Another Rothkopf blast about our current foreign policy in the Middle East

David Rothkopf, the editor of Foreign Policy has been inveighing against Obama for a while and, in my opinion, he makes a lot of sense. Here are some of his comments from a lengthy article on Obama and the Middle East that you should read:

• The situation in the region is unprecedented. For the first time since the World Wars, virtually every country from Libya to Afghanistan is involved in a military conflict. (Oman seems to be the exception.) The degree of chaos, uncertainty, and complexity among the twisted and often contradictory alliances and enmities is mind-boggling. America and its allies are fighting alongside Iran to combat the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria but in Yemen, the United States and many of those same regional partners are collaborating to push back Iranian-backed Houthi forces. Israel and Saudi Arabia are closely aligned in their concerns about Iran while historical divisions between the two remain great. Iran supports Bashar al-Assad in Syria; the United States and Western allies deplore his policies but tolerate his presence while some of the rebel forces we are supporting in the fight against the Islamic State in that country seek his (long overdue) removal. The United States wants the states of the region to stand up for their own interests — just not in Libya or when they don’t get America’s permission first. The technical foreign-policy term for this is giant cluster-fuck.
• this is a moment that requires great vigilance and should be producing much greater multilateral action by the United States and our allies and within the U.N. Having effectively every country in the region at war is as likely to lead to escalation as it is to solutions. More so. We are not far from seeing the conflicts connect into what could be the biggest conflagration the world has seen since August 1945. And even if that does not happen, prolonged chaos will feed into the spread of extremism in Africa, Asia, and the spread of terrorism in Europe and North America. The stakes could not be higher. And it is clear, even if we recognize America’s limited ability to impact what is happening on the ground, that we have an urgent obligation to try and to try to do so in new ways. Because what we have done for the past six years is just not working and in fact is making the world’s worst situation worse.