For the past two years, Syria has been at war with itself, as their government forces clash daily with armed, civilian rebel groups. When evidence emerged implicating the Syrian government in the chemical weapons usage, the United States has been forced to consider intervention as a policy mechanism to bring peace to Syria. Despite public pledges to intervene if the Syrians were caught using weapons, the United States has decided not to intervene - at least for now. This decision marks a significant deviation from our traditionally liberal American foreign policy, which tends to favor intervention as a policy tool; exhibited by the 2008 invasion of Iraq and more recently, NATO strikes on Libya. Although Liberalism appears to fail in this context, as non-intervention seems to go against the American doctrine of spreading democracy, the decision not to intervene can be explained through a level of liberalism. America's stance of inaction in the Syrian civil war was due to exogenous shifts in the social demands of Americans; away from interventions and toward a type of national isolation. .
Although, that this point, the United States has no plans for a military intervention in Syria, this was not the initial intention of President Barack Obama. On June 13 2013, the Obama administration announced that it would provide military assistance to Syrian rebels, after concluding that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons against the rebel fighters. After much domestic backlash, Obama scrapped that plan in favour of negotiating a deal with Russia, Syria's ally. This is a massive deviation from traditional American policy which viewed the spread of democracy as a key strategic preference. .
However, Obama's decision to not intervene with Syria does not signify a failure of Liberal theory, but rather an exogenous shift in social demands that aggregate to form American foreign policy. This exogenous shift was caused by previous American attempts at interventionism.