Red Lines Matter - NYTimes.com BERLIN - Europe knows, and this city in particular, about the importance of American "red lines." West Berlin, caught for more than four decades 100 miles within the Soviet occupation zone, survived on the credibility of the U.S. commitment to it, demonstrated by the Allied airlift in response to the Soviet blockade of 1948. A shattered Europe became whole, free and prosperous under the shield of U.S. credibility. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty spelled out that an armed attack against one member "shall be considered an attack against them all." This was believable enough to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe. American credibility in Asia has played a substantial part in the rapid but peaceful rise of China, a power shift of a kind that has seldom, if ever, occurred in world history without major conflict. China believes in the U.S. defense commitment to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. America has been the offsetting power allaying the tensions of China's emergence. It is the credibility of the United States as a European and Asian and Middle Eastern power that underwrites global security. In the Americas, the crisis that began in October 1962 with the presentation of evidence to President John F. Kennedy of Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba, 90 miles off the Florida coast, provided a stern test of U.S. credibility. Kennedy, like President Barack Obama over Syria, took his time before declaring: "It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." In the end, Moscow backed down. Syria is not part of Moscow's imperium in the way Cuba was, and Syria does not present anything resembling the threat to the United States of the Cuban missile crisis. Still, President Bashar al-Assad is Moscow's man and Syria has become a critical test of American power. Nobody, to my knowledge, bequeathed Syria in perpetuity to the Assad family. But let's set that aside for the moment - and Hama, and the 100,000 dead of the past 30 months, and the more than two million refugees. It is not easy to overlook the crimes of a leader who will so slaughter and scatter his own. But let's try, because a global question of overriding importance has now arisen out of Syria. That is the question of the enduring credibility of the American "red lines" that have been a foundation of the post-1945 world order. Obama drew one last year on the use of chemical weapons in Syria. France has declared that the Aug. 21 chemical attack near Damascus "could not have been ordered and carried out by anyone but the Syrian government," the same conclusion the U.S. government has reached. The gas, the munitions, the target, the intelligence and the history all point to the regime. As for motive, it may as well be asked what motivation prompted Assad to acquiesce to the slaughter or dispersal of several million of his citizens. Syria, in the words of Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking of the chemical attack, has become a "moral obscenity." The man bearing ultimate responsibility for that obscenity is Assad. Values cannot be all of foreign policy; perhaps they cannot even be a quarter of it; but a U.S. foreign policy stripped entirely of values is no longer American. U.S. authority is tied to its moral stature as a state of laws committed to freedom. It is equally tied to the credibility of its word. In Syria the two inextricable strands of U.S. foreign policy - values and realpolitik - have come together. That is the kernel of the matter now before Congress. As Senator John McCain has said, a no vote in Congress on a U.S. military riposte to the chemical weapons attack would be "catastrophic" for the United States and its credibility in the world. If Assad can thumb his nose at America anyone can, including the Islamic Republic of Iran. My initial response to Obama's decision to seek congressional support and to the long delay involved was that it betrayed a by-now familiar hesitancy. I have reconsidered: This is a necessary post-9/11 rebalancing from the dangerous "unbound powers" of the presidency of which Obama has spoken, powers that opened the way to the compromising of America's "basic values" to which he also alluded this year. American interests and values are aligned in requiring that Assad answer for his acts. Because Syrian diplomacy is now backed for the first time by the credible threat of force, it may even produce something over the next 10 days. But I doubt it. In that case, Congress must assume its responsibilities. Three days into the Cuban missile crisis, Gen. Curtis LeMay of the U.S. Air Force suggested the president's refusal to order immediate air strikes on the Soviet missiles was "almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich." He had mistaken Kennedy's deliberation for indecision. The U.S. red line was upheld - as it must be in Syria today.