The Chief Enforcer

"You know, when you're president of the United States, you're not just dealing with the United States ... If there's a problem in Ukraine, we're the ones who are expected to mobilize the world community to isolate Russia, put pressure, support Ukrainians, and to vindicate the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity and freedom that we stand for."
"If there's a problem in the Middle East, the expectation is that we create the coalitions to deal with a problem like [ISIS]. If there's an issue in Africa around Ebola we need to help mobilize that public health infrastructure."
U.S. President Barack Obama

"He is teaching our Mideast friends the U.S. is not a volunteer fire department that suits up every time you fall asleep on the couch smoking."
"In the meantime he is coolly watching new alliances form -- wasn't that the Kurds the other day fighting alongside the Iranians? Mr. Obama's supporters frankly hope that there's a method to the madness, that he is quietly, behind the scenes and with great subtlety pulling together a coalition that will move."
Peggy Noonan, former President Reagan speech writer

Poor President Obama, he is tired, sleep-deprived and sick of it all. Who can blame him? On the other hand, he is president of the United States of America, the sole world super-power. And no force on Earth other than his own self-assurance and ambition geared him toward promising his people that if elected he would bring them to a new place and a new world. And when he was elected he travelled to Cairo to speak to the Muslim world about a new relationship with the United States.

For those words and his ineffable ability to charm, he was chosen to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. And he appears to have been attempting, desperately, to live up to the 'peace' element of the prize ever since. Red lines, once stated with all the force that his position gave to the statement, became expendable when a leader of another country convinced him that nothing beats diplomacy. Now that leader of that other country sneers at the very concept of diplomacy and extracts satisfaction from provoking Mr. Obama by sending troops into a neighbouring country.

Where U.S. resolve might have saved thousands of lives in Syria from the atrocities visited on citizens by their own president, diplomacy saved the day by removing the chemical weapons he had bombed them with, leaving Bashar al-Assad free to bomb his citizens with chlorine instead, and barrel bombs exploding with countless pieces of shrapnel geared to shred human bodies. And Vladimir Putin has now gifted Russia with Crimea, torn from Ukraine's geography, eager with intent to claim even more.

It's enough to give anyone a headache. Especially the one world figure upon whose dining table a feast is presented with plate after plate of world disasters, from China threatening its neighbours' territories, North Korea churlishly exploding bombs and threatening to invade South Korea, Iran brandishing its right to nuclear arms, and Somalia and other African countries imploding, Ebola virus spreading, ISIS beheading Americans, and the Baltic states quivering with fear over Russian expansionism.

"There are days where I'm not getting enough sleep, because we've got a lot on our plate", he groaned. Leading and liberating the free world from worry is a soul-destroying vocation; at the very least if you come into the workplace with a full head of virile, black hair, you'll exit it with an excess of grey and the smile is no longer as pacific and gleaming, but weary and half-heartedly wry. But why complain? It's what he sought with his high-flown rhetoric, after all, and his fabulous promises of a new era.

Well, the new era has dawned. Surprise! Deal with it. And not by admitting to the public arena that you haven't yet devised a plan on how to deal with the unprecedented and unholy menace of a religiously-inspired battalion of fundamentalist psychopaths who have called upon the world's inventory of like-minded lunatics to join them for a free-for-all of bloodletting and genocidal games the better to make absorbing videos of in a new venture of gruesome entertainment.

Of course, he's perfectly correct when he asserts that the Sunni countries in the Middle East are required to 'do something' practical and purposeful to solve their own dilemmas. But they've become so accustomed to calling on their great good friend in the West to begin the work of assembling Western countries to solve the quite horrible ills that the Arab and Muslim countries of the world bring upon themselves, unable and unwilling to solve the dilemmas they create through tribal and sectarian antipathies, they cannot bring themselves to react to save themselves.

Not that the rest of the world is much different, since America's appeal to its counterparts in Europe and the rest of North America has borne little fruit. The world has elected America to be its one and only arbiter and enforcer. And Barack Obama elected himself to stand for the office he now holds, the American populace supporting him hugely in his self-confident assertion that he was the man for the job.

The job is there. Do it.

Um, maybe not.