Norman Podhoretz has called it “Obama’s successful foreign failure”, Peggy Noonan has described “a new kind of credibility gap” and “a small President on the world stage”, and Fouad Ajami says that “Obama is lost in the Mideast bazaar” and is operating like “a lawyer lost in a region of thugs”. The common thread that runs through the analysis of this administration’s Middle East policy by these and other observers is that, contrary to what one might think, President Obama is playing out a script exactly to his liking with an end result that he believes is a winning one, namely, American withdrawal from world leadership and influence in that region.
So as a result of a series of blunders going back at least to the blown opportunities during the so-called Arab Spring and now culminating in badly misguided deal-making with Iran’s new “moderate” President, who is playing us like a cheap violin, we have the strange scenario in which Saudi Arabia is chastising us for our credibility gap and, along with France, is taking the moral high ground in the region! We will be very fortunate to have any credibility left with friend or foe when this crowd leaves office and it might take at least a generation to restore it.