BERLIN — I have long been a critic of the German foreign policy debate — of its freeloading on the American security umbrella, coupled with moral grandstanding whenever the Americans did things their way; of too much analysis of past events and not enough thinking about how to get things right in the future; of its tendency to take words as a substitute for deeds. That’s why I have usually given the Americans the benefit of the doubt: At least they took on problems nobody else was willing to tackle.

But then, at the height of the Syria conflict and just after yet another of Barack Obama’s speeches, I suddenly understood the problem with this American president and his foreign policy. He sounded just like a German politician: all moral outrage, but little else to help end one of the most devastating civil wars of our age. President Obama, I thought with a sigh, has become European.

Indeed, the less this president wants to get involved in something abroad, the more he dials up his rhetoric. That the American president finds things “unacceptable,” one of his administration’s favorite words, doesn’t carry any real meaning anymore; it certainly doesn’t mean that America will try to change what it deems “unacceptable.”

One school of thought holds that President Obama is only executing the will of the people by staying out of conflicts around the globe. After two wars Americans are tired, so the reasoning goes, and need a respite from the world. And after the country recovers economically and mentally, it will return to be its true global self.