It is possible to imagine that Khamenei’s unexpected munificence, including his last-minute appeal for every Iranian – even those who don’t support the Islamic Republic –  to vote, was planned, writes  Suzanne Maloney in Foreign Affairs.

“In this case, those who see Rouhani’s election as a replay of the shocking political upset that Khatami pulled off in 1997 are off base. Instead, Rouhani’s election is an echo of Khamenei’s sudden shift in 1988 and 1989, when he charged Rafsanjani, a pragmatist, with ending the war with Iraq, and then helped Rafsanjani win the presidency so that he could spearhead the post-war reconstruction program. Now, as then, Khamenei is not bent on infinite sacrifice. Perhaps allowing Rouhani’s victory is his way of empowering a conciliator to repair Iran’s frayed relations with the world and find some resolution to the nuclear dispute that enables the country to revive oil exports and resume normal trade.”

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Barack Obama has been flirting with self-containment and Germany won't shed it, argues Josef Joffe in the Wall Street Journal. “The two countries' macroeconomic policies have been at odds since the 2008 crash. America's strategic ken is shifting to the Pacific, the key arena of the 21st century. Washington is struggling with ungovernability, and Berlin is happy to outsource politics to Brussels and the ECB in Frankfurt.”

“These trends would be less painful if all the world behaved like that happy stretch between Berlin and Berkeley. But it doesn't, being torn by substrategic mayhem from the Maghreb to the Middle East, by terror and cyberattacks, by failing states like Syria that invariably suck in the rest. Throw in zero growth in Europe, shrinking growth among the once fabulous BRICs and an oppressive overhang of global liquidity.

“Who is going to mind the store? Russia, China, India? In the West, the U.S. and Germany are the two last men standing, yet they would rather sit down in their respective corners. The price is high: a ‘nonpolar’ or ‘a-polar’ world where nobody is in charge.”

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High-income kids who don't graduate from college are 2.5 times more likely to end up rich than low-income kids who do get a degree, notes Matthew O’Brien in The Atlantic.

“It's a totally different game for high-achieving, low-income students, because nobody tells them how to play it. Aside from magnet school kids, they mostly don't have parents or teachers or counselors with much experience applying to selective colleges. Nor do many know, despite the best efforts of the schools to inform them otherwise, that the most selective colleges have very generous financial aid packages that can take tuition all the way down to zero. Indeed, Harvard is pretty much free, including room and board, for students whose parents make $65,000 or less.”

We know that China does infrastructure better than anyone in the world. Their trains, their roads, their airports, their subways have been built at amazing speed on a grand scale and with great foresight. Well, the next great Chinese infrastructure project is a canal. But this canal won't link two Chinese cities together with a waterway. This canal will link the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

Sound familiar?

Yes, we have one of those already, in Panama. But a Chinese company wants to help build another one. The "HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co. Ltd." will help finance a Nicaraguan canal at a total cost of about $40 billion.

Geographically, a canal there might seem to make sense.  It's just 12 miles from the Pacific to Lake Nicaragua...and from the lake a river flows to the Caribbean...and thus to the Atlantic.  But we don't know if that's the route the canal would take.

For Nicaragua as a nation, the canal seems to make sense.  The canal's proponents claim that the effort would almost double the nation's per capita GDP, which last year was just $3,300. But why build a canal when we already have another one just a few hundred miles away?

Well, here's one reason: there's so much demand for the Panama Canal that the average wait to transit can top 12 days.

Here's another: the biggest cargo ships that can go through the Panama Canal are called "Panamax." Each Panamax ship can carry about 4500 shipping containers. But there are newer, bigger ships, called post-Panamax. The newest ships on the block – so-called "Triple E's" – can hold more than 18,000 containers...that's four times the capacity of a Panamax ship.

Watch the video for what shipbuilder Maersk says 18,000 containers would look like stacked in Times Square.  The first "Triple E" will be delivered on June 28. These ships obviously have to find other routes since the Panama Canal can't accommodate them...and that's exactly what they are doing.

In the meantime, Panama is frantically trying to revamp its canal to accommodate bigger ships (but it still won't be able to accommodate the biggest ships). This massive effort will just about double the canal's capacity...and cost more than $5 billion.

Now, when the Panama Canal is widened – and if the Nicaragua Canal project actually comes to fruition – those post-Panamax ships will obviously need somewhere to dock to pick up goods and to drop them off.

