Barack Obama has long impressed this observer with his combination of extremes: keen intelligence combined with a remarkably deficient education.
His latest apologia for political negligence calls to mind Franklin Roosevelt’s admission at Yalta that he got the best possible deal he could in the circumstances.
As regards Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Obama said, ‘We challenged Putin with the tools that we had at the time given where Ukraine was’.
Some months before the Yalta conference, Roosevelt said, ‘I think that if I give [Stalin] everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace’.
Obama is too cynically self-interested to have believed anything like that about Vladimir Putin. His concession, unlike Roosevelt’s, does not demonstrate the practical failure of an over-optimistic policy. Instead it emphasises just how little Obama knows about diplomacy.
Rather than throw up obstacles or challenges, did he try in earnest to persuade Putin to choose another course of action? Did he aim to view the situation through different eyes on behalf of anything else besides resignation?
Perhaps he did, and failed. But how easily negligence blurs into malpractice.