Mario Loyola writing in the National Review:
I can’t wait to read Obama’s White House memoirs. The main reason is that I think I might find in those memoirs some explanation of the reasoning behind his foreign policy. For example, there must be some logical reason why he pushed Hosni Mubarak out of power in Egypt after a few days of mostly nonviolent protests in Cairo, but it took eight months of killing on a massive scale in Syria before he was willing to offend Bashar Assad by calling for him to step down. When a policy seems utterly senseless, it’s usually not because it’s utterly senseless. But every explanation I can think of seems highly implausible.
One of those explanations is based on Obama’s history of mistreating allies (Israel, Colombia, Britain) and bowing to adversaries (Russia, Syria). According to this explanation, Obama combines the qualities of bully and coward. But I don’t buy it. Everyone knows that Obama likes bullying subordinate allies in order to show both how liberal and how tough he is. The bully-coward theory explains his approach to Egypt well enough. Yet I don’t think cowardice, properly so called, can explain his tenderness towards Bashar Assad these many months. There must be something else.
Perhaps the explanation for Obama’s approach to Syria is that Sen. John Kerry got involved, thereby drastically lowering the average intelligence of whatever group of advisers was formulating the policy. This explanation is more convincing than the coward theory. We know that Kerry worked hard to stay the administration’s hand on Syria for months: He had spent the previous two years making secret trips to Damascus for weekend stays at Assad’s palace. Apparently the wives get along famously — and Assad himself was really nice and genuinely interested in being friends with America, if we could only earn his trust.
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