Thank you for reading it. My own view is that Obama's single most important achievement, and the one that made his foreign policy initiatives possible, was his decision to break from standard responses and practice. We don't yet know how these initiatives will work out. It will take a number of years for that, but I remain hopeful. With time, I believe Obama has become more of a realist. He now seems to have accepted the limitations and downside of conventional military action. He plainly wanted to avoid another Iraq-like fiasco.
You've identified three world events that occurred during Obama's Presidency where the NATO Nations might have conceivably intervened earlier and with much more presence. Even though the results in these instances are not as we would have liked, it isn't clear at this point that the decisions made were not the best that might have been made, given the information, and assessments of risk and probability of success. We live in a complicated world. Ideally we will always choose well educated, experienced, psychologically stable and well balanced leaders, and then trust them to make the best decisions. We don't always to that, and that is the downside of our particular way of choosing our leaders.
