Obama is a lazy narcissist. And because Obama is primarily concerned with Obama, we have a President who always takes the path of least resistance in the belief that this will make him look good without having to really work too hard at it. It is the looking good that is the real motivation here, not the actual state of the country or how our actions affect the rest of the world.
And since Obama is not exactly a deep thinker, as Hanson notes, he gets himself into trouble regularly due to his tendency to not think things through to their logical conclusion. This is the curse of leftist ideology, which has little relationship to how the world actually operates. The smart set keeps doing things based on their leftist views that then blow up in their faces with spectacular effect, but when this happens they either hide and hope no one notices the disaster, or they try to blame others for the failure. Never do they re-think their assumptions in light of the mess that they create wherever they go.
How did Obama get himself into this mess? It was bound to happen, given his past habits. All we are seeing now is the melodramatic fulfillment of vero possumus, lowering the rising seas, faux Corinthian columns, hope and change, the bows, the Cairo speech, and the audacity of hope. Hubris does earn Nemesis.
1) His inclination is to damn straw men, blame others for his self-inflicted errors, and spike the ball when he should keep quiet and become modest (cf. the bin Laden raid). So in Syria we heard the same old, same old: A host of bad guys, here and abroad, wants to do nothing. Obama alone has the vision and moral compass to restore global and U.S. credibility through his eloquence; but the world disappointed him and is now at fault for establishing red lines that it won’t enforce: He came into the world to save the world, but the world rejected him.
After five years of this, the world caught on, and sees juvenile and narcissistic petulance in lieu of statesmanship—and unfortunately a sinister Putin takes great delight in reminding 7 billion people of this fact almost daily. In terms of geostrategic clout, Obama has nullified the power of his eleven aircraft-carrier battle groups, Putin through his shrewd insight and ruthless calculation of human nature, has added five where they didn’t exist.
