![act of war direct action problems act of war direct action problems](https://gamefabrique.com/storage/screenshots/pc/act-of-war-direct-action-11.png)
It could have exacerbated the plight of Syria’s civilians without toppling the regime or curtailing the war. It is far from clear what the impact of a US-led military intervention in 2013 would have been. It fitted his core agenda: to rebuild Moscow’s influence in the Middle East and make Russia great again by restoring Soviet-era global reach. Obama’s hesitation gave Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader, an opening. Obama’s disregard for his own “red line” was interpreted in Moscow, Tehran, Damascus and other Arab capitals as confirming a fundamental shift – evidence that a chastened, post-Iraq America was retreating from its global policeman role. In effect, he outsourced the war to Moscow. Russia, Assad’s ally, offered to remove the regime’s chemical weapons stockpile to prevent such outrages happening again. Yet before the issue came to a head, there was another surprise. In the ensuing debate, it became clear much of the American public opposed involvement in another Middle East war. But the British vote gave him a plausible fig-leaf. Legally, Obama did not need Congress’s consent. Photograph: Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Imagesįor a risk-averse president pledged to end America’s foreign wars, the reluctance of his foremost ally to repeat the Iraq mistake of 2003 and plunge headlong into another open-ended Middle East conflict was cautionary. Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, with his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad at the Kremlin in Moscow in 2015.