PPI - Radically Pragmatic
  • Donate
Skip to content
  • Home
  • About
    • About Us
    • Locations
    • Careers
  • People
  • Projects
  • Our Work
  • Events
  • Donate

Our Work

RealClearPolitics: What Obama Must Do in Syria

  • November 23, 2015
  • Will Marshall

Syria has become Barack Obama’s Iraq—a foreign policy debacle rooted in faulty assumptions about the utility of American power. Where George W. Bush overstated what U.S. military intervention could achieve in Iraq, Obama has underestimated the risks and costs of non-intervention in Syria.

The analogy will rankle many progressives, as well as conservative “realists” who have praised Obama’s doctrine of U.S. restraint. But any administration’s policies must be judged by their results, not the elegance of their conceptual underpinnings. And the results of Obama’s decision to stand aloof from the Syrian crisis have gone from bad to worse.

Despite declaring early on that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad must go, Obama in 2012 overruled his national security team — including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — which urged him to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels not allied with jihadists groups. Having decided the previous year to pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq, Obama was not about to get sucked into Syria.

But power vacuums invite trouble, especially in the combustible Middle East. The Syrian caldron soon boiled over, morphing into a regional conflict as Iran and Hezbollah rushed to Assad’s rescue, while Saudi Arabia and Arab states came to the aid of Sunni rebels. Then came the hard-core Islamists of al-Qaeda and the even more fanatical spinoff, the Islamic State (commonly called Daesh), which proclaimed a new caliphate centered in Raqqa.

Continue reading at RealClearPolitics.

Related Work

Op-Ed  |  July 11, 2025

Marshall for The Hill: How Trump Can Capitalize on Autocrats’ Setbacks

  • Will Marshall
Op-Ed  |  July 10, 2025

Ainsley and Mattinson for The Observer: Do our leaders really care about us? To keep us on side they must prove they do

  • Claire Ainsley Deborah Mattinson
Feature  |  July 7, 2025

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Ukraine Infantry Adapts to More Menacing Drones

  • Tamar Jacoby
In the News  |  July 6, 2025

Jacoby on Background Briefing with Ian Masters: China Admits It Wants the Ukraine War to Drag on to Keep the US and NATO Out of Asia

  • Tamar Jacoby
Feature  |  July 6, 2025

The People Who Brought You Bill Clinton Want to Introduce You to the ‘Colorado Way’

  • Will Marshall
Budget Breakdown  |  July 3, 2025

Passage of ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Renders Republican Deficit Hawks Extinct

  • Ben Ritz Alex Kilander
  • Never miss an update:

  • Subscribe to our newsletter
PPI Logo
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Donate
  • Careers
  • © 2025 Progressive Policy Institute. All Rights Reserved.
  • |
  • Privacy Policy
  • |
  • Privacy Settings