While France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said Thursday that there would be unspecified intervention, though nothing as drastic as a ground operation, Washington’s stance on intervention in the wake of the attack remains unclear.

Last week, Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a letter to Congress that strongly suggested that the U.S. would not intervene. “Syria today is not about choosing between two sides but rather about choosing one among many sides,” he said. “It is my belief that the side we choose must be ready to promote their interests and ours when the balance shifts in their favor. Today, they are not.”

Has the attack on Ghouta crossed Obama’s “red line,” and will it spur intervention by international governments?

Emile Hokayem, senior fellow for regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies: 

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The likelihood of strikes has gone up now, but they’re not necessarily going to happen. Fundamentally, the West and the U.S. in particular remain reluctant to intervene in any direct way. The kind of air and missile strikes that the U.S. are thinking of will probably not be a game changer that will profoundly shift the balance on the ground. So we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.

What Assad has done over the last two years is to pursue a strategy of escalation that was meant to numb us, to render us almost insensitive to these kinds of crimes. It’s a strategy of gradual escalation in violence. We’re at the point where people a year ago remember the Houla massacre of May 2012, but no one remembers the massacre of Jdeidet Fadel a couple months ago. Outrage is fading.

Assad has broken several taboos and nothing has happened. The impact abroad is that [outrage] is becoming very minimal. You would have expected much greater outrage at the use of chemical weapons, with such graphic images like kids choking in front of a camera. But the [global] outrage is not close to the magnitude of the crime committed.

It speaks to the numbness, to the wariness [about Syria] that has descended on Western publics. In a way Assad could get away with [more chemical weapons attacks]. He is fighting on his own terms, on his own timing. The question of how this could have happened when U.N. investigators were inside Syria is marginal. He couldn’t possibly have done it because the U.N. was in Syria then? Why are we assuming that a small group of foreign observers is going to matter in Assad’s existential calculations? We exaggerate the deterrence value of these observers.

The White House is behind and has made itself irrelevant in a way by its lack of decision, its garbled communications, its lack of coordination and synchronization between its diplomatic approach and its decision to arm some rebels with some weapons. We are at a point where the U.S. is marginal, almost irrelevant, to the dynamics of a conflict that has a deeper humanitarian, regional and strategic impact than the Iraq war. I don’t think that the U.S. is that important anymore, it has removed itself from the game.

Yesterday’s statement about chemical weapons came from the deputy press spokesman. [U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.] Samantha Power wasn’t at the U.N. discussion yesterday. She tweeted about it, but she wasn’t there during the debate. You’re also dealing with a U.S. that doesn’t want [intervention] and in a pretty perverse way is almost relieved that there’s paralysis on the Security Council because it means they’re not compelled to act.

I don’t think Arab governments can do anything on their own. They don’t have the military or diplomatic tools to do something about this, and they are too divided. There is bad blood between Saudis and Qataris, Saudis and Turks. If in coming days we see clear evidence of the use of chemical agents, perhaps they will do something. But I’m skeptical. Time is on Assad’s side; the ambiguity and denial that come with chemical weapons use is itself a weapon in Assad’s hands.

Could we see some limited strikes? Perhaps, but probably just a symbolic response, not to change the dynamics of the conflict. This [attack on Ghouta] isn’t going to lead to intervention.

Steven Heydemann, senior advisor for Middle East Initiatives, United States Institute for Peace:

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This has the potential to be a game changer, but I think there is a significant resistance, especially from the White House, to a significant shift in U.S. and Western policy towards Syria.

The strong preference of the Obama administration would be to avoid any shift in its current policy towards Syria. If there is confirmation that some kind of chemical agent was used, and it’s very hard to imagine otherwise at this point, I think [the Obama administration] will find itself forced to take some kind of steps in response, but my sense is from the administration’s perspective, the best kind of steps to take would be those that do not in any way expand or deepen U.S. engagement in Syria.

This event has not affected the factors that are shaping the policy decisions of the administration. There is no public pressure on the White House to take further action on Syria. However, if it is determined that the Assad regime has caused between 500 and 1,000 civilian deaths with the use of some kind of toxic substance, I am not sure that those obstacles will be able to prevent the escalation of pressure to act. We would then have a regime that was confirmed in its use of the most heinous weapons it possesses, and I think that would have to affect the political calculations of the governments that support the opposition.

What that means is less clear, but I think that there are events that can overwhelm the obstacles that are currently impeding more decisive action. We don’t know if this will turn out to be the one, but I think it really is going to put the White House and other governments under enormous pressure.