Hawks are constantly misjudging how other states perceive U.S. actions and therefore fail to anticipate their reactions. Bombing Syria isn’t going to cow Russia into changing its behavior in Ukraine. If anything, it would provoke Russia to escalate its involvement in Ukraine, and perhaps might trigger Russian actions against other “pro-Western” governments in its vicinity. If Russian leaders see their seizure of Crimea and interference in Ukraine as a sort of payback for Western interventionism in the past, is it likely that they will respond to a new military intervention in the way that our interventionists expect? No, it isn’t.
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