If one looks at Obama’s actions through a lense with the presumption that he is a hate America/Muslim, everything he has done and is doing makes clear sense.
I don't think that can be emphasized enough when attempting to write a post-mortem for this lamentable chapter in American history. This was campus progressivism's Big Chance and they weren't shy about proclaiming its "transformative" nature. To be sure, "We are the ones we've been waiting for" was a grotesquely narcissistic utterance but 0bama and his followers meant it seriously.
That meant that the principal focus was to be domestic, because that is the transformation they've been designing for the better part of a half century. It led them down the paths of intense and trendy racism, anti-middle-class economic warfare, graft, corruption, and authoritarianism that they loudly opposed until in power and in a position to benefit from that power. It also meant that foreign policy would be a mirror image whether it were appropriate or not. 0bama kowtowing to every foreign leader he found in front of a camera was a perfect illustration of what he felt the country's foreign policy should be, and when, at last, he desired to leave his own personal imprint on history he found that the kowtowing had a cost. Syria only infuriates him because his royal will was flouted, not because he or anyone in his administration gives a rip for the Syrians.
But his foreign policy has, in fact, left an imprint if not the one he wanted. The Arab Spring debacle of 2011 was a systematic repudiation of stability in the Middle East in favor of Transformation, and the new Islamic face of Europe is only one of the results. It isn't a pretty picture, and it wasn't painted accidentally.
To understand the 0bama administrations and to a great degree the Western Left in power, you have first to understand their hatred, their greed, and their contempt for the greatness that placed them in the position to destroy it. To them, "America was never great" because of their own failure to understand it. And evidently it turned out to be quite great enough to send them into a shrieking tantrum at having the controls plucked from their hands by an angry people. Too bad.