Yeah, even the White House admits to the major reporters that have high level access that this has not been Obama playing 8-dimensional chess. David Sanger @ NYTimes, today:

For Mr. Obama, it is a shift of fortunes that one senior American diplomat described this week as “head spinning.”

In their more honest moments, White House officials concede they got here the messiest way possible — with a mix of luck in the case of Syria, years of sanctions on Iran and then some unpredicted chess moves executed by three players Mr. Obama deeply distrusts: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and Iran’s erratic mullahs. But, the officials say, these are the long-delayed fruits of the administration’s selective use of coercion in a part of the world where that is understood.

The thing that bothers me about Obama fans who like to prop up a mythic brilliant chess playin' Obama is not the need for role model & idol worship. What upsets me is that they are not taking the right lessons away from it as to foreign policy by any president. (Lessons that I suspect will probably end up being in Obama's presidential memoirs, by the way. And by the time those come out, the Obamabots will forget that they thought he knew exactly what outcomes would be and instead will be lauding him for being honest about making mistakes. Another by the way: I still believe the man himself is much humbler about his own capabilities than his major fans.) One of them is that threat of force is a tool that can throw a helpful monkey wrench in stalemated situations but that it must be used extremely carefully and rarely. But the main one is that "wait and see what serendipity brings while you play diplomatic-and- economic cat-and-mouse" is a much discredited but actually time-tested successful modus operandi; there are thousands of examples in history books.

It might not seem like much to those of us not in that arena, but to Obama's credit, he's allowing Putin and the domestic opposition to stop him. Bush, McCain, and Romney most likely wouldn't have. That's hardly high praise, but it is something worth remembering.