Missing from Obama’s foreign policy speech: the peace process and the fire in his belly

 According to Chemi Shalev, the critics that Obama confronted at West
Point are also Israel’s strongest allies: Those who see international
diplomacy as weakness and military intervention as the only sign of
strength.

Syria, as always, is the bane of Obama’s life, his Achilles’ heel. It was the retreat last year from his clear-cut commitment to punish Syria for using chemical weapons that placed support for his foreign policy on such a slippery slope; it was his failure to intervene in the ongoing mass murder of Syrians that distanced him from his interventionist liberal wing, and it is in Syria, as he said Wednesday, where the next great threat of anti-American terror is breeding. But it was Syria that was the undoing of the speech as well, when Obama failed to live up to the hype that he would proclaim American training and arms for anti-Assad rebels. Obama tried to set down a third way between isolationists at any costs and interventionists no matter what, though by the standards of his critics he was simply pulling back and surrendering.

Missing from Obama’s foreign policy speech: the peace process and the fire in his belly - Diplomacy and Defense Israel News | Haaretz