For a devastating verdict on President Obama’s leadership in the Middle East, nothing can beat this short blog post, titled Fecklessness 101, from the not-partisan Walter Russell Mead. Excerpt: “The President’s string of misjudgments on the Middle East — on the peace process, Erdogan, withdrawal from Iraq, Libya, ISIS as the ‘J.V. team’, and Syria — is one of the most striking examples of serial failure in the annals of American foreign policy.”
It strikes me that there is a single thread going through what Mead characterizes as Obama’s misjudgments: solipsism. Obama seems to assume that foreign adversaries or people in foreign cultures will behave as he would in their place. Linked with that, I suspect, is a belief in the guilt of Western societies and the virtue of those who are often thought of as their victims. Wrong on both counts, in my view — and with disastrous results.
