Mark Cunningham

Mark Cunningham

Opinion

How Iran’s rulers see Obama

In the wake of the Russian putsch in Crimea, defenders of President Obama have been falling all over themselves insisting that our commander-in-chief is not seen as weak by other nations’ leaders.

This cartoon is damning evidence to the contrary — since it speaks to Obama’s image on three key fronts.

The image itself links our president’s famous “red line” on use of chemical weapons by the rulers of Syria (which he said would be a “game changer”) with his veiled threats over the weekend against Russian action in the Ukraine crisis.

In the event, the only change in the Syrian game was that the nation’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, has been steadily strengthened since he was caught massacring innocents with his chem weapons. (And, of course, Obama, with his red-line threat, had tacitly walked away from his earlier “Assad must go” tough talk.)

By the way, Syria’s still “working” on handing over its chems.

On Ukraine, the cartoon suggests, Obama can’t credibly threaten to do much of anything, because he never made good on his last threat. The fact that he bought into Vladimir Putin’s offer of a face-saving way out of enforcing his threat just adds to the sting.

The third front? The cartoon comes to us from the English portion of the website of the Fars News Agency — which is the de facto official news agency of the Iranian regime.

In other words, Iran’s rulers are watching Obama lurch from crisis to crisis, and they’re not impressed.

Indeed, if this cartoon is a window into their thinking, it’s a safe bet that Tehran is already planning to walk away from the “interim” deal now that it has loosened the global sanctions that had been crimping Iran’s economy.

Iran’s rulers certainly aren’t going to worry about Obama’s vague talk of “all options” being “on the table.” When it comes to getting tough on the world stage, they see him as all talk and no stick — and they’re not even hiding their contempt.