http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/us-foreign-policy-needs-s_b_9008288.html

Ivan Eland  Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent Institute

U.S. Foreign Policy Needs Some Old-fashioned Subtlety

Posted: 01/18/2016

In the Republican and Democratic presidential debates, President Barack Obama's ultimate rejection of using force against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people, keeps being raised as an issue. In all cases, the debate moderators have been pushing the candidates to call out the president for being "weak." In the Democratic debate, the candidates avoided this characterization, but of course the Republicans bring up the episode second only to the equally overstated and unimportant episode of the Obama administration's response to the attack on diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya--principally because current candidate Hillary had a bigger role in Benghazi simply because she had left her post as Secretary of State eight months before Obama made the decision not to use force against Assad.
But what of Obama's of "weakness" and "appeasement" of Assad? Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Germany in the late 1800s and a master of international Machiavellian diplomacy, would have been appalled at these characterizations. So likely would have Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the greatest military commanders of all time. Obama's threat eventually led to Russia's pressure on Assad, its ally, to get rid of his chemical weapons entirely. Happy ending, right? Not according to the Republican candidates. In 2016, the Republican candidates, and occasionally Hillary -- to show how tough they are -- would have the United States behave like a dim-witted body builder at the beach who goes around punching people for no reason. Apparently, according to Republican thinking on the Assad matter, the world thought Obama was a wimp for not following through on his threat to use force, no matter how good the outcome attained without it. Obviously, the Russians took Obama's threat to use force seriously, because they pushed their ally Assad to get rid of his chemical weapons. So the choice was between punitive, purely symbolic, and likely ineffectual U.S. military "retaliation" and an even better outcome -- an Assad stripped of his chemical weapons. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/us-foreign-policy-needs-s_b_9008288.html