ISIS attacks: Obama reaction shows US foreign policy shift

Washington

REPUBLICAN politicians and conservative pundits were appalled. Radical Islamists had launched deadly terrorist attacks in Brussels, Belgium, earlier in the day, and images of death and destruction were being broadcast worldwide. And here was US President Barack Obama, the first president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge, joining Cuban President Raul Castro at a friendly baseball game between the Tampa Bay Rays and Cuba's national team in Havana.

Cool and calm, smiling and wearing spiffy sunglasses and a shirt with no tie, Mr Obama didn't look like the leader of the free world managing an international crisis and getting ready to respond to the challenge posed by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to America and the West.