President Putin has his boot right on little o obama's neck.
How bad is it for obama?
This bad
Most important, for Obama, all this shop-worn idealism provided legitimacy for behavior that is driven by raw politics––the success of his own presidency and that of his party–– and, along with the bumbling John Kerry, that reveals an astonishing incompetence, if not outright stupidity, about how the most powerful country in the world and source of global order must conduct itself in a dangerous world of hard men who aren’t impressed by outreach, flattery, or prostrations of grief, but only by mind-concentrating action. Is it any wonder that every major world leader and two-bit jihadist gang like the Mullahs in Iran take Obama’s lunch money?
So here we are, with a disaster brewing in Syria because this president shot off his mouth about “Assad must go” and “red line” and “change my calculus,” empty rhetoric unconnected to any thoughtful foreign policy strategy, but useful for pacifying his base and the internationalist do-gooders about his commitment to “responsibility to protect” and the international conventions against chemical weapons. Desperate to escape the railroad tracks he tied himself onto, Obama challenged Congress to vote up or down on military strikes. Then like Dudley Do-Right, Russia’s Putin, seizing on an off-the-cuff, half-baked remark by John Kerry, rescued Obama with a spurious diplomatic solution the main effect of which was to elevate Putin into the major power in the region. After all, Obama had struck out in the U.N., had no international material support, was facing repudiation in the House of Representatives, and had two-thirds of Americans opposed to military strikes. What he needed was some breathing space, which Putin’s shrewd move provided for him, at the same time he gave his ally Assad more time to destroy his enemies and squirrel away his stockpiles.
Fifteen Minutes of Foreign Policy Malfeasance | FrontPage Magazine