Obama’s inaction in Syria is nothing new – the US has been selective in its Middle Eastern interventions for a century.

The conflict in Syria is likely to be one of President Obama’s most important foreign policy legacies, with many already believing that his administration’s inaction (despite its statements of intended action) in that area was a major departure in US foreign policy towards the Middle East. Jasmine Gani writes that the early part of the twentieth century saw a similar period of selective inactivity in the Middle East for the US, when it had sympathy but gave no material support for Arab independence movements into the 1940s.