those wars were launched by U.S. clients with the blessing of the U.S. There are also multiple other recent examples of countries that have been similarly ruined thanks in large part to direct military intervention by the U.S. and/or its allies and clients. Libya and Iraq are the obvious examples, and Yemen is another. These countries were not saved or helped by U.S. demonstrations of “leadership,” but have been wrecked through the reckless and destructive interference of outside governments. The U.S. is certainly far more responsible for the disasters stemming from its “leadership” and the actions of its clients than it is for things that it “failed” to prevent, and to blame the U.S. for such “failure” takes for granted that it was within the power of the U.S. to put a stop to a foreign civil war at an acceptable cost.