Barack Obama has gone to great pains recently to explain the broad moral and policy context of his foreign policy choices for the remaining years of his presidency. Syria stands out, however, as a prominent exception to Washington’s kinder and gentler approach to foreign policy.
The US president's self-declared interest is to close the file on Afghanistan and all that it represents — an ill-considered case of mission creep marked by costly military escalation, counterinsurgency and, at best, ambiguous outcomes. He insists that he has learned something after more than a decade of war in the Middle East and Asia.
