How Barack Obama’s lack of resolve on Syria sowed the seeds for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

Putin was briefly at the Lough Erne resort in Fermanagh for a meeting of the G8 in 2013, when Taoiseach Enda Kenny was allowed along for the optics.

Few will recall Putin’s presence here – unlike everyone’s instant recall of the 2011 trip by US president Barack Obama and first lady Michelle.

The Kremlin dictator was barely noticed while mingling among the great and good, including host David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, and Obama himself.

How we in Ireland have adored Obama. The image of the former-president flashing his megawatt smile lingers in the imagination; in our mind’s eye we see again him deliciously contemplating a pint of Guinness in a bar in a little Irish village.

Bizarre to think that an Irish emigrant from an Offaly farm with the unlikely name of Falmouth Kearney could have produced the first black president of the United States. History moves in mysterious ways.

But history may soon move against the Obama myth of intellectual invincibility and supreme correctness in all political and social thought.

And the reason would be the man who stayed the night north of Enniskillen in June 2013 – Putin, today’s terror of mankind.

A current BBC series entitled Putin versus the West, shows that Obama’s endless accommodations of Russia sowed the seeds for the invasion of Ukraine – and thereby the cost-of-living crisis now affecting your own pocket and purse.

The documentary trilogy almost suggests that the Barack Obama Plaza in Moneygall – where you cheerfully get your petrol and pizza – might as well be named after Hitler’s appeaser Neville Chamberlain.

The latter effectively encouraged the Nazi leader’s aggressive expansionism in the late 1930s, never calling him to account. Despite Churchill’s dire and repeated warnings of what was to come, Chamberlain conceded to Hitler wherever he could.

History has distilled him down to a film clip of a flapping piece of paper on the prime minister’s return from Munich in 1938 with the pronunciation of “peace in our time”. How wrong he was.

History now shows that Obama was wrong in effectively ceding to Putin a personal sphere of influence.

Re-elected the year after his 2011 Irish trip, Obama narrowly missed being derailed by a September 2012 attack by Islamists on US diplomatic facilities in Libya that killed the US ambassador. (That terror spree, however, did huge damage to the reputation of secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who would seek to replace him).

Obama thus began to be beguiled by Putin’s argument that the West’s support for the Arab Spring, which had toppled Gadaffi, was misguided – because dictators were being displaced by incendiary Islamist extremists.

And so to Syria, which had begun falling apart like many other countries bordering the Mediterranean. A rebellion against president Bashar al-Assad created conditions that allowed much of Syria to be occupied from the east by the caliphate of the Islamic State. Obama allowed Putin a free hand in tackling the terrorists, but soon he was bombing the rebels too, and in densely populated areas. The destruction soon rivalled that of Chechnya, itself reminiscent of Berlin in 1945. It was a harbinger of Ukraine today.

Obama set out a red line – there would be a US military response if chemical weapons were used. They were, in March 2013, in Aleppo. Children and adults alike writhed in agony. But Putin claimed it had been done by the rebels themselves, precisely to draw Western intervention.

Obama did not act on his own red line. His next meeting with Putin was at Lough Erne, and the one-on-one ended icily. Putin insisted Assad was the legitimate ruler of Syria, and went on to step up his military support, at vast cost in lives and infrastructure.

He drew a lesson from the West’s wishy-washy lack of resolve. Next would come the seizure of Crimea and a proxy war in Ukraine’s east, including the shooting down of a civilian airliner with a Russian BUK missile, claiming nearly 300 Dutch lives. Still no response.

We know what came next. A year ago, on February 24 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine. The West now lives with the costly economic consequences.

And it is largely why your pizza and petrol costs more money near Moneygall. Arguably much of it is owed to Obama.