Since the civil war in Syria began, writes Max Boot, Barack Obama has based his response on the belief that American military intervention “creates more problems than it solves” and on the fear of annoying Iran, which is deeply invested in preserving the Assad regime. The results have been disastrous:

If the U.S. continues to do little, the conflict will continue to spiral out of control, destroying more lives inside Syria and spewing conflict and instability far beyond its frontiers.

The policy that the Obama administration is pursuing—of bombing Islamic State (IS) and supporting Kurdish militias to fight it while engaging in on-and-off negotiations with Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad—is a recipe for futility. Even if IS is defeated, other extremist groups such as the Syria Conquest Front [a/k/a Nusra Front, a subsidiary of al-Qaeda] will simply expand into the resulting vacuum as long as the civil war continues and large swathes of the Syrian countryside remain ungoverned. The only way to defeat the extremists is to end the civil war and create a moderate state, or possibly multiple states if the existing state can’t be reassembled, capable of effectively policing Syria’s territory.

The most credible path forward has been offered by Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and NSC staffer who now works at the Brookings Institution. . . . [He proposes that the U.S.] build a conventional Syrian military force in Turkey and Jordan that would receive at least a year of training in combined-arms warfare. . . .

Once this force reaches critical mass, it can surge out of its bases in Jordan and Turkey, and, with American air support and American advisers, begin to take back ground from both the pro-Assad and anti-Assad militias. If this army shows that it is capable of winning military victories and of bringing law and order to the territory under its control, it will see a flood of new recruits. It can then grow to become the most potent military force in Syria—one that eventually will be capable of threatening the other factions with defeat and thus compelling them to reach a settlement.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”