Barack Obama’s Serenity

At the time when some, like Laurent Fabius, the French minister of foreign affairs, are concerned about Syria and predict a third World War, President Barack Obama preserves all his serenity. Rightly so.

The American president is the target of criticism for the way he is handling the Syrian crisis. In 2013, he missed a good opportunity to weigh in on the conflict by accepting a Russian proposal to disarm the Syrian chemical weapon sites instead of bombarding them.

He showed no enthusiasm toward the support offered to the “moderate” rebels, when the Pentagon program aiming to train and arm them failed and was cancelled. He was hesitant and indecisive when faced with the choice to respond to the Russian presence on the ground.

Basically, the president had no strategy. Next to him, Vladimir Putin seems to be a genius with his offensives in Ukraine and Syria. However: Barack Obama does have a strategy.

He became president in January 2009 with one idea in mind: restore the U.S.’s economic, social and political health, a solid foundation to act full force on the international stage. For him, one of the ways to achieve this goal is to stop exhausting the U.S.’s resources on conflicts that cannot be solved.

Henceforth, America will choose its wars. The president has put an end to the American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he unwillingly backed the strikes in Libya, of which we now know the tragic consequences. With Syria, as well as Iran, he sided with diplomacy, no matter the political and diplomatic cost.

And the president remains firm, despite Russia intervening to back Bashar Assad and the anger of his allies in the region, especially Saudi Arabia. Last Sunday, on CBS, he was unambiguous: He wants to avoid getting the U.S. militarily engaged in a conflict where he believes that American forces cannot offer any viable long term solution.

It’s clear that, in Barack Obama’s opinion, the Syrian conflict cannot be solved militarily, and that this was the case since the beginning of the civil war four years ago. “But what we have not been able to do so far, and I’m the first to acknowledge this, is to change the dynamic inside of Syria and the goal here has been to find a way in which we can help moderate opposition on the ground, but we’ve never been under any illusion that militarily we ourselves can solve the problem inside of Syria,” he said.

Consequently, this strategic insight has allowed and still allows him to resist the constant calls to intervene on the ground. This attitude is all the more justified as the principal actors of this drama — Syrian rebels, the regime in Damascus, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, France — have divergent targets and often camp on positions as intransigent as they are irreconcilable.

The president is perfectly aware that the Syrian conflict is likely to last several more years.

He also knows that he’s subscribing to a broader policy where the collapse of states — in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen — the return of Iran, and Turkish and Saudi ambitions announce the parceling out and the recombining of the Middle East. Engaging the U.S. militarily in this maelstrom would be no use.

It’s better to proceed with caution and to think deeply about the consequences. Therein, Barack Obama is the worthy heir of the first American president, George Washington, who, in 1789, refused to yield to the popular calls inviting him to support the French revolutionaries and, thus, refused to be dragged into a situation where the U.S. could not find its place.