A nifty catch by Josh Rogin from today’s presser. If you want to see what “Smart Power” resolve looks like in practice, here’s where we are right now with a guy whom the supposed leader of the free world has been insisting for years must step down as president of Syria.

[I]n fact, even before the tragedy in Paris, I had gathered together my national security forces — it had been a year — to review where we had made progress, what worked, what did not, and had put together a plan to accelerate and advance the pressure that we can place on ISIL.  And we intend to execute on those plans, but we also think, as François said, that there may be new openness on the part of other coalition members to help resource and provide additional assistance both to the coalition as a whole and to local forces on the ground.

With respect to Mr. Assad, I think we’ve got to let the Vienna process play itself out.  It is our best opportunity.  And so the notion that there would be an immediate date in advance of us getting a broad agreement on that political process and the details I think doesn’t make sense.  As soon as we have a framework for a political transition — potentially, a new constitution, elections — I think it’s in that context that we can start looking at Mr. Assad choosing not to run and potentially seeing a new Syria emerge.

As our rotten luck would have it, Assad is interested in running again for the presidency, according to Russian diplomats who recently spoke to him. Either Obama’s kidding himself about Assad “choosing not to run” or he’s hinting here that there may be ways to force Assad out, so long as Assad’s patrons in Tehran and Moscow feel they’d benefit from him exiting. Maybe there’s another Shiite leader among the Alawites that would be as acceptable to Iran as Assad is? But if there is, why would the Sunnis of Syria who detest the Alawite regime trust that guy? And why would Putin, who’s eager to show the Middle East that he’s a much more steadfast ally than Barack Obama — and eager to show his own domestic opposition that, like Assad, he’ll fight inexhaustibly if challenged — undermine that point by agreeing to throw Assad under the bus?

The sick punchline to Obama’s Syria policy is that it’s now far more likely that Assad will someday hold a press conference to crow about Obama leaving office than vice versa.

Bashar Assad’s presidency looks likely to outlast Barack Obama’s.

As the United States has turned its attention to defeating the Islamic State group, it has softened its stance on the Syrian leader. More than four years ago, Obama demanded that Assad leave power. Administration officials later said Assad did not have to step down on “Day One” of a political transition. Now, they are going further.

A peace plan agreed to last weekend by 17 nations meeting in Vienna says nothing about Assad’s future, but states that “free and fair elections would be held pursuant to the new constitution within 18 months.”

Maybe it’s time to shift from insisting that Assad must go, which is unlikely to happen, to insisting that Syria (and Iraq) must go as a nation-state. Apart from sending peacekeepers, which no one wants to do, the only way to leave Assad in power while reassuring Sunnis in the area that they won’t need to answer to him is to carve out separate Shiite and Sunni states. Give Assad and the Alawites their own statelet, give another to the Shiites of southern Iraq, and then, as John Bolton suggests, carve out a Sunni state in Mesopotamia that would incorporate the Sunni parts of Iraq and Syria. Once the Sunnis are free from Damascus and Baghdad, maybe they’ll be less willing to tolerate having ISIS around as their “protectors.” All you need to do is somehow get Iran to agree to cede Shiite hegemony over all of Iraq and Syria in exchange for two much smaller states. That should be a snap, no?

After enough stalemate on the battlefield, maybe even Iran will come around to a settlement that involves redrawing borders if it gives them an excuse to exit the war. I wonder how much time it’d take to get to “enough stalemate.” While you think about that, here’s a short Free Beacon compilation from last year of the empty-threat administration in action.