I am more than skeptical. The scramble reminds me of the farce during the Bosnian war that involved the Serbs handing over “all” their heavy weapons to the United Nations to avert air strikes — and then resuming their bombardment of Sarajevo.

A State Department spokeswoman had it right when she initially described Kerry’s proposal as purely “rhetorical,” because “this brutal dictator with a history of playing fast and loose with the facts cannot be trusted to turn over chemical weapons.”

The hesitancy since the chemical attack has highlighted a lack of U.S. leadership throughout the Syrian conflict. The just cause of rebels fighting the 43-year tyranny of the Assad family was never backed by arming them; and when Islamist radicals moved into Syria, their presence was used to justify the very Western inaction that had fostered their arrival.

The sight of a president who draws a red line on chemical attack and then says “I didn’t set a red line” (the world did); who has Kerry plead a powerful case for military action only to stall; who defers to Congress but seems happy enough with Congress ambling back into session more than a week later; who notes that for “nearly seven decades the United States has been the anchor of global security,” and then declares “America is not the world’s policeman” — the sight of all this has marked a moment when America signaled an inward turn that leaves the world anchorless.

The president has reflected the mood in America. Almost two-thirds of people surveyed think the United States should not take a leading role in trying to solve foreign conflicts, according to a recent New York Times/CBS news poll. Principle backed by credible force made the United States the anchor of global security since 1945 and set hundreds of millions of people free. Obama has deferred to a growing isolationism. His wavering has looked like acquiescence to a global power shift.

In Berlin, which survived as a free city because of a U.S. red line, the change has been noted. It has also been noted in Tehran, Moscow, Beijing and Jerusalem.

A letter this week on the Syrian gassing to the German news magazine Der Spiegel from Dr. Tewes Wischmann of Heidelberg read: “We will be asked by our children what we did against this mass murder, as we asked our parents about Nazism. We will then lower our eyes and have to remain silent.”