I don't think anyone will disagree if I say that France should have intervened in Spain in 1936. Note he date: 1936, to help the Spanish government put down a military mutiny. Couple of hundred thousand lives saved.

What about Yugoslavia, 1991? Note, 1991. i.e. when militias are terrorizing villages, the Yugoslav army is coming apart/turning into a Serbian army, and the Croatian army hardly even exists. As I have suggested, a joint Franco-German intervention would not have been easy, and there probably would have been months of mayhem before they got things locked down, but... tens of thousands of lives saved. It doesn't solve the problems that precipitated the war, but those problems were never serious enough to justify war. Instead of a decade of wars, a decade of establishing a political process for partition of territory.

Perhaps my scenarios are not realistic, but they are a lot more objective than conjectures about future civil wars.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}