How many Syrian refugees should the United States accept? In the wake of terrorist atrocities in Paris, more than half of state governors offered a simple answer: none. Several noted that one of the Parisian attackers may have entered Europe as a refugee via the Aegean island of Leros. In Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s words, to accept such refugees would place his constituents “in harm’s way.” And for what reason? Implicit in the governors’ resistance is the intuition that the United States has no moral obligation to alleviate the suffering of distant foreigners embroiled in a civil war.

Judging by its actions, the federal government likewise perceives no obligation to accept refugees; it occasionally does so as a minimal humanitarian gesture. Just over 2,000 Syrian refugees have been resettled in the United States. Secretary of State John Kerry has urged slightly greater hospitality, proposing that 10,000 be permitted entrance. Yet more than 4 million are displaced externally and nearly 8 million internally, most of them by the regime of Bashar Assad, not by the Islamic State. Around half are children, implausible triggers of security panic.

Americans might be more welcoming if we felt we bore some responsibility for the crisis. But the common assumption, implicit in Kerry’s apparent generosity and the governors’ risk-aversion, is that we don’t. In the mid-1970s, the end of the American war in Southeast Asia catalyzed an exodus for which the United States took responsibility, but that was then and this is now.

True enough. Syria today is not Vietnam circa 1976. Nevertheless, careful examination shows that the United States has shaped the Syrian war in ways that have intensified the violence and fostered greater displacement. By encouraging conflict just as it turned violent, making uncompromising demands that undermined the possibility of a negotiated international settlement, and using military force in a way that channels the Assad regime’s forces toward civilian populations, the United States has entangled itself in the Syrian refugee crisis. In light of these facts, even narrow conceptions of global justice saddle the United States with an obligation to refugees far beyond what has been acknowledged so far.

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