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The Obama administration has responded to the Ebola epidemic by talking big. It does that well. From the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti to Syria’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, the administration has made a lot of splashy responses. But making a splash isn’t the same as being serious.

Take the Haitian earthquake, which killed more than 300,000 people. The initial U.S. response, led by the Department of Defense, saved many lives, though analysis by the Rand Corp. found that our success was mostly due to luck: if different buildings had collapsed, the U.S. response would have been much more compromised. But the U.S. mission ended in June 2010.

That left the ongoing United Nations mission in charge. By late 2010, UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal had caused a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 8,000 people. In early 2010, Haiti seemed so important that it got a line in Obama’s State of the Union address. But by late 2012, the United States had disbursed less than a third of its promised aid. The administration ignored the UN’s failure and moved on.

In 2011, after an online video went viral, Obama deployed U.S. forces to Uganda to hunt down Joseph Kony, the murderous leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. In March he reinforced that mission. It would be good to eliminate Kony’s small band of killers. But with neighboring South Sudan on the verge of genocide, Kony is little more than an infamous