My comment was not clearly stated. What I meant was the right U.S. leadership.
It's not about nation-building, though. Who's talking about that now? It has more to do with not letting ISIS or al-Qaeda or pro-Iranian forces take over the rubble and use it as a base for further attacks.
"No nation-building" is a hollow slogan nowadays. It's what politicians accuse their opponents of doing while they do pretty much the same thing themselves.
What are the alternatives? Either we find some native force to re-establish order (which involves something very like nation-building) or we do it ourselves with our own troops or allies from the region, or we hightail it back home and our intervention is accused of being a failure or futile or counter-productive.
I notice that Ted Cruz did vote against ground intervention in Syria, and that supports the writer's argument. But I'm not sure that he'd behave all that differently from Rubio or another possible president if he were elected. The difference between what politicians say when they're running for office and what they do when they get in is very familiar by now.