And therein lays the problem for the United States.

By 2015, when the enlargement of the Panama Canal is expected to be complete, only 10 of the Unites States' approximately 55 major commercial ports will be ready for the bigger ships, according to KC Conway, chief economist for the United States for Colliers International.

But will that be enough? Listen to this:

In just 18 years times, 60 percent to 70 percent of shipping will be on the bigger post-Panamax ships, says Conway, the author of Colliers' North American Port Analysis. And a report from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says that over the next 30 years, U.S. imports are expected to grow four-fold and exports more than seven-fold.

The U.S. needs to keep up with that demand and to stay competitive with the rest of the worlds' ports. And yet, the American Society of Civil Engineers gives America's ports a C rating.

That shouldn't be the case. The U.S. collects a federal harbor maintenance tax of about 0.1 percent on each container that comes into port. That money is supposed to go back to the waterways, most importantly, perhaps, helping U.S. ports stay competitive. But for the last twenty years Congress has diverted more than half of those funds, Conway of Colliers says.

Congress does not seem to understand that this kind of spending is an investment in the nation's future economic growth. If we don't modernize our ports, the new big ships won't dock there and we will be the losers.

Fareed speaks with CNN about the election of Hassan Rouhani as Iranian president, how he compares with outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and who really holds power in the country.

Beyond the rhetoric, how different are these two as far as their actual beliefs and approach to the nuclear program that Iran has launched?

They’re quite different. They're different in tone – you can see that. They're also different in that Ahmadinejad was a layperson, whereas Rouhani comes out of the clerical establishment. It makes him probably more capable of navigating.

The problem, however, is there's a deep structural contradiction within the Iranian system. The president doesn’t have much power on these core foreign policy and national security issues. Those are held by the supreme leader. Remember, the last two presidents of Iran have, by the end of their terms, fallen afoul of the supreme leader completely. Mohammad Khatami did start out as a reformist. He's now under a form of house arrest.

Ahmadinejad started out in some ways as an opponent of the clerical system. He's discredited. The supreme leader doesn't like him. So the real question is will the supreme leader look at the results? And now you have 20 years of polling where the Iranian people are basically saying, we want conciliation, we want reconciliation with the West, we want to join the modern world.

Will he look at that data and say, I'm going to give this president, who has the right credentials, some leeway to try to negotiate with the Americans, or will he do what he has done for the last 10 years, which is he lets them make these statements, he even lets them explore some things, but at the end of the day, the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guard pull back the chain when it seems as though there is an actual concession about to be made?

Editor’s note: Janet Fleischman is a senior associate at the Global Health Policy Center of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (@CSIS). The views expressed are her own.

President Barack Obama’s trip to Africa this month is focused on the pressing issues of economic growth and investment, democratization, and the next generation of African leaders. Yet a central element for achieving those goals is missing from the list – advancing the health and empowerment of women and girls. The Obamas have an opportunity to make this trip historic by explicitly committing the United States to focus on women and girls as a key pathway to progress for Africa. But will they seize it?

The President and First Lady can speak powerfully to African and global audiences on these issues. On January 30, President Obama issued an unprecedented presidential memorandum on advancing gender equality and empowering women and girls globally, calling it “one of the greatest unmet challenges of our time.” For many who worried that the energy and commitment that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brought to those issues might dissipate with her departure, this high-level statement was most welcome. Many have also wondered whether Michelle Obama herself might become a champion for global women’s issues in the second Obama term, building on her support for women and girls in the U.S.

The Africa trip provides a timely opportunity to rejuvenate the administration’s commitment to women and girls in Africa and around the world. Growing evidence demonstrates that investments focused on women and girls – maternal health services, voluntary family planning, access to HIV services, education for girls, economic empowerment for women, and preventing and responding to gender-based violence – are not only critical to improving health outcomes, but produce substantial positive returns in poverty reduction, development, and economic growth.

More from CNN: 'Give African women a voice'

In its first term, the Obama administration elevated women’s health and gender equality as a central foreign policy goal and accelerated policy development to that end.  Despite the often polarized atmosphere in Washington, it is useful to remember that these policies built on a number of bipartisan successes in support of women’s global health. In particular, the Bush administration created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which included gender strategies to reach women and girls with HIV prevention, care, and treatment services. Faith-based organizations also have devoted considerable resources to empowering women and girls.

