Obama's policy review identified several themes behind the failure to respond to mass atrocities, all of which can be traced back to the fact that there has been no single agency or group in the U.S. government responsible for monitoring and engaging situations that might lead to such acts. And without such a system, by the time the government realizes there is a problem it could be too late to coordinate an effective U.S. response, much less help coordinate an international response. The proposed cure, therefore, makes perfect sense--if the goal is to intervene much more frequently around the world.

There are at least three reasons to worry about the Atrocities Prevention Board. First, if it works as its creators hope, it will lead to many more interventions in the future. It will create a stronger lobby for interventions within the government, it creates tools that make intervention easier to manage and potentially by raises expectations of aid from endangered people around the world. As PSD-10 states: "Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States."

Again, no one wants more mass atrocities, but many do question the extent to which preventing them is actually a core national-security interest or moral responsibility of the United States. What Obama is calling for will make the default presumption one of U.S. involvement, rather than the opposite.

Now, instead of needing good reasons to intervene, the president will need good reasons not to intervene. This, in turn, leads to a debate that the current executive order does not answer: Which mass killings are we responsible for? All of them? What counts as a mass killing? Why is nine thousand in Syria almost enough to get the United States involved but several million in the Congo was not? Without a clearer articulation of the conditions under which the United States will act to prevent mass killings, this effort starts to look more like political theater and less like sound policy.

Second, a bigger intervention tool kit raises the chances of the United States engaging in conflicts more deeply than planned. Obama argues that without an infrastructure like the one he's building, U.S. options are limited to full-scale intervention or no intervention at all. At one level, he is correct. But at another level, the notion of partial intervention is a myth. Preventing mass atrocities is difficult, dangerous and time consuming. Very few conflicts that involve mass killings are the kind where the nudge of sanctions or vague threats of criminal prosecution are going to get the job done. Yes, there are cases where a relatively small investment of attention and action would have paid huge dividends--Rwanda comes to mind. But for every Rwanda, there are many that look more like Bosnia, Syria, Somalia or Sudan, where problems cannot be fixed without getting deeply involved in resolving multilateral civil conflicts and nation building. In those cases, getting involved at all risks getting involved all the way and, in turn, risks being involved for a very long time at great cost. Given our track record in those sorts of conflicts, I am not sure improving our infrastructure for intervention is a good idea.