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A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with Philip Gordon, who
held the Middle East portfolio at the National Security Council
from 2013 to 2015 (and before that, served as assistant
secretary of state for European affairs) about my Atlantic
article, “The Obama Doctrine.” The piece tried to explain how
the president understands the world, and America’s role in it.
(This week, the president is on a tour of the some of the
countries he discussed in the article.)

Gordon, a loyal Obama man, is, like his ex-boss, somewhat-to-
very fatalistic about the ability of the U.S. to direct the
course of events in the Middle East (“realistic,” rather than
“fatalistic,” is the term the president prefers). Gordon is
known for, among other things, a pithy and concise formula he
developed to explain why President Obama, and many of his
advisers, are so hesitant to engage fully in the various
catastrophes of the Middle East. In Iraq, the Gordon dictum
goes, Obama learned that full-scale invasions leading to regime
change don’t work; in Libya, he learned that partial
interventions leading to regime collapse don’t work; and in
Syria he learned that non-intervention also doesn’t work. An
unspoken but obvious lesson: Once a president reaches this set
of conclusions, can you blame him for wanting to pivot to Asia?

So I was a bit surprised to hear Gordon tell me that he
believes, in retrospect, that President Obama should have
attacked Syria in retaliation for its use of chemical weapons in
2013. A year earlier, the president drew a “red line” for the
Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad regarding the potential use of
such weapons; a year later, when Assad deployed sarin gas in the
town of Ghouta, killing as many as 1,300 people, Obama set in
motion a strike, but stood down at the last minute, putting the
matter in the hands of Congress. In one of the interviews that
informed “The Obama Doctrine,” the president told me that this
moment was a source of pride for him; he resisted the
pressure—and the temptation—to carry out an operation
preordained by the “Washington playbook.” The “playbook,” in
Obama’s mind, is in part a set of received understandings about
what a president should do in the event of a rogue-state
provocation. Obama argued to me that the Washington playbook is overmilitarized, and is overused.

As we know, the decision to stand down was not a popular one
with America’s allies, who believed that Obama had squandered
U.S. credibility. When a superpower sets a red line, the
thinking goes, it must enforce the red line.

There you have it. Obama is a pussy.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/04/philip- gordon-barack-obama-doctrine/479031/?google_editors_picks=true
 

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