I stole this from the comment section here:
h/t to "adk"
Here's the short version and the longer (albeit incomplete) list of various villains and humanity flaws responsible for sometimes less than brilliant results of Obama's foreign policy and His great many disappointments. The short one: Obama is disappointed and frustrated by everybody and everything, everywhere. It's actually much easier to note who clears his high bar of being far-sighted, reasonable and strategic -- He does.
The longer list of frustrations and other people's failures, in the order of appearance:
-- the war-monger Churchill (Churchillian rhetoric and,more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq.)
-- annoying Samantha Power who "argued early for arming Syria’s rebels." (“Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped.)
-- Hillary Clinton (Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle, ” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” ...Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments...)
-- the Washington foreign-policy establishment (which he secretly disdains...)
-- conventional expectations (he president had come to believe that he was walking into a trap—one laid both by allies and by adversaries, and by conventional expectations of what an American president is supposed to do.)
-- his advisors (Many of his advisers did not grasp the depth of the president’s misgivings...)
-- Washington at large (He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries.)
-- Pentagon (Four years earlier, the president believed, the Pentagon had “jammed” him on a troop surge for Afghanistan.)
-- The Saudis (he had, long before he became president, referred to them as a “socalled ally ” of the U.S.)
-- Congress (Congress’s clear ambivalence [about authorizing US strike on Syria] convinced Biden that Obama was correct to fear the slippery slope.)
-- the “Washington playbook”(that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.)
-- America's Middle East allies (frustrating, high-maintenance allies in the Middle East—countries, he complains privately to friends and advisers, that seek to exploit American “muscle” for their own narrow and sectarian ends.)
-- US military leaders and the foreign-policy think-tanks (He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex.A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. )
-- America’s ability to direct global events (Obama as a president who has grown steadily more fatalistic about the constraints on America’s ability to direct global events)
-- small men (who rule large countries in ways contrary to their own best interests)
-- primary human emotions (the persistence of fear as a governing human emotion—frequently conspire against the best of America’s intentions.)
-- the world at large (the world is a tough,complicated, messy, mean place, and full of hardship and tragedy)
-- America's free riders, esp. Britain(“Free riders aggravate me, ” he told me. Recently, Obama warned that Great Britain would no longer be able to claim a “special relationship” with the United States if it did not commit to spending at least 2 percent of its GDP on defense.)
-- American self-righteousness. (“We have history,” he said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”)
-- traditional U.S. foreign-policy thinking (to a remarkable degree, he is willing to question why America’s enemies are its enemies, or why some of its friends are its friends.)
-- Pakistan (which he believes is a disastrously dysfunctional country, [why] should be considered an ally of the U.S. at all.)
-- Israel (he has questioned why the U.S. should maintain Israel’s so-called qualitative military edge, which grants it access to more sophisticated weapons systems than America’s Arab allies receive)
-- US Arab allies ( [he] also questioned, often harshly, the role that America’s Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American terrorism.)
-- ME Muslims (he said that he had been trying—unsuccessfully, he acknowledged—to persuade Muslims to more closely examine the roots of their unhappiness.)
-- the Arab Spring (...as the Arab Spring gave up its early promise, and brutality and dysfunction overwhelmed the Middle East, the president grew disillusioned.)
-- Netanyahu (Some of his deepest disappointments concern Middle Eastern leaders themselves. Benjamin Netanyahu is in his own category: Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution that would protect Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority democracy,but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so.)
-- other Middle Eastern leaders (Obama has also not had much patience for Netanyahu and other Middle Eastern leaders who question his understanding of the region...Other leaders also frustrate him immensely.)
-- Erdoğan (Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian, one who refuses to use his enormous army to bring stability to Syria.)
-- King Abdullah II of Jordan (Obama said he had heard that Abdullah had complained to friends in the U.S. Congress about his leadership, and told the king that if he had complaints, he should raise them directly.)
-- Middle East at large ("The president recognized during the course of the Arab Spring that the Middle East was consuming us,” John Brennan ... told me recently.)
-- bad faction within [his] national-security team...Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, ...Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Antony Blinken who pushed him to intervene in Libya (...lobbied hard to protect Benghazi, and prevailed.)
-- Libya (he calls Libya a “shit show...for reasons that had less to do with American incompetence than with the passivity of America’s allies and with the obdurate power of tribalism.)
-- EU types, Cameron and Sarkozy in particular ( "I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up,” he said.)
-- General Lloyd Austin, then the commander of Central Command (told the White House that the Islamic State was “a flash in the pan.” This analysis led Obama, in an interview with The New Yorker, to describe the constellation of jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria as terrorism’s “jayvee team.” )
-- U.S. intelligence (But by late spring of 2014 ...he came to believe that U.S. intelligence had failed to appreciate the severity of the threat and the inadequacies of the Iraqi army)
-- the Islamic State (The rise of the Islamic State deepened Obama’s conviction that the Middle East could not be fixed—not on his watch, and not for a generation to come.)
-- Republican governors and presidential candidates ([who] had suddenly taken to demanding that the United States block Syrian refugees from coming to America...This rhetoric appeared to frustrate Obama immensely.)
-- fearful American society (in the words of one official, that “everyone back home had lost their minds.”...Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do. Several years ago, he expressed to me his admiration for Israelis’ “resilience” in the face of constant terrorism, and it is clear that he would like to see resilience replace panic in American society..he believes that a misplaced word, or a frightened look, or an ill-considered hyperbolic claim, could tip the country into panic. The sort of panic he worries about most is the type that would manifest itself in anti-Muslim xenophobia or in a challenge to American openness and to the constitutional order)
-- terrorism (The president also gets frustrated that terrorism keeps swamping his larger agenda)
-- modern Islam (in private encounters with other world leaders, Obama has argued that there will be no comprehensive solution to Islamist terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to modernity and undergoes some of the reforms that have changed Christianity. )
-- ME tribalism (One of the most destructive forces in the Middle East, Obama believes, is tribalism—a force no president can neutralize. )
-- climate change (As I survey the next 20 years, climate change worries me profoundly because of the effects that it has on all the other problems that we face)
