Yet as measured by the loss of life and global impact, nothing compares with Obama’s failure in Syria. His refusal to lift a finger opened the door to perhaps the largest humanitarian crises since World War II.
The United Nations estimates that out of a prewar population of 22 million Syrians, 500,000 are dead, more than 6 million are displaced within the country and nearly 5 million more are refugees scattered around the world.
Nearly a million are in Germany alone, and their presence elsewhere in Europe, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Greece is causing enormous social and political divisions. Both Brexit and Trump’s election were fueled in part by the unchecked flood of refugees.
Talking about his legacy before he left office, Obama confessed to historians that the Syrian bloodbath was his biggest regret. “He himself told me, when I interviewed him, that that was the decision that haunted him the most,” Doris Kearns Goodwin told Time magazine. “Not that he had had two decisions and made the wrong one, but he said maybe there was some other decision out there that he didn’t have the imagination or the inventiveness to figure out.”
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