Clearly, significant challenges remain in advancing women’s health and gender equality issues, and progress remains vulnerable at home and abroad.  The administration will have to navigate political obstacles, notably the polarizing discussions around abortion, which are often erroneously conflated with family planning. In addition, national governments in many African countries have to demonstrate their own commitment to advancing women’s health and gender equality, working with civil society and other development partners.

The itinerary of the Africa trip – Senegal, Tanzania, and South Africa – highlights key priorities and challenges for U.S. policy in women’s health, ranging from HIV to gender-based violence to family planning. In Tanzania, the President and Mrs. Obama can see innovative examples of U.S.-supported programs to address the dual epidemic of HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence, which exert a destructive and disproportionate impact on women and girls. South Africa, despite much progress in fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic, still faces unacceptably high levels of HIV-positive pregnant women, maternal mortality, and gender-based violence. Senegal has made recent advances in improving access to voluntary family planning.

More from CNN: Girl Rising special

To build on the administration’s strong foundation and lead to real progress for women’s global health and gender equality, the Obamas should use the Africa trip to emphasize three key priorities. The first is leadership, with the president and First Lady committing to sustain high-level U.S. leadership on women and girls and to support leadership in other governments and in civil society.  The second is implementation, with Obama directing the U.S. agencies to translate U.S. policies on women and girls into programing, and holding agencies accountable for success. The third is new partnerships, with the President and Mrs. Obama highlighting the importance of building partnerships with host governments, private partners, multilateral organizations, and other donors to make best use of existing U.S. funding to reach sustainable outcomes.

In a meeting in March with the First Lady of Zambia, Christine Kaseba Sata, an obstetrician and gynecologist herself, I asked her if she had a message for the Obama administration. Her response encapsulated the worldwide imperative to strengthen women’s health and empowerment: “At the end of the day, mothers and women make the difference. Whatever you do should be woman centered…It’s the cornerstone for every country.” The Obamas have an unparalleled opportunity to heed this advice – and to make this part of their legacy.

Iran has a ‘deep state’ where the real power lies and a ‘shallow state’ where politics happens, writes Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest.

“Iranian newspapers are highlighting the voter turnout of 73 percent as a sign that the system is working. While voters understand very well where the real power lies, they still choose to participate in the political process. The Supreme Leader may be less worried that his pet candidates did poorly in the election than he is pleased to have an electoral process that lets voters blow off steam while the deep state rolls on.”

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“The United States spends more than $8,000 a person per year on health care, well more than twice what Sweden spends. Yet health outcomes are far better in Sweden along virtually every dimension,” argues Robert Frank in the New York Times. “Its infant mortality rate, for example, was recently less than half that of the United States. And males aged 15 to 60 are almost twice as likely to die in any given year in the United States than in Sweden.”

“…Larger hospitals with heavier patient flows also enable their staff to hone their skills through specialization and experience. If you are getting a knee replacement or coronary bypass surgery, you want teams that do scores of such procedures each month.

“Doctors in the two countries also face different financial incentives. In the United States, under the fee-for-service model, they can bolster their incomes, often substantially, by prescribing additional tests and procedures. Most Swedish doctors, as salaried employees, have no comparable incentive.”

Millions of Iranians poured into the streets Saturday to celebrate the victory of presidential candidate Hassan Rouhani. Huge crowds snarled traffic in the capital, Tehran, demanding the release of hundreds of political prisoners arrested during protests over sham elections four years ago. "My dead brother and sister, I got your vote back," people chanted, a reference to more than 100 demonstrators killed by the regime.

The surprise was not so much that 18 million votes were cast for Rouhani, slightly more than half the ballots, but the fact that the regime had endorsed his victory, triggering hope that international pressure over Iran's nuclear program and growing internal rifts at home might have forced the leadership to restore some of its lost legitimacy.

Rouhani is not a reformist, even according to Iranian standards. He had backed the violent crackdown against the pro-democracy student movement in 1999 and never formally aligned himself with the reformist camp. A cleric and a veteran politician since 1979, he was in the circle close to the founder of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. He served five terms as a member of Parliament and 16 years as the head of the National Security Council.

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Editor’s note: Matthew Levitt directs the Stein program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is the author of the forthcoming book Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God. The views expressed are his own.

