No it's not. Especially so with the civil wars in the Arab world, they didn't spring up virtually overnight and almost across the board started well away from the capital cities where most expats and embassies/consulates are.

> Give me an example of a developed military that's gone into an armed conflict to rescue citizens. The closest I can think of is the rescuing of hostages. That's not quite the same thing though and very rare.

There are a variety of examples of this by practically every developed country. In the last two decades it's been relatively common in Africa and the Middle East. The US in particular has a number of such cases which can be found in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...

Hostage rescues are very rare, I agree. That's an extreme measure.