Vali Nasr, a John Hopkins University dean and former senior adviser at the State Department, wrote a very critical appraisal of President Obama’s Middle East policy last year: basically, he had none. He was inclined to let the region simmer, and even to ignore what appeared to be overtures from Iran to begin to settle its nuclear problem. America would not be indispensable unless the president actively made it so. Nasr’s critique carried over to countries like Pakistan, and to the Arab Spring, where the U.S. would step in reluctantly…and then pull out, once a mess had been made.

What Obama’s brain trust would tell you, or me, at the time, was that (a) it is absolutely a goal, a feature, of Obama’s broader foreign policy to force other regional actors to take much more active roles in settling conflicts, (b) the less “American” a movement was, the more America could do later to help legitimize it, (c) things take time and Obama thinks in the long-term, and (d) M. Ahmadinejad, while powerless, was off the rails, and even his sensible overtures (and there were some) could not be met with reciprocal gestures…

In Syria too, Obama is engaging. He’s getting into the mud. Will it work? It’s unclear. But as soon as he acted, the gears started to move. Things began to change.