By Fareed Zakaria
When the Obama administration was selling the case for military action against Syria, it used every argument it could come up with, from preserving international norms to preventing another Holocaust. Most of these were exaggerations or bad history, but one could have dangerous consequences for U.S. foreign policy.
Almost every senior U.S. official–President Obama, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel–asserted in some way that we had to act militarily in Syria to preserve U.S. credibility with Iran. There is a mountain of scholarship in international relations that has carefully examined the notion of maintaining credibility–and most of it concludes that there is little gain in doing something simply to maintain credibility. Countries know that circumstances differ wildly in international relations and that what you might do in one situation says very little about what you might do in another, different situation. You really don't need to attack country A to let country B know that you're a tough guy.
