Great article! However I'm a little concerned you mentioned Bosnia and Kosovo and then skip over them saying they are not the conflicts you are most familiar with, this seems a bit disingenuous since you seem very well informed. I would say yes both Bosnia and Kosovo seem much better off than they did in 1992 and 1999 respectively and whenever I talk to survivors they seem to strongly agree. (Acknowledged that the Bosnians and Kosovans I talk to are a those that resettled in the West) You really can't offer an opinion on a matter directly related to the theme of your essay? Definitely the intervention in Libya and Syria were disasters but couldn't the relative successes in Bosnia and Kosovo given some hope (or arrogance) that Libya or Syria situations could be improved. The Assad regime has been particularly brutal both internally and externally for a very long time. Should the West 100% of the time not intervene? When the Arab Spring protesters were demanding basic civil rights should we automatically turn our collective backs on them? Maybe the answer is yes but it would have been good if you tackled that aspect of the issue. Given the facts of the time what would have been a realistic response? Let the authoritarian dictatorships violently snuff out the Arab Spring? And what should we do in the future? The West was criticized for not intervening in Rwanda. It is easy in hindsight to be critical but I'd like to hear a positive realistic plan for how to handle complex international crisis rather than just criticism.