“If the multilateral institution's set up to do it, the Security Council is being blocked and won't do it, that doesn't mean we should turn our backs and say there's nothing we can do,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week. “And we did it in Bosnia and made a difference; we saved countless numbers of lives. And I believe, Mr. -- the president of the United States believes we can do that now.”

The interventions in Yugoslavia in the 90s and the proposed strikes in Syria are similar in that in both cases, Western countries acted -- or would act -- without the consent of the UN Security Council. And in both, a breaking point had been reached: with Assad, it was chemical weapons, but in Kosovo, NATO had said ethnic cleansing was a “red line,” one that Serbs crossed with the Racak massacre of ethnic Albanians in 1999.

But looking at the picture on the ground, that’s where the parallels end.

First, it’s important to note that what NATO set out to accomplish in Kosovo was much more extensive than what we’re currently contemplating in Syria. NATO forces bombed Yugoslav military sites from the air after disabling the region’s air defenses. So far, Obama and his team have only suggested firing missiles at key sites in Syria from far-away ships, which would require less time and equipment.

Based on the dynamics of the conflicts, here are three major ways Kosovo and Syria differ:

1) Kosovo is in Europe. Obvious, right? But that’s important because it pertains to a big fear that non-interventionists have: That taking any sort of action might further inflame an already tumultuous region. Already, the conflict in Syria is spilling over into neighboring Lebanon and at times even into Turkey, but the Balkan ethnic violence was hemmed in by stable democracies to the north.

“Kosovo is in a much better neighborhood,” Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, told me. “Syria is surrounded by countries that are themselves in the midst of instability, so it’s a much tougher environment for outside powers to tame.”

With Kosovo’s “better neighborhood” comes inducements like NATO and EU membership, which countries can aspire to once they’ve reached a certain level of peace and prosperity. Together, these organizations now contain several former Yugoslav countries.

In fact, one reason for intervening in Kosovo was partly to prevent a bigger conflagration: International organizations worried that, under the threat of ethnic cleansing, Albanians would flee to neighboring countries and spread the region’s ethnic conflict further. In Syria, many analysts have the exact opposite fear.

2) There weren’t really any jihadists in Kosovo. Another big concern is that if the U.S. either purposefully or indirectly pushes the rebels into power in Syria, that the “wrong,” extremist rebels like Jabhat al-Nusra will take charge in the aftermath. That wasn’t an issue in Kosovo because those rebels, the Kosovo Liberation Army, didn’t have a strong extremist contingent and they were a reliable on-the-ground partner.