ELI LAKE: Assad’s Fall Has Humiliated Washington.

As president, Donald Trump challenged the Obama doctrine. Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018. On the second day of 2020, Trump ordered the air strike that killed Qasem Suleimani, the Iranian general and architect of Iran’s strategy of building up regional proxies throughout the Middle East.

But after Biden won the 2020 election, the old Obama approach returned. One of the first priorities of Biden’s new administration was to restore the nuclear bargain that Trump tried to scuttle. And Iran’s proxies continued to become emboldened. No worries. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan boasted last year, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” Oops—eight days after Sullivan made those remarks at the Atlantic Festival, Hamas launched its October 7 pogrom.

A year later, thanks to Israel’s robust response, Hamas and Hezbollah are hobbled. Their leadership is largely eliminated, and Assad’s regime has fallen. Obama’s wisdom, in retrospect, looks foolish. It turns out that Iran was not here to stay. It turns out that another regional power—Israel—was able to extinguish much of Iran’s vaunted ring of fire, despite the warnings, arm-twisting, and weapon-shipment delays from the Biden administration. The Saudis, the Syrian people, the Lebanese, and the Israelis had a choice all along. They did not have to “share” the region with a regime intent on dominating it.

So it’s also worth tallying the price of Obama’s strategic patience. The most conservative estimates say that more than 300,000 people perished in Syria’s civil war; others put that figure at closer to 600,000. This says nothing of the 14 million refugees forced to flee Syria after Iran and Russia saved the country’s brutal tyrant. Outside groups estimate that nearly 400,000 people have died as a result of the war in Yemen, a war started by Iran’s Houthi proxies. Lebanon today is nearly a failed state because Hezbollah was the most powerful militia in the country after Iran’s years of intervention. In the meantime, Israel suffered the horror of October 7 and Gazans suffered the war Hamas initiated.

How much of this bloodshed could have been spared if Obama hadn’t clung to the fantasy of a Saudi-Iranian cold peace?

It was my impression Obama was enabling Iranian dominance, not a cold peace. Either way, the results of Obama’s (and then Biden’s) largess toward Tehran were as chaotic as they were deadly.