The Group of Eight is holding its annual summit in Northern Ireland under the presidency of the United Kingdom.  While the summit is slated to focus on trade, tax, transparency issues and of course Syria, British Prime Minister David Cameron staked out several months ago a particular focus on counterterrorism for the G8 under the U.K. presidency.  But with Hezbollah plotting attacks targeting civilians around the world from Europe to Asia, and in light of its military support for the brutal al-Assad regime in Syria, London should press for a G8 condemnation of Hezbollah at the meeting.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last January, Cameron stated that among Britain’s top priorities for the G8 agenda this year was tackling the threat of extremism and terrorist violence.  “I’ll put my cards on the table,” Cameron said in Davos.  “I believe we are in the midst of a long struggle against murderous terrorists and a poisonous ideology that supports them.”

While his remarks at the time were specific to al Qaeda and its franchises, recent events from Bulgaria to Syria and from Cyprus to Thailand have exposed the extent to which Iran and Hezbollah have been frenetically plotting acts of terrorism and violent extremism around the world. According to the U.S. State Department, “Iran and Hezbollah’s terrorist activity has reached a tempo unseen since the 1990s, with attacks plotted in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa.”  Indeed, the increase in Hezbollah activities over the past few months led the Gulf Cooperation Council to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.  Meanwhile, European Union member states are now considering an EU ban of Hezbollah’s military wing, at the U.K.’s request, in the wake of the bombing of a busload of Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria last July and the conviction in March of a European Hezbollah operative who conducted surveillance for a similar plot targeting Israeli tourists in Cyprus.

While hard evidence linking Hezbollah to the Burgas plot has been slow in coming (and, since it reportedly is based on intelligence material, may never be made public), the arrests of alleged Hezbollah operatives in Thailand, Cyprus, and most recently in Nigeria have authorities on edge.  The cases in Thailand and Nigeria are ongoing, but the conviction of Hossam Yaacoub in Cyprus provides unique insight into Hezbollah’s international terrorist activities.  A dual Swedish-Lebanese citizen, Yaacoub was reportedly recruited by Hezbollah in March 2007 and slowly groomed as a terrorist operative.  Trained over several years in everything from the use of small arms to counter-surveillance and bomb-making, Yaacoub was first used as a Hezbollah courier and delivered packages to and from Hezbollah operatives in Turkey, France and the Netherlands. Finally, in 2009, Hezbollah sent Yaacoub on his first mission to Cyprus so he could create a cover story that would justify subsequent trips. Over several subsequent trips Yaacoub would collect intelligence on a variety of places, from a specific parking lot located between a police station and a hospital to specific hotels.  He was reportedly told to look for kosher restaurants catering to Jewish customers and ultimately took careful surveillance notes as Israeli tourists deplaned and boarded buses to their hotels.

Yaacoub confirmed his Hezbollah affiliation to Cypriot police, but insisted his surveillance of Israeli tourists was nothing out of the ordinary. “I don’t believe that the missions I executed in Cyprus were connected with the preparation of a terrorist attack in Cyprus,” reportedly Yaacoub told police. “It was just collecting information about the Jews, and this is what my organization is doing everywhere in the world.”

Such an attitude reflects precisely the kind of “poisonous ideology” Cameron called on the G8 to counter under the British presidency. And while the G8 suspended its Counterterrorism Action Group in 2011 (well intentioned when it was launched with fanfare in 2003, it failed to live up to expectations), the group still has powerful tools at its disposal should it choose to take a principled stand on Hezbollah.

First there is the G8’s Roma-Lyon Group on Counterterrorism and Counter-crime, which last met in January in Washington.  The group aims to better align G8 counterterrorism and anti-crime policies, making it a particularly useful venue for a discussion of Hezbollah, a group engaged both in international terrorism and transnational organized crime as recently underscored by several Hezbollah cases involving drug-running, money-laundering and a host of other crimes.

More recently, when G8 foreign ministers met in London in April, they “reiterated their absolute condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations.”  This week, the G8 meeting in North Ireland presents the group with an opportunity to act on this pledge by calling world attention to the growing threat from Hezbollah.  A statement by the G8 carries significant weight, and would shine a spotlight on Hezbollah’s illicit activities in a way few other multilateral groups could.

