As Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime forces crackdown on opposition and protests, the United States should take care to not involve itself directly in enforcing the human rights aims of the United Nations.

An extension of the Arab Spring of earlier this year, protests against President Assad’s regime began in March. According to the BBC, some 2,200 people have died since in violence against protesters.

While ours is the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, we have overstretched our resources since the end of the Cold War 20 years ago, especially in the past decade. The costs of funding two wars, expenditures which are now nearly a decade old, as well as entitlements expansion, tax cuts and ordinary government spending stretched our debt to its limits time after time.

Huge numbers of people in America are tired of fighting; whether the malaise be good or bad, the fact exists: The American people probably have no ambition to wage wars against unjust regimes that prey upon, rather than protect, citizens whose only crime is dissent.

But there are a few things in our toolkit we can use to apply pressure to the Syrian government, to induce it to reconsider the treatment it metes out to its people. Earlier this year, after we imposed economic sanctions on Syria, its government said the sanctions “would not affect Syria’s independent choices and steadfastness.”

We can keep those sanctions in place, and implement new ones.

If Assad’s government and Syria is unaffected by them — if the welfare of the Syrian people is not damaged enough so that they flock to the streets in numbers larger than ever before — then the United Nations can persist in trying to send someone to evaluate the human rights situation.

It is to international organizations such as the United Nations, whose membership consists of nearly every country in the world, that such policing activities should be left. The problem in Syria is not America’s. Nor is it the problem of any other country in its individual capacity.

The problem belongs to us all. Therefore, let an agency whose mission is to act on our behalf handle the situation. The United States has no more stake in Syria than any other country. The Syrians are not our allies. Last year, American exports to Syria totaled just more than $503 million. In 2009, that number was less than $304 million.

Instead of using up our limited resources for the benefit of other countries, without regard to our own needs back home, we should send a message that we will not play policeman for human rights. The United States should not be the only leader in the world. Other countries should step up and band together, taking their own actions to help the U.N. in its mission, if they want to ever be considered leaders on the international scene.