Obama's lack of strategy is one of the biggest problems with his foreign policy

Power Line gives space to Mark Moyer a military historian who specializes in strategy to discuss the current problems facing the US.

Last year, shortly before Barack Obama fired him, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel chided America’s President for “lurching from crisis to crisis without direction.” The treatment of foreign policy as an exercise in ad hoc crisis management has characterized Obama’s entire Presidency, as indeed it has every Democratic Presidency of the last half century. Fixated on domestic affairs and reluctant to assert American power overseas, Democrats from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama have viewed foreign policy challenges as nuisances to be kept off the front page of the New York Times, rather than problems to be solved through a coherent grand strategy.

Whereas a good strategy drives an active foreign policy, crisis management is inherently reactive. International problems reach the President’s attention mainly when they generate inordinate press coverage or cause a spike in unfavorable polling. Active adversaries, like North Vietnam in 1964 and Russia and ISIS in 2015, have consistently beaten a reactive United States to the punch and dodged the counterpunches.

Because crisis management focuses on reducing symptoms rather than eliminating causes, its practitioners typically resort to half measures and token gestures. By demonstrating that the White House is “doing something,” symbolic actions often suffice to alleviate press scrutiny and public pressure for action, at least temporarily. They seldom remedy the problem that they were ostensibly addressing.

In the case of Syria, Obama rejected recommendations from his cabinet to arm moderate Syrian rebels until 2013, by which time most of the moderate rebels had been killed or co-opted by extremists. He then decided to train and equip rebel forces in such small numbers and with such restrictions on their activities as to render them insignificant. When ISIS advances compelled Obama to restart American training of Iraqi forces, Obama put a ceiling on the number of U.S. trainers that limited throughput to 3,000 trainees per year, too few to make a difference in the war against ISIS or to lessen the influence of the 100,000 Iraqi Shiite militiamen whom the Iranians were training.
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There is much more an it is an excellent analysis.  One of Obama's problems is that he is such a narcissist  that he cannot take advice from real strategist.  That is why he is "lurching from crisis to crisis."  On top of that, he does not trust his military to plan and execute a viable strategy so he micro manages what he will allow them to do.  Thus the many screw ups in dealing with ISIL or the JV as he used to call them.  Even after he reacted to ISIL's taking of large chunks of Iraq, Obama continued to push an amateurish response of pin prick air strikes and no ground operations that would deny space to ISIL.  That strategy in effects strengthens the enemy and leaves few options for the military to respond with.