Do Barack Obama's red lines mean anything? If the President of the United States is going to lay down a red line, he ought to stick to it. Barack Obama, however, is not so consistent. On August 20 2012 he gave a statement on the crisis in Syria of monumental importance - delivered, unusually, as an off-the-cuff remark during a White House press briefing. The president said: "We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised... That would change my equation." Now opponents of Bashar al-Assad claim to have proof that he has done more than just "move around" a "whole bunch" of chemical munitions - he is accused of using them to kill between 500 and 1,300 people. Photographs have been released of scores of dead children with no visible signs of injuries, evidence, perhaps, of the use of chemicals. If this attack is proved, then it would amount to the deadliest attack of this kind since Saddam Hussein rained death upon his Kurdish population in 1988. It would suggest that Mr Obama's red line has been crossed, and that his "equation" has been changed. Certainly Britain and France feel that some reaction is necessary. The UK has called an emergency UN Security Council meeting and France has warned Syria of a forceful response. What Mr Obama will do remains to be seen, although "as little as possible" is a fair guess. This is partly because any decisive action is made unwise by the complex situation on the ground. The American public is wary about putting weaponry in the hands of rebels affiliated with radical Islamists, and a no-fly zone would be tantamount to a declaration of war. The international bad guy in this crisis is Russia, which still refuses to stop arming Assad. But the situation has not been helped by Mr Obama's foreign policy, which has turned doing as little as possible into a kind of Zen. He refused to act earlier on in Syria because it would have meant military action in the middle of election season. He has spoken out against Assad yet failed to offer real support to his opponents, cruelly raising hopes. And he has moved his red lines to such a degree that they are almost impossible to cross. There is a similar pattern to his behaviour in Egypt, where he has swung from tolerating one authoritarian regime to another: following the tide of history, not leading it. The Syrian crisis is a tragedy that often seems impossible to fix, but that is no excuse for America not to be at the forefront of the efforts. For better or worse, Mr Obama is leader of the free world. For worse, he has refused to act like it.