Follow-up to Wednesday's post about the current juncture in Syria

That post quoted John Bolton as saying that the fact that the US wasn't invited to the current talks between Iran, Turkey and Russia about the Syrian situation is a "precise reflection of the serious diminution of American influence under the Obama administration."

Charles Krauthammer fleshes this out a bit more in a piece at NRO today, calling out the tried and true Leftist red herring that goes something like, "What would you have us do? Invade with a massive influx of ground troops?"

the U.S., at little risk and cost, could have declared Syria a no-fly zone, much as it did Iraqi Kurdistan for a dozen years after the Gulf War of 1991. 

The U.S. could easily have destroyed the regime’s planes and helicopters on the ground and so cratered its airfields as to make them unusable. That would have altered the strategic equation for the rest of the war.

And would have deterred the Russians from injecting their own air force — they would have had to challenge ours for air superiority. Facing no U.S. deterrent, Russia stepped in and decisively altered the balance, pounding the rebels in Aleppo to oblivion. The Russians were particularly adept at hitting hospitals and other civilian targets, leaving the rebels with the choice between annihilation and surrender.

They surrendered.

He then gets to the crux of the worldview embraced by the likes of the Most Equal Comrade that makes for a fading America on the world stage:

Obama has never appreciated that the role of a superpower in a local conflict is not necessarily to intervene on the ground, but to deter a rival global power from stepping in and altering the course of the war. That’s what we did during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Moscow threatened to send troops to support Egypt and President Nixon countered by raising America’s nuclear-alert status to Defcon 3. Russia stood down. 

Less dramatically but just as effectively, American threats of retaliation are what kept West Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan free and independent through half a century of Cold War.

It’s called deterrence. Yet Obama never had the credibility to deter anything or anyone. In the end, the world’s greatest power was reduced to bitter speeches at the U.N. “Are you truly incapable of shame?” thundered U.S. ambassador Samantha Power at the butchers of Aleppo. As if we don’t know the answer. Indeed the shame is on us for terminal naiveté, sending our secretary of state chasing the Russians to negotiate one humiliating pretend cease-fire after another.

Per the previous post, the emerging era is going to be characterized by a number of things, some of which we can foresee and some of which we can't, but it seems fairly certain that planned decline is about to be relegated to the trash heap of history.