Syrian Rebels Put Their Hopes in a Romney Win

There are some reasons to think that Romney would be more likely to favor direct military intervention in Syria in the future, but even if Romney were to win I think the Syrian opposition would be unpleasantly surprised in the near term. The political obstacles to direct intervention haven’t changed, and the prospect of any sort of prolonged, ill-defined involvement in another country’s conflict is presumably unappealing to the U.S. military. If Romney allows himself to be pressured into a Syrian war, which he very well might, I suspect that it would initially resemble first-term Clinton policy in the Balkans rather than the more abrupt decisions to intervene in Syria along the lines of Kosovo or Libya. He would be drawn in one step at a time rather than all at once, but he would eventually yield to the demands of the hawks in his party that he “lead,” which is their way of saying, “start an unnecessary war.”