“To defeat this menace we’ve got to be tough,” Cameron warned his colleagues in Davos several months ago.  “This is the argument I’ll be making at the G8.”  This week, Cameron has an opportunity to do just that: Be tough and issue a statement deploring Hezbollah’s international terrorism and transnational crime.

Fareed speaks with former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden about the recent revelations of former CIA contractor Edward Snowden about alleged NSA activity.

Tell me what your reaction is to the revelations of Edward Snowden.

Well, I'm very disappointed that these legitimately secret things have been pushed into the public domain where they help our enemy and punish our friends overseas and our friends in corporate America. But in terms of what the agency is doing, frankly, Fareed, I think it's what the nation expects the agency to be doing – to be defending the United States while still respecting American law and American values.

So I want to ask you, is the NSA listening in on phone calls that Americans make?

No, it's not. Unless, of course, it's got a very specific, individualized FISA warrant, which has been the situation for more than three decades. In terms of the one program which I'll just call the meta data program, the one that the FISA order to Verizon seemed to reveal, this is indeed about meta data. It's about fact of call. NSA is getting, from the telecom providers, records that they create for their own purposes.  These are essentially billing records that the telecom providers are sharing with the NSA.

Fareed, NSA puts them in a very large database, and then sits and waits until it has…an arguable proposition that a reasonable man would look at and say, yes, this is correct, to ask that database a question. Let me give you concrete example. We raid a safe haven somewhere in Yemen. We pick up a cell phone we've never seen before.  There's pocket litter in the possession of the individual clearly indicating he's affiliated with al Qaeda, he's a terrorist. We take that new phone number and we simply ask that database, does this phone number show up in connection with any of the phone numbers, any of the phoning events that we have gathered here? And if, for example, a phone number in the Bronx kind of raises its hand and says, well, yes, I've been in contact with that phone regularly for the past three months, we then get to ask the phone in the Bronx, who else do you call? At which point, Fareed, we're done in terms of what this program authorizes. If we want to do anything more with that domestic U.S. number, we've got to go back to the court.

So would it be fair to describe this as, as I've seen somebody do, as the meta data program collecting data in a way that is on the outside of an envelope – who you wrote to, what the return address was, but nothing about what's inside the envelope?

No, that's absolutely correct.  And that's almost a perfect analogy. It’s the outside of the envelope. And, by the way, the Supreme Court ruled back in 1979 that that outside of the envelope information, the meta data, is not protected by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. There isn’t a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to that information.

Do you feel as though, when you were at NSA or watching when you were at CIA, looking at these things, that there were areas where you wouldn't go, even though you felt as though it might be useful because of privacy concerns? In other words, did the privacy wall come up and you guys would say, well, you know, we can do that to find this kind of data, but that would be too much?

Fareed, the first thing you have to understand, that when it comes to privacy, what CIA, NSA – all the elements of the American intelligence community are concerned with – is the privacy of U.S. persons, which I think you know is a group a bit larger than just American citizens. It includes everyone in the United States and U.S. citizens no matter where they are in the world. Those are the people whose privacy is protected by the American Constitution. And that’s the guiding light. That’s the guidepost for American intelligence collection.

Fareed speaks with Egyptian-born columnist Mona Eltahawy about the situation in Turkey and her role in the upcoming documentary ‘Girl Rising,’ which is premiering this Sunday on CNN at 9 p.m. ET.

How does it look to you, from Cairo, what is going on in Taksim Square?

I think the most important thing about what's happening in Turkey is that for me, it seems like Turks are trying to find a middle ground or a third way between what used to be just kind of the Ataturk, nationalist way and the Islamist way, as modern as it is, of Erdogan. And for me, as a Muslim from the Middle East, that's really important.

You’ve spent 10 years in America and gone back to Cairo. Do you worry that while you would like to see a more secular republic, you're worried by Erdogan's Islamism or the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamism?

Um-hmm.

On the ground, that stuff is pretty popular. So when Erdogan has put in these moderate restrictions on the sale of retail alcohol or he talks about women being allowed to wear the head scarf, in my experience, all my friends in Istanbul hate him for it. But the country at large likes it, because [this is a] 99 percent Muslim country, most people are devout. That actually resonates a lot more than people think. I assume the same is true in Egypt. Do you worry that your preferences are actually the preferences of a very small urban, kind of educated class?

