The United States is still engaged in military combat overseas. The conflict is not in Afghanistan, where the US withdrew its forces. Biden went out of his way to avoid military involvement in Ukraine. The place is in Syria.
In response to rocket attacks on bases housing US forces, the Biden administration authorized air strikes against Iranian-backed militant groups. According to reports, the US strikes were quite extensive and deadly, even though only minor injuries to US troops were caused by the militant's rockets.
The war in Afghanistan seemed to last forever, and the war in Ukraine seemed to have fixed the public for the past six months.
When Barack Obama decided not to attack the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in response to the use of chemical weapons, or when Donald Trump chose to respond with force, it generated attention.
There was outrage over the killings of Americans by the Islamic State in 2015, as well as angst over the US decision to "abandon the Kurds" in order to defeat the Islamic State. There was a segment on the war in the 2016 vice president debate.
The Syrian war has not held the attention of the US public.
The war in Syria is not easy to understand. There is a civil war in which various militant and militia groups are fighting against each other. The United States and Russia have both supported the anti-Assad rebels.
The conflict is similar to the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s or the Thirty Years'War of Central Europe in the 1600s.
Unlike the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan or the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US was not a main player in the conflict. Unlike inUkraine, Washington has played a mostly supporting role. Last week, when US troops came under direct attack, it was a rare event. The US involvement in Syria is kept away from the public's attention.
This doesn't mean the US didn't play a role in the beginning of the conflict. The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way, Obama said in 2011. The time has come for President Assad to step down.
The Assad regime may have been afraid of intervention by the United States. The groups began fighting back. The United States trained and armed them. The war was going on, and Obama's statement may have made things worse.
The US was not at all involved in the conflict's main drivers. In the wake of the "Arab Spring" pro-democracy movements that spread across the Middle East and North Africa, the protests against Assad began. The status quo of the movement remained unchanged. Civil wars started in Libya and Yemen.
There is a belief that US interest in the conflict ended when the Islamic State was defeated. Direct US involvement in the war began when the Islamic State rose.
The group took advantage of the turmoil in Syria to gain territory. It attracted a lot of attention in 2015, when it reached its peak territorial control in both Syria and Iraq, as well as being a sponsor of terrorist attacks around the world.
The US-led coalition's victory over the organization suggested that the war was over. That should have ended US involvement in the war. The thing didn't.
The Islamic State gained attention because of the war. Even though the group was defeated, the "ungoverned" spaces created by the fighting in Syria still existed. The US-led coalition has remained in order to prevent the group from coming back.
The justification for the US presence in Syria is not clear to the American public.
The attention of the American public has been focused on the war in Ukraine. In February, Russia did not invade Ukraine.
In that case, the end of US involvement in Afghanistan in August 2021 may have led to more public and congressional calls to end US involvement in other parts of the "Greater Middle East."
At the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Biden administration argued that removing resources from Afghanistan would allow the US to focus those resources elsewhere. The chaotic nature of the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan could have led to calls for the US to reduce its military presence in the region.
It was thought that the Biden administration would follow such a course. Events quickly overtook any plans. The Biden administration was aware of Putin's plan to invade Ukraine and was trying to convince its European allies.
Biden's decision to keep US troops in Syria may have been influenced by the fact that Russia could not fully redeploy its forces to Ukraine.
The United States is so involved in wars and interventions around the world that a conflict involving the US military that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians doesn't register with the American public.
It's possible that this is the price of being an indispensable nation, that a nation can forget one of the conflicts it is involved in.
At the University of Chicago, Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science.
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