This was the moment Obama decided not to intervene in Syria
After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces killed more than 1,300 Syrians in a 2013 chemical-weapons attack using chemical weapons in 2013, which crossed Obama's self-imposed "red line," Obama considered launching an air campaign in an attempt to depose Assad.
That campaign was delayed when Obama decided to put it to a vote in Congress. It was thrown out altogether when Russia - Assad's ally - offered to dispose of Assad's chemical-weapons arsenal if the US refrained from launching airstrikes.
That fateful delay, as it turns out, was the result of a one-on-one meeting Obama had with McDonough as the two strolled around the White House grounds during their daily afternoon "wrap."
From Politico:
According to Thrush, neither Secretary of State John Kerry nor then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel were consulted before Obama made his decision to delay military action in Syria. US National Security Adviser Susan Rice was also kept out of the loop.
"Both men were allergic to military intervention," Thrush wrote. "And McDonough was an enthusiastic executor of Obama's plan for running foreign policy: concentrating as much decision-making power in the West Wing national security staff as possible, at the expense of the harder-to-control Defense and State departments."
He added: "This aggravated the big-time principals Obama had recruited to run those departments."
Indeed, in an interview with Foreign Policy last month, Hagel - who resigned as defense secretary in November 2014 - voiced his frustrations with the administration's sluggish response to the crisis in Syria.
"For one thing, there were way too many meetings. The meetings were not productive," Hagel said in December.
"I don't think many times we ever actually got to where we needed to be," Hagel continued, noting that the meetings sometimes went as long as four hours. "We kept kind of deferring the tough decisions. And there were always too many people in the room."
Thrush corroborated both Rice's penchant for seemingly endless National Security Council meetings and Hagel's annoyance with them, relaying a telling anecdote:
Haunted by the war in Iraq and the disastrous campaign in Libya and wary of mission creep, Obama has always been deeply ambiguous on the subject of Assad's removal.
Since drawing his "red line" in 2013, Obama has accepted a "limited" role for the ruler in political negotiations over the country's future. Those negotiations are due to begin in January, as long as all parties sign on to a plan brokered by Assad's biggest ally - Russia.