"There was hope a few months ago that mounting chaos in the Middle East, and a revamping of President Obama’s national security team, would prompt the president to snap out of what looked like a deepening torpor in foreign policy," writes Jackson Diehl of The Washington Post.
Instead, this president’s extraordinary passivity in the face of crisis may have achieved its apotheosis this week. On Wednesday, as Egyptian security forces gunned down hundreds of civilians in the streets of Cairo, an unperturbed Obama shot another round of golf at Martha’s Vineyard. His deputy press secretary was left to explain to reporters that the administration remained firmly committed to not deciding whether what had happened in Egypt was a coup.
When the president finally deigned to address the crisis himself, the result was measured rhetoric — “deplorable” — accompanied by a classic half-measure: A biennial military exercise scheduled for next month will be canceled, sparing the White House some unseemly photo ops. But the deeper relationship with the Egyptian military, including $1.3 billion in annual aid, remains in place." Read it all.
