US President Barack Obama has juggled with the same foreign policy initiative since the start of his course of his presidency: a big push for Middle Eastern peace. Eventually, he settled into the strategy of not getting too involved. Now the military is exhausted, the American public is polarised, and the government is in debt. Obama’s approach of avoiding military intervention without taking steps to resolve the actual problem is likely to draw the U.S. into future Middle Eastern conflicts. Although Obama wants to keep the U.S. out of Syria’s civil war, he’s failed to make a serious diplomatic effort at ending that war, because doing so would require negotiating with Iran, Bashar al-Assad’s key benefactor. As a result, the US has watched passively as the situation in Syria became worse, until Assad shockingly used chemical weapons on scale so large that it forced Obama to contemplate military action. It is not crazy to believe that Assad is unlikely to turn over critical weaponry when he’s in a fight to the death. It’s ironic, but Obama’s diplomatic passivity may push him to the precipice of military action - exactly where he doesn’t want to be.