Things are not going quite as expected under the administration’s banner of “smart diplomacy”

But Peter Baker of the New York Times says that president Obama seems reluctant to take responsibility for anything, arguing he is not to blame for the Syrian mess, having been a skeptic of his own policies from the beginning...

Under these circumstances it’s only natural to get the jitters when the administration says it’s going to fix things. It’s almost as if they don’t know what the word means. In an exchange that purportedly showed the president’s superior acumen over Mitt Romney, Obama told the former governor how silly he was to ever think Russia would be a problem again....

If anyone had told Candy Crowley on that debate evening that three years later Russia would have an army in Ukraine, an expeditionary airbase in Syria; that Europe would be beseiged by millions of Africans and Middle Easterners; that China stood to inherit Afghanistan at the cost of American lives and treasure — and that there would be more watchtowers in Europe than in Harry Lime’s day who would have believed them?

Who’s laughing now? Nobody. It’s all you can do to keep from crying.