…nonchè le oggettive difficoltà con le quali gli Stati Uniti si devono confrontare, secondo Philip Stevens, sul Financial Times: “Obama’s Syria choices go from bad to worse“:

[…] Oddly, the world’s most powerful leader does have a blind spot about the exercise of power. Analysis has too often been the handmaid of paralysis. The critique that sticks is the one that says the US has been badly hobbled by Mr Obama’ s defensive deferral to the political advisers who fill the corridors of the White House. Mr Obama has disdained those in the foreign policy establishment who could have told him that inaction can impose a higher cost than action. He has failed to grasp the importance of perceptions. Foreign policy is not just about what this or that power could do, but whether others think it would actually do it.
It is much easier, though, to say the US approach to the Middle East lacks coherence than to set out what an effective strategy would look like. The cauldron of territorial and confessional rivalries and competing and overlapping allegiances does not allow for neat grand strategies. Unless, that is, the west wants to start thinking about a Middle East in which Shia Iran rather than the Sunni autocracies of the Arab world provides the essential source of stability.