How much was he to blame for America’s lost credibility?
, then America’s president, to act on his warning that “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons being moved around or utilised. That would change my calculus.”
to oversee Syria’s chemical disarmament. Critics argue that Mr Obama’s reluctance to punish Mr Assad diminished America’s credibility and that the consequences are still being felt even now.last month, François Hollande, who was French president at the time, argued that it “was particularly bad for the Middle East. And it was decisive when it comes to relations between the West and Russia.” Back in 2013,”. But it is worth revisiting that judgment.
The officials were too late. Many people within the American government and abroad, including in London, wanted America to use military force to stop Mr Assad committing daily atrocities. They seized on Mr Obama’s words. “It was going to detonate immediately,” says Steven Simon, a former Obama official and author of “Grand Delusions”, a new history of American policy in the Middle East. “There was no time-delay fuse attached to this.
With hindsight, Mr Obama’s error was to seem to want to have it both ways. The red-line formulation helped strengthen America’s warning when Mr Assad appeared to be thinking about using nerve gas to terrorise his people. Yet after the atrocity the very firmness that made it a powerful threat also raised the cost of seeming to do too little. Theodore Roosevelt, America’s 26th president, famously advised leaders to “speak softly and carry a big stick”.
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