President Obama’s Interview With Jeffrey Goldberg on Syria and Foreign Policy - The Atlantic

A long article with video.  Very much worth reading.  Obama is a better President than the American electorate envisioned or realizes.  - gwc
President Obama’s Interview With Jeffrey Goldberg on Syria and Foreign Policy - The Atlantic


The Obama Doctrine
by Jeffrey Goldberg: 
"...Libya proved to him that the Middle East was best avoided. “There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa,” he recently told a former colleague from the Senate. “That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.”

President Obama did not come into office preoccupied by the Middle East. He is the first child of the Pacific to become president—born in Hawaii, raised there and, for four years, in Indonesia—and he is fixated on turning America’s attention to Asia. For Obama, Asia represents the future. Africa and Latin America, in his view, deserve far more U.S. attention than they receive. Europe, about which he is unromantic, is a source of global stability that requires, to his occasional annoyance, American hand-holding. And the Middle East is a region to be avoided—one that, thanks to America’s energy revolution, will soon be of negligible relevance to the U.S. economy."