Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Obama's Syrian Failure May Become a Blessing

Over the past couple of days, I've been getting an earful from friends (yes, I have friends, though mainly I have shifting alliances) who believe that I've been underplaying the importance of President Barack Obama's seeming passivity on Syria.

January 7, 2014 at 6:55 PM UTC

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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Over the past couple of days, I've been getting an earful from friends (yes, I have friends, though mainly I have shifting alliances) who believe that I've beenunderplaying the importance of President Barack Obama's seeming passivity on Syria.

This passivity has manifested itself in two ways, the argument goes: Obama's refusal to supply weapons and training to Syrian rebels early in the civil war, when the opposition to Bashar al-Assad was not so heavily dominated by jihadists, represents a huge missed opportunity to shape Syria's post-Assad future. And, of course, Obama's refusal to enforce the red line he articulated on the use of chemical weapons suggested to the region and others (including the regime's sponsors in Tehran) that he is a terminal vacillator.