Fight this war, not the last one

JUST a decade ago, a short season in the ebb and flow of global influence, economics was in thrall to the Washington consensus and geopolitics was a wholly owned subsidiary of the hyperpower run out of the White House. Today, before launching an attack to punish Syria’s Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons, Barack Obama has felt bound to seek the blessing of Congress (see article). Britain has failed to stand alongside its closest ally (see article). The Middle East echoes to talk of America’s diminished leadership. And one of Mr Obama’s aides has briefed that the strike will be “just muscular enough not to get mocked”.

America has often let atrocities go unpunished before. In the 1980s it sent no missiles when Saddam Hussein gassed Kurds and Iranians; nor did it do so when Mr Assad’s father, Hafez, massacred as many as 20,000 of his own people. But that was back in the cold war, when Saddam was fighting Iran and before the ban on chemical weapons had been buttressed by a UN convention. Moreover, Mr Obama declared last summer that he would not tolerate Syrian use of chemical weapons. With more than a thousand dead in a nerve-agent attack that, it now turns out, was just the latest of many, the president rightly concluded that Syria was testing America’s capacity to impose its will.