I often compare the Muslim Brotherhood and their platform to the Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. who love to tout moral values. It's very easy to tout moral values, to be against abortion, to be against same-sex marriage here. And in Egypt and in the Middle East, it's very easy to say I'm going to ban alcohol and I'm going to make sure that all girls can or should wear head scarves. That is too easy and that is a violation of people's rights.

More from CNN: Meet the girls of 'Girl Rising'

So, you know, be as Muslims as you want, be as religious as you want. But I think that the goal of the revolution was never about banning alcohol. The goal of the revolution was never about head scarves.  The goal of the revolution was bread, liberty and social justice. And in that spirit, I think that we should be aiming for rights that encompasses everybody and their way of life. So I think when it comes to women especially, we’re unfortunately very cheap bargaining chips. But what helps us is that women were side by side with men on the street.

More from CNN: 'Dear girls of the world'

This revolution is ours, as well. It might not have been a revolution for women's rights, but now that we started the political revolution, if we don't have a social sexual revolution that works on the ground, that political revolution will fail. It's not about replacing one misogynistic patriarch with another.

Tell me about ‘Girl Rising.’

Well, it's a fantastic documentary that paired women writers with girls from their countries.  So I was paired with a wonderful 13-year-old girl in Egypt who was a survivor of rape. And I myself was sexually assaulted close to Tahrir Square in November of 2011. So when the two of us met, we had a lot to share.  But, you know, there I was at the time, you know, 44 years-old, 43 years-old.  And she was 13. And the spirit of this girl, who had never had any kind of formal education, the way that she fought back, the way she and her mother went to the police to demand justice for the rape that she survived and her enthusiasm for education and her mother's agreement to, you know, to have her daughter be paired with me and have her story told was just wonderful. And, you know, I urge everyone to watch the film, because it really goes to the heart of this, that when girls are educated, everybody benefits. So I'm glad CNN is showing it and I was glad to be a part of it.

By Fareed Zakaria

So, the Obama administration has now decided that Syria’s use of chemical weapons crosses a red line and, as a result, the United States will supply the opposition with small arms and ammunition.  This strikes me as a risky decision – too little to have a real impact and enough to commit the United States in a complex civil war.

First, let’s be clear. This will not ease the humanitarian nightmare unfolding in Syria. The opposition forces will now have some more arms and will fight back, presumably killing more of the regime’s soldiers and supporters. Levels of violence might well rise not decline.

So what exactly is the objective of this policy shift? Is it the defeat of Bashar al-Assad? If so, can such a small shift in American support for the opposition really do that? The opposition forces are disorganized. Joshua Landis, the Syria scholar, estimates that there are 1,000 militias that make up the rebel forces. Such a decentralized opposition would need a lot more than more small weapons and ammunition to succeed.

If they did succeed, that would be a good outcome. But it will almost certainly mean that the various militias would then begin a massacre of the Alawites, the sect that the al-Assad regime comes from. It is unclear what would happen to the Christians and Kurds, who have tended to stay neutral in this conflict, but they too might feel the wrath of newly empowered Sunni militias. The Alawites, Christians, and Kurds collectively make up about a third of Syrians, so this could become an even-larger, many-cornered struggle. Remember, with 180,000 troops in Iraq, we could not stop massacres, ethnic cleansing and massive human rights violations. We are now planning to achieve lofty ends with almost no means.

More from GPS: Why Obama needs to act on Syria

The most likely scenario is that this small step up in American assistance will not make much difference. At that point, pressure will build on the Obama administration. Sen. John McCain will make speeches saying that now, America’s credibility is on the line. Having supported the opposition, we have to ensure that they succeed. The administration will face a choice between seeming ineffectual or plunging deeper into a complex and bloody civil war.

It’s possible that the administration can just stand pat and do the little that it is doing. That could be a brutal but effective strategy to bleed America’s enemies. Contrary to much of the media commentary, the fact that Iran and Hezbollah are sending militias, arms, and money into Syria is not a sign of strength. It is a sign that they are worried that the Syrian regime might fall and are desperately seeking to shore it up. Keeping them engaged and pouring resources into Syria weakens them substantially. But can the United States pursue such a cold-blooded strategy of realpolitik?

Former President Bill Clinton recently said that he favored some American intervention because “Sometimes it's just best to get caught trying, as long as you don't overcommit.” That suggests that supporters of interventions see it as some kind of symbolic policy, to show that we care. But it is like trying to get a little bit pregnant. The outcome is rarely what you want.