Faced with deepening crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, U.S. Commander in Chief Barack Obama put the brakes on the notion American military power can solve either conflict.

At a news conference Thursday, the president addressed the situation in Syria because, White House officials said, a statement Obama gave earlier in the week left the impression that military action would be taken quickly. Obama muddied his earlier message by asserting “we don’t have a strategy yet” for going after the Islamic State militants in Syria.

No strategy, yet, to block a militant jihadist army that reportedly has slaughtered thousands of non-Sunni Muslims, Christians and ethnic Kurds in Syria and Iraq — and videotaped the beheading of American journalist James Foley.

No strategy, yet, for a caliphate movement whose threats of international terror prompted the United Kingdom on Friday to elevate its terror threat warning to severe, and the Italian government to issue a nationwide alert.

No strategy, yet, for radical rebels who have seized vast tracts of northeastern Syria and northwestern Iraq and claiming that property as their own nation, the Islamic State.

No strategy, yet, as video surfaced Thursday of 250 Kurdish soldiers being forced to strip to their underwear and march into the desert where they were executed in a hail of gunfire.

Given the severity of the threat, it would be hoped that our commander in chief would hunker down in the war room and oversee the immediate completion of a strategy.

Amazingly, that didn’t happen. Obama spent the weekend fundraising in New England and attending the wedding of the White House chef to an MSNBC news reporter. Today he leaves for a trip to Estonia and then a NATO summit in Wales.

The president’s apparent lack of alarm is outrageous, especially when given the fact that the crisis in Iraq and Syria is only one of several global outbreaks. Others include Russia’s incursion into eastern Ukraine, Chinese aggression in international air space, an all-out civil war in Libya, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and an expanding Ebola outbreak in several African nations.

Obama seems to be conveying the message that nations in conflict need to solve their own conflicts without military intervention from the United States. In some respects it’s a noble thought — until U.S. interests, and lives, are threatened. And U.S. interests, if not lives, haven’t been under this severe a threat since Sept. 11, 2001, if some senior intelligence analysts are correct in their assessment of the Islamic State.

Those analysts include Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, who said unequivocally that the Islamic State could only be defeated if the U.S. were to go after the group in Syria as well as Iraq.

Obama’s lack of action over the holiday weekend bolsters recent criticism that the president has become detached, disinterested and increasingly reluctant to initiate any action requiring cooperation from legislators or other leaders.

That’s not a comforting attitude for a president, lame duck or otherwise, to perpetuate.