Obama came to office eight years ago determined to end America’s two wars, the agonizing Bush legacies in Afghanistan and Iraq. He wanted to move America beyond a political culture of “permanent war.” He could focus on rebuilding America after the financial crisis and recession.
Entering the Syrian war with a major land force was unthinkable, and Obama has never wavered on this point. The danger of escalation to a full-scale land war explains his resistance to the urgings of Secretary of State John Kerry, former secretary Hillary Clinton, and many others in his administration to do more given the humanitarian consequences of doing less. [...]
Obama is not intellectually naive, but his history with Putin indicates an unwillingness or even an incapacity for brutality. Machiavelli wrote in The Prince that the leader who tries to be good in a world where so many others are bad “will necessarily come to grief.”
Amorality is not Obama’s strong suit in any case. He cares about “the problem of dirty hands.” Yet Putin is not evil in the sense that Hitler was evil. He doesn’t have delusions of world domination, nor is he genocidal. But he does believe that bombing and starving thousands of helpless civilians is justifiable to a sufficient Russian strategic ambition.
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