You raise a very general question about the responsibility to protect that I think is important to clarify. It is a principle that encompasses a broad range of measures that in some ways, if you think about the spectrum, including prevention, can even be non-coercive at a very early stage.
Very interestingly—this is just a bit of a tangent, because I was struck by that statement in the strategic concept about prevention—all of the world's watch lists about countries that were prone to either mass atrocities or conflict prior to 2011 included Syria in their top 10. None of them included Libya. Now, what does that tell us about our current capacity to monitor situations of concern and feed that information through to policy-makers and then act on the information we have?
Syria was consistently on these lists. That's my point about prevention. If we're serious about it, are we actually prepared to consider a range of actions? By the way, just because they're preventive doesn't mean they won't be threatening to state sovereignty. There's often this assumption that prevention is somehow warm and fuzzy and less difficult, but it can very often be incredibly intrusive.
The responsibility to protect includes a whole host of actions, only one of which includes military force, so to me the failure to authorize military intervention in Syria does not spell the failure of the responsibility to protect. The very fact that we are discussing atrocities, that there have been commissions of inquiry, that there have been very serious financial sanctions put in place, that there are now attempts to try to buttress the opposition and encourage them to consolidate and work together—all of these are ways of implementing the responsibility to protect.
Now, many of you will say, “Ah, but what good are any of them if you don't intervene militarily?” Well, at the end of the day you're making a probabilistic assessment as to whether you can do more harm than good through military intervention, and you have to make a prudent calculation about that. I think up that until very recently the prudent calculation was that intervention might cause more harm than it would actually address, but what we've been seeing over the past few weeks in Turkey is that we have to factor in the costs of inaction. It's precisely what you mentioned: this gradual spillover is now creating a new set of challenges.
Therefore I think that when policy-makers make those probabilistic assessments—which, by the way, are part of the responsibility to protect but also are part of good policy-making in NATO—they have to consider the implications of both action and inaction.