When the United States speaks, the world listens. Despite the heated global rhetoric, this is undeniable: President Obama’s threat of military action in Syria — and his subsequent request that the congressional authorization vote be postponed — has exacerbated existing crises and thrown the region into a frenzy.

In his address to the nation on Tuesday, Obama spoke of noble intentions, among them, to “stop children from being gassed to death” and to “make our own children safer over the long run.” Amidst the waves of criticism Obama has received for his handling of the Syrian crisis, these intentions must not be ignored. But if these are truly the president’s motives for military intervention, the United States must rethink the consequences of its actions, both past and future, in charting the most effective course forward.

This is hardly the first time Obama, himself a parent, has played to the emotions of Americans by referencing children. In national debates on gun control, education and economic reforms, America’s youth are a constant in the president’s rhetoric. For the most part, these references are appropriate, thoughtful and — in the sense of gaining votes — effective. It is therefore no surprise that Obama would frame his Syria appeal to the American public in the same terms; as he has repeatedly emphasized, among the thousand victims of the August chemical weapons attack in Damascus were several hundred children.

Yet somehow overlooked in the Obama administration’s statements are the signs of a far greater issue, of which Damascus is merely one symptom: mass migration on levels that international news agencies have deemed a refugee crisis. As many as one million children have become displaced, many abandoned by parents living in extreme poverty, left to live and work illegally on the streets in deplorable conditions. Predictably, the very real threat of U.S. strikes has only increased the rates of displacement, with children sent into neighboring Lebanon — 20 miles from Damascus — by fathers preparing to fight. The notion that, if it were approved, a strike in Damascus would help these children is lit- tle short of insane.

Taking at face value President Obama’s claim that the United States’s national security is indeed at stake, it is also difficult to see how a strike in Syria would “make our own children safer.” Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his remarkable and polarizing op-ed in Thursday’s The New York Times, is not the first to suggest that the proposed strike “would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism,” likely in reference to the Hezbollah group affiliated with Iran, one of Assad’s closest allies.

Obama’s frequent reassurance that no country poses a credible military threat to the United States does little to reassure America’s children or parents against the threat of extra-governmental retaliation, and there is clear evidence to suggest that, with provocation, this threat is real.

Developments in the past week have made two things clear. With confirmation of the United Nations’s receipt of documents declaring Syria’s intent to sign onto the international chemical weapons ban, it’s becoming increasingly evident that diplomacy is possible. And the United States’s reactions to these rapidly changing circumstances — and their increasingly grave ramifications for the people of Syria — are making painfully obvious that whatever decisions America ultimately makes, the consequences of its actions will be felt around the globe.