The US has remained largely on the sidelines but the Syrian crisis will affect all corners of the Middle East and beyond Syria, more than anywhere else, is sorely testing Barack Obama’s hands-off policy in the Middle East. So grave is the crisis in the Levant that it will go close to defining the success of the US president’s second term – or Mitt Romney’s first. If Obama was to be judged now on how he has dealt with the ever-worsening Syrian civil war, history would likely be harsh. The US has remained largely on the sidelines of the most violent episode of the Arab spring, shaping its response through the regional policy it laid down before the first stirrings of uprising in Tunisia. Soon after replacing George W Bush, Obama rubber-stamped the Republican president’s policy shift, which pledged to recast the way the US dealt with the entrenched Arab world order.

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