WE WOULD like to thank Patrick Buchanan, Leslie Gelb and Marc Lynch for their thoughtful responses to our piece.

All of them tackle the crux of the argument in their answers: Does the intervention in Libya represent a paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy, or was it a one-off aberration? All of them lean toward the latter rather than the former. It is a fair assessment. Indeed, as the Libyan operation was winding down, the United States was simultaneously pushing forward with a strategy of engaging the government engendered by the long-reviled and sanctioned military junta in Myanmar, in part due to a geopolitical strategy of competing for influence with a rising China throughout Southeast Asia. Seen through an East Asian prism rather than a North African one, U.S. policy indeed seems to be guided more by realist considerations—validating Buchanan’s contention that “neither realists nor anti-interventionists are out of this game.”

But it is also clear that there has been a shift since 2009, when U.S. foreign policy was characterized by the Carnegie Endowment’s Thomas Carothers as a “stepping back” from promoting U.S. values, defined more by “a broader effort to improve U.S. diplomatic engagement with a variety of nondemocratic governments.” Buchanan and Gelb both suggest that a form of “buyer’s remorse” over the direction that revolutions have taken in Libya and Egypt will reinforce those earlier pragmatic tendencies. Conversely, the United States may have to learn, as Lynch suggests, to adjust to a series of new regimes in the Middle East that have become far less accommodating to U.S. interests. The U.S. experience over the last decade with both Turkey and Pakistan suggests that Washington may still be unprepared for “engaging with hostile publics,” in Lynch’s words, where and when they have become empowered.

Will there be more interventions after Libya? We agree with Lynch that the United States will decline to intervene in many instances; as we noted in the original piece, the shift we have charted “is not categorical or complete.” We concur with Gelb that large land-based operations à la Iraq or Afghanistan are off the table, in the spirit of the advice colorfully proffered by Robert Gates at West Point in February 2011: “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined.’” But we believe that the acceptable threshold for any sort of action has been lowered by the perceived success of the Libya operation.

How should we read the Defense Strategic Guidance (DSG) released by the Obama administration in January? Christopher Layne, writing in the online edition of this magazine, argues that the document “is the first move in what figures to be a dramatic strategic retrenchment by the United States over the next two decades.” He suggests that America, in the future, will “refrain from fighting wars for the purpose of attaining regime change.” But Layne acknowledges that the DSG still asserts “that America’s global interests and military role must remain undiminished” and labels this as a point of “intellectual dissonance.”

But if the DSG is read from a postrealist perspective, it becomes a blueprint for what we might label “smart interventionism”: leveraging America’s expeditionary firepower capabilities of the U.S. Air Force and Navy and placing a greater emphasis on special and irregular forces to provide a light land footprint. To use University of Kentucky professor Robert Farley’s turn of phrase, this enables proponents of intervention to make “a case for cheap, easy, painless war against distant foes.”

Gelb notes some of the technical and geographical limitations for these types of “low-cost” interventions, particularly for drones. But we cannot neglect their political attractiveness. Recall General James Jones’s memorandum to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of August 2001, when Jones was commandant of the Marine Corps, outlining why continuing with the no-fly zones over Iraq was becoming increasingly untenable. Citing the growing probability that American personnel would be killed or captured over Iraq, Jones noted, “We need to ensure the risk we are directing our aircrews to take is consistent with the end state we desire to achieve.” By their very nature, drones take out of the equation the need to put American lives in jeopardy—which may encourage rather than diminish opportunities to utilize them.

In the same way, a decade of beefing up irregular-warfare capabilities to combat terrorism has handed President Obama options that he may be more inclined to use in a series of small-scale interventions. The dispatch of special forces to Uganda last fall to assist East African states in combating the insurgency of the Lord’s Resistance Army—which is certainly very destructive for the states of the region but does not pose any serious threat to vital U.S. interests—and the use of a SEAL team in a hostage-rescue operation directed against Somali pirates-turned-kidnappers (overcoming the long-standing reluctance of the United States to engage onshore in Somalia) raise the question as to whether these will also be exceptions or are setting precedents.

Syria, therefore, becomes the next test case. All the commentators noted that the administration, so far, has eschewed following the Libya intervention to its logical conclusion over the skies of Damascus. Yet it is also important to note how the needle has moved toward intervention over the last several months. We have proposals now on the table for NATO to create and police safe havens and “cities of refuge” for the Syrian opposition. In reluctantly supporting them, the State Department’s former head of policy planning Anne-Marie Slaughter also invokes the “credibility” argument that was marshaled in 1999 in the Kosovo campaign; a failure to act means that

not only will dictators around the world draw their own conclusions, but belief in the U.S. commitment to other international norms and obligations also weakens. . . . The credibility of the U.S. commitment to its own proclaimed values will also take yet another critical hit.

Slaughter acknowledges that “raising the possibility of armed intervention does not mean that intervention is bound to occur.” And it may not. Some of the objections raised by Buchanan to intervening in Syria may indeed guide U.S. policy. Deadlock in the UN Security Council may also provide the excuse that, while the West was prepared to go, action was blocked by Russia and China. But the trump card of the anti-interventionists—invoking the specter of another Iraq—has been diminished. Now, the response to opponents of a proposed intervention will be, “Tell us why it won’t be like Libya”—especially since the realists’ worst-case scenarios about Libya have not, as yet, come to pass, as Lynch noted.

This is why we concur with the assessment of the Naval War College’s Tom Nichols in the aftermath of Libya: “Humanitarian interventions are here to stay, and are going to be driven more by moral calculation and military opportunity than by ‘national interest.’”

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a senior editor at The National Interest and a professor of national-security studies at the U.S. Naval War College. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. The views expressed here are entirely those of the authors.