The Dumb 'Red Line' Argument Won't Die

If Obama had followed through on the threat to bomb Syria, he would have been breaking international law and violating the U.N. Charter.

David Lammy’s case for “progressive realism” includes this delusional claim:

The fact that the United States did not police its redline against the use of chemical weapons in Syria not only entrenched Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s monstrous regime; it also emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin. He concluded that the West no longer had the stomach to defend the rules-based order [bold mine-DL] and, by annexing Crimea, applied the logic of what David Miliband, another former Labour foreign secretary, has called “the age of impunity.”

It is silly to think that choosing not to bomb Syria in 2013 encouraged Russia to act aggressively somewhere else later on. This is another tired appeal to the dumbest version of the hawkish credibility argument. I won’t waste my time or yours explaining once again why the world doesn’t work this way. The more important error is Lammy’s claim that bombing Syria in 2013 would have had something to do with defending the “rules-based order.”