I continue to think that Syria might yet offer a platform for some fairly modest foreign policy advances for the Obama Administration in the Middle East. But that’s far from certain. Seymour Hersh offers some fascinating snippets from a long conversation with Syrian President Bashar Assad, including this one:
Now the problem is that the United States is weaker, and the whole influential world is weak as well…. You always need power to do politics. Now nobody is doing politics…. So what you need is strong United States with good politics, not weaker United States. If you have weaker United States, it is not good for the balance of the world.