Spencer Ackerman reports on NATO’s Libya-induced R2P fatigue:

In interviews here, NATO officials are quick to claim the win, and understandably so. But lurking behind that alacrity is a subtle recognition that this war required some serious exogenous events to break NATO’s way. There’s palpable relief that this thing is over, even before the pride in knowing that it ended in such a way that NATO can claim potency and relevance. Without those exogenous events — the rebel rush east from beleaguered Misurata, instead of the expected push west into Tripoli from Benghazi — NATO might still be bombing Gadhafi, until the coalition cracked up from the strain. No wonder no one here wants to try again against Bashar Assad.

Put another way, NATO got lucky, and the alliance doesn’t want to try its luck (or risk new rifts in the alliance) again, especially not so soon after the end of the Libyan war. That’s a wise decision.

Concerning the need for a a U.N. mandate, the architects of R2P were explicit and unequivocal that U.N. authorization in some form was essential. They left some room for alternatives to Security Council authorization (e.g., “uniting for peace”), but R2P isn’t R2P without U.N. authorization.

David Bosco notes that there is a related concept that the permanent members should refrain from using the veto power in these cases. The architects of R2P described original version of this idea this way:

The Permanent Five members of the Security Council should agree not to apply their veto power, in matters where their vital state interests are not involved [bold mine-DL], to obstruct the passage of resolutions authorizing military intervention for human protection purposes for which there is otherwise majority support.

It’s that “vital state interests” qualification that is creating difficulties in the Syrian case. Russia is currently resisting U.N. draft resolutions that don’t explicitly authorize military intervention, so it is hard to imagine them agreeing not to veto a resolution that does.