Recall Syria in 2013
It's good to go back, regularly
The history of the presidency starts as soon as it happens, but there’s so much information to digest at the time it can be disorienting to figure out what’s true, what’s significant, or even if you’re asking the right questions, making the right assumptions.
The information only grows as more things happen, as time flows into the future.
But interests fade, and as time goes by, sometimes it’s easier to go back and think freshly about what was happening then, and what it means now.
Take the Syrian conflict in 2013, the use of chemical weapons by Assad I think August 21, 2013, and the response of Obama to that.
This, like many things in international relations, was a complex situation, involving al Qaeda in Iraq . It looked like if we went against the Russians in Syria, degraded the Assad regime, we would be temporarily on the side of al Qaeda in Iraq. This is was just one aspect of how awkward the time was. Perhaps even awkwarder than the word awkwarder, though, was that it seemed that Obama had the entirely wrong approach to both discouraging chemical weapons and simultaneously reducing the likelihood of another costly US military intervention.
Keep in mind, in 2013, no one was thinking of Trump as a serious candidate to replace Obama’s mystique foolishness on the international scene.
The events then helped to set the stage for 2016.
Here’s a great moment, captured for posterity, a Democrat podcast voicing significant criticism toward Obama in Lawfare’s 40th episode from September 8, 2013 (re: a Brookings event from 5 Sept 2013—Brookings is Dem). It’s well-worth listening to in its entirety. These issues will again be relevant in the future.
Luke for TRP