ABSTRACT
American leaders often portray foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil. Political science offers a more nuanced view. Critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy often claim the United States ‘did nothing’ to stop the Assad government from slaughtering civilians to hold on to power. Underlying the view that the US did nothing in Syria is an implicit belief about what causes atrocities. The literature on mass killing thus suggests that if the policy objective is to preserve life in a state facing internal rebellion, providing assistance to the opposition should be avoided. The US continues to have adversarial relationships with many dictatorships, some of which may face domestic uprisings in the future. For too long, Washington has pursued policies in the Middle East that are based on wishful thinking and divorced from a thorough and assimilated understanding of what social science says about mass killing and civil war.
