Obama is a foreign policy lightweight. He doesn't understand a lot of the US foreign policy being applied because he had no real foreign policy background before he got elected and because being POTUS is an enormous job, needing a lot of his attention in domestic politics.
However, he does sometimes assert himself, such as pushing for the nuclear deal with Iran, which has some in the State Department completely apoplectic.
I believe that his advisors do not tell him the complete story, and sometimes boil it down to good guy/bad guy.
Much of US foreign policy is still conducted by NeoCons, and there are competing interests in the US State Department and even within the White House itself. The most glaring is Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, the one who organised the Ukrainian coup. She is married to neocon Robert Kagan who co-wrote the Project for an American Century with Paul Wolfowitz when they were working for the American Enterprise Institute under Dick Cheney, head neocon. She was appointed to the State Department by Hillary Clinton, who we can consider a foreign policy neocon, with a large mix of neo-liberalism. Wonder why Obama didn't appoint her again during his second term.....(Clinton will be a dangerous person if elected POTUS, as she will seek confrontation with Russia and China, partly just to prove that she's no pushover because she's a woman).
So, at the last G20 meeting, when Putin had a one-on-one meeting with Obama, he showed him aerial pictures of the tanker truck assembly areas in Eastern Syria and asked him why the USAF had been ignoring these. A short time later, the US began bombing those hundreds of tanker trucks. Someone in high up in the US government power structure had directed the USAF to ignore these, obviously because keeping up funding for ISIS served the policy interests of leading factions within the White House and/or the State Department, but without Obama's knowledge: because ISIS and Jabhat Al-Nusra and its affiliates are the biggest threat to the Assad regime that the US neocons want to overthrow, and defeating and ousting Assad is a bigger goal than defeating ISIS. Plus, Erdogan's son Bilal personally profits from those oil sales.
Turkey has been involved in Syria up to their necks. Seymour Hirsh reported that it was Turkish Intelligence that organized the Sarin gas attack in Damascus that was blamed on the Assad regime, just as UN weapons inspectors arrived there. That was the time when Obama had drawn his 'red line', and the US was then ready to bomb the Syrian Armed Forces, and would have done so until the Russians got a deal from Assad to give up his strategic chemical weapons arsenal. Hirsh wrote that Obama was furious at Turkey when he found out the real story. If the US had bombed Syria, Assad's army would then have collapsed against its rivals, who are now almost exclusively Islamic Jihadists. That there are any significant 'moderate' rebels left is a fantasy, as they almost all cooperate or have joined with Al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra. Syria would now be run by Daesh and/or Al-Qaida. It's at that point where Turkey would have intervened in Syria and installed their own puppet as head of state, in order to restore order.... how convenient then for Turkey to then control Syria, and Erdogan's quest to be the new Ottoman ruler.
There is now the growing realisation (Cameron included) that ISIL cannot be defeated without the Syrian Army. That's why there is now the acceptance that Assad can remain for a 'little while' while a democratic process is put together to replace him. Problem is that if Assad runs for democratic office, he will likely be re-elected by the Christian, Alawite and other minorities that he has been protecting, and by Sunnis (most of his army is Sunni) who want to preserve Syria's secular way of life. The Syrian Opposition in exile never got its act together, and only represents paid off stooges who hang around foreign 5 star hotels.
