The passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile is a major victory for U.S. diplomacy. It came about by implementing some of the major lessons of the post-Cold War decades -- the importance of force to back up diplomacy and a willingness to use force outside the UN context. Now President Barack Obama must use these lessons in the endgame. But he must also apply a third lesson: keeping the world’s attention on the much more important, and harder, task of ending the civil war.
I’m wary of tactical victories. Throughout much of the 1990s, I watched senior officials at the White House and the capitals of Europe celebrate small diplomatic victories. All too often, this seeming progress ended up distracting leaders from the more difficult task of devising and implementing strategies to stop killings at their source.
