History will remember the Libya war by how it ends, not how it began. And it’s far too early to declare success or failure.

The manner in which the war started though, allows us to draw three broad conclusions: Barack Obama successfully delegated the burden of global policing. Europe, for all its self-flagellation, has been found both willing and capable of leading a campaign that prevented bloodshed in Benghazi. And lastly, NATO continues to be the go-to platform for Europe and the United States to fight wars. The alliance, however, has become a more transactional place in which individual countries pick and choose which missions to support.

The key lesson of the war is that Obama has accomplished one of his top foreign-policy goals: convincing the allies to take greater responsibility for their own affairs. The administration has made clear that the United States, exhausted from fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and economic crisis at home, will be less keen than before to enter new conflicts. “The nation that I am most interested in building is my own,” Obama said in 2009. By implication — in a complete role reversal from the 1990s, when the United States led the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo — the allies in Europe must take primary responsibility for military operations. Read more