President Obama said that the crisis in Syria "haunts me constantly" during an interview with Vanity Fair published Wednesday.
In an interview focusing on presidential legacy with left-leaning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Obama said the actions he has and has not taken regarding the Syrian civil war, now in its sixth year, weigh heavily on him. The conflict has killed 430,000 people, according to some estimates, and has displaced millions more from their homes.
Obama told Goodwin there are always things he wishes he could have done better, but the president added he rarely felt he had pursued the wrong course.
"Another good example of that is the situation in Syria, which haunts me constantly," the president said. "I would say of all the things that have happened during the course of my presidency, the knowledge that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed, millions who have been displaced, [makes me] ask myself what might I have done differently along the course of the last five, six years."
He called the "conventional arguments" about what he could have done differently wrong, such as a "pinprick strike" or providing arms to Syrian rebels.
One of the most crucial foreign policy decisions Obama made was the ultimate choice to not order air strikes against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad when he crossed Obama’s declared "red line" in 2013 by using chemical weapons against his own people.
Secretary of State John Kerry promised at the time that the U.S. would conduct an "unbelievably small" strike, drawing criticism. Obama ultimately chose to let Congress decide whether to employ the strikes, which surprised even his own aides, according to a lengthy profile of the president in The Atlantic.
In the end, the U.S. took no military action and a Russian-brokered deal to remove Assad’s chemical weapons was struck, although his regime continues to use such weapons inside Syria today.
Obama also undertook a $500 million plan to train and equip Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State in Syria, which was ultimately abandoned and widely viewed as a financial disaster.