The new president will face a crescendo of voices in Washington DC urging a restart to American interventions abroad.

The decade after 2001 saw US military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, with the relative failure of the aftermath of the Libyan intervention leading President Obama to adopt a more soft-power approach. Adam Weinstein writes that despite previous disastrous interventions, whoever enters the White House next January will face a chorus of calls from DC-based think-tanks for the US to become involved in the Syrian civil war, demands that the new Commander in Chief may find difficult to ignore.