Syria: Exhibits A to Z
Nowhere is the charge of passivity and abandonment more likely to stick than in Syria.
I've supported the president's risk-averse approach on Syria, largely because the endgame the United States wants -- a liberal, secular, pro-Western Syria -- is beyond America's capacity to achieve from the outside and not worth the risk of a more muscular intervention that would require the United States to be on the inside. Splitting the difference by thinking America can get what it wants by arming this or that rebel group in a sea of competing rebel groups and external actors for which Syria is truly vital is, well, laughable.
History may prove much less sympathetic, however. Syria's isn't Obama's Rwanda. But the killing -- and the passive reaction of the entire international community -- will raise inevitable questions about what more could have been done.
It won't help the president's case that key members of his national security team recommended doing more and he overruled them. It may not be remembered that "more" would barely have altered the military arc of the conflict.
It's lonely at the top. And the president will be criticized on moral, humanitarian, and strategic grounds for not doing more. Plenty of circumstances could still bring America into Syria, particularly the use of chemical weapons on a large scale. But barring some heroic, improbable intervention that brings down the Assads and stabilizes the country, it's hard to see how Obama could create a counternarrative to the judgment history is likely to bestow on him.
Iran
Obama stands to be the U.S. president who either allows Iran to get a nuclear weapon, is the first to bomb the country, or becomes the guy who cuts an interim deal that keeps the mullahs a few years away from nuclear nirvana. That last scenario, by the way, comes with ready-made tensions with Netanyahu, with whom Obama just mended fences. The Israeli prime minister will wonder how a limited tactical deal on enrichment fixes Israel's strategic problem with prospective Iranian nukes. It also offers no real guarantees that the Israelis -- unhappy with a diplomatic outcome -- don't at some point resort to military action on their own. If he's really lucky, he gets out of town before Iran gets the bomb, and then it's the next president's headache.
Not a terribly appetizing menu for the legacy buffet. A military strike could make Obama look strong, but there are those pesky, unpredictable repercussions, including plunging financial markets, skyrocketing oil prices, and escalating regional tensions. A grand bargain in which the mullahs gave up their nuclear weapons ambitions and began to work with the West toward a more stable Middle East would make the president look like a genius. But it's an outcome he's unlikely to see.
The reality is that Iran -- followed by North Korea -- is probably the most difficult puzzle in the international system today. There are no happy endings or comprehensive solutions. And for this president, who has publicly vowed not to allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, the ironies abound. Think about this: His predecessor went to war against Iraq, a war Obama strongly opposed, because of imaginary weapons of mass destruction, only to strengthen and embolden an Iran that could cross some significant nuclear threshold on Obama's watch.
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