It’s a very rare honour to be quoted by Mark Steyn. But it can happen:

This is what happens when you elect someone because he looks cool standing next to Jay-Z. Putin is cool mainly in the sense that Yakutsk in February is. In American pop-culture terms, he is a faintly ridiculous figure, with his penchant for homoerotic shirtlessness, his nipples entering the room like an advance security team; the celebrities he attracts are like some rerun channel way up the end of the dial: Goldie Hawn was in the crowd when Putin, for no apparent reason, sang “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” which Goldie seemed to enjoy. In reality, Putin finds his thrill by grabbing Obama’s blueberries and squeezing hard. Cold beats cool.

Charles Crawford, Britain’s former ambassador in Serbia and Poland, called last Monday “the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began.” Obama set it in motion at a press conference last year by drawing his famous “red line.” Unlike, say, the undignified scrums around the Canadian and Australian prime ministers, Obama doesn’t interact enough with the press for it to become normal or real. So at this rare press conference he was, as usual, playing a leader who’s giving a press conference.

The “red line” line sounds like the sort of thing a guy playing a president in a movie would say — maybe Harrison Ford in Air Force One or Michael Douglas in The American President. It never occurred to him that out there in the world beyond the Republic of Cool he’d set an actual red line and some dime-store dictator would cross it with impunity. So, for most of the last month, the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment has assured us that, regardless of whether it will accomplish anything, we now have to fire missiles at a sovereign nation because “America’s credibility is at stake.”

This is diplomacy for post-moderns: The more you tell the world that you have to bomb Syria to preserve your credibility, the less credible any bombing raid on Syria is going to be — especially when your leaders are reduced to negotiating the precise degree of military ineffectiveness necessary to maintain that credibility.

In case you’re thinking that I was a bit harsh on President Obama, the FT has done a fine analysis (££) of the whole exciting week, and has this quote:

Many will also judge that Mr Obama has emerged weaker. Over the past three weeks he has zigzagged from one initiative to another. “I can’t think of a foreign policy issue in my lifetime where America has offered us so little sense of strategy and such a strong sense of making things up as it goes along,” says one British official.

The deal that has now been struck by Washington and Moscow is, of course, all about them. It is trivially humiliating for Obama that Washington now finds itself effectively engaging with (and thereby re-legitimizing) Assad. The whole shift of focus from the devastation caused by Assad’s greedy clinging on to power towards the CW issue is mainly reprehensible. And I would not like to be a CW inspector entering this disgusting war-zone to try to identify/secure Assad’s CW stocks and then arrange for them to be transferred to a site for safe destruction. If some of the rebels are as insane as both Moscow and Washington say they are, these folk will be delighted to have some new fat targets to behead.

That said, the situation is not without new risks for Moscow. It might sooner or later become blindingly obvious – and undeniable – that Assad is not cooperating with this new CW process and/or is using his new-found respectability to commit even more massacres. That could make a decision by the USA to move things along by blowing up some of his most precious assets a lot easier to sell in Washington and in many other capitals round the world.

Moscow may think that in practice this risk is manageable and that they can fine-tune Assad’s moves to make sure that he is always just cooperative enough to make US bombing unthinkable. Moscow may even be right. But now thanks to its own cunning diplomacy Moscow has taken a new level of responsibility for this crisis, and so has some credibility to lose here too.That gives the USA new options for its own attempted judo-flips.

That’s for tomorrow. For today, let’s let Mark Steyn lustily sing us out:

Putin has pulled off something incredible: He’s gotten Washington to anoint him as the international community’s official peacemaker, even as he assists Iran in going nuclear and keeping their blood-soaked Syrian client in his presidential palace. Already, under the “peace process,” Putin and Assad are running rings around the dull-witted Kerry, whose Botoxicated visage embodies all too well the expensively embalmed state of the superpower.

As for Putin’s American-exceptionalism crack, he was attacking less the concept than Obama’s opportunist invocation of it as justification for military action in Syria. Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans alike took the bait. Eager to mend bridges with the base after his amnesty bill, Marco Rubio insisted at National Review Online that America was still, like, totally exceptional.

Sorry, this doesn’t pass muster even as leaden, staffer-written codswallop. It’s not the time — not when you’re a global joke, not when every American ally is cringing with embarrassment at the amateurishness of the last month. Nobody, friend or foe, wants to hear about American exceptionalism when the issue is American ineffectualism.

Ouch.