Is Obama Really 'Abandoning' Syria's Rebels?

The U.S. really did give Hungarians and Cuban exiles the false expectation that the U.S. would back them up, and in the Cuban case it was an American-sponsored operation that never had any realistic chance of success. Those could fairly be called instances of “seduction and abandonment.” When Ignatius says that “policymakers often get cold feet,” he means that the U.S. refused to escalate the situation by attacking another country when the rebels started to lose. By all accounts, the Syrian uprising started without U.S. encouragement, and it continued despite explicit public statements that the U.S. wouldn’t be repeating anything like its Libyan intervention there. The Libyan war may have given many Syrian rebels the false impression that the U.S. would go to war on their behalf. If so, they were very much mistaken.