The American electorate is often upset, but a recent poll by Quinnipiac University was still a surprise. It had Barack Obama coming in last among all postwar Presidents, twelfth out of twelve. That’s got to be deflating for Obama, although he may find solace in an approval rating that still hovers around forty per cent, better than the one George W. Bush had when he took up painting in Texas (thirty-five per cent), a lot better than Richard Nixon’s during Watergate (twenty-seven per cent), and nearly twice as high as Harry Truman’s at the end of his Presidency (a record low twenty-three per cent). The three of them ranked eleventh, tenth, and first in the poll, respectively. Even if poll-takers’ questions often drive the answers, the numbers in Obama’s case do seem to reflect a feeling that he’s not quite up to the job.

But then, apart from moments of national unity—usually in the wake of war or some other terrible event—Presidents rarely get high approval ratings; there are too many agendas occupying the nation’s psychic and social space. It is normal for us not to become fond of our Presidents until they’re long gone (as with Truman) or murdered (J.F.K.). In the meantime, the agitation of the job wears down whoever holds it, and, to some extent, the office itself gets whittled away. That’s about where Barack Obama seems to be these days—looking both depleted and annoyed; alert for what his opponents, domestic and foreign, will throw at him next; and stuck for the next thirty months in the house that Truman called “the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations.”

But not getting it right is very different from getting it catastrophically wrong—the way that, say, Lyndon Johnson, our fourth postwar President chronologically, and also the fourth best in the Quinnipiac poll, did in Vietnam, when he steadily raised the number of American troops to more than half a million a decade after French Union forces realized that the colonial war against the Viet Minh was unwinnable. Or the way that George W. Bush got it wrong when, almost casually, he led the nation into two wars, the one in Afghanistan so badly planned and executed that Osama bin Laden and his few thousand followers got away, and the unfathomable one in Iraq, in a region (does this need to be repeated?) that neither Bush nor Dick Cheney nor anyone in the Administration understood very well, if at all.

Obama’s critics blame him for a diminution of American prestige—of the country’s influence, respect, and power. Given that premise, their remedy is usually the same: the planet’s only true superpower (which, by the way, suggests that American power is not all that diluted) needs to assert itself in places where things are going to hell, which usually means arm the “moderates” or the “rebels,” or launch airstrikes, or lend support to “democratic” forces. There are so many suggestions.

The history of our time won’t be wholly understood for years, but one can nonetheless wonder if the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and their aftershocks, may one day be seen as a turning point toward disaster. Our two wars, and the “global war on terror,” which is actually a series of real or potential conflicts against people and groups who are in endless supply and don’t wish us well, stem in large measure from September 11, 2001, and our response to it. Like the Taliban and the guerrillas in Vietnam, these groups are able to fight, run, and disappear, which reinforces an illusion of American powerlessness, with no end in sight.

More than sixty-five years ago, in the early days of the Cold War, Walter Lippmann wrote a series of columns that took aim at the policy of global “containment”—the George Kennan formulation that John Lewis Gaddis calls “the single most influential explanation of postwar Soviet behavior.” Lippmann acknowledged that “Soviet power will expand unless it is prevented from expanding because it is confronted with power, primarily American power, that it must respect”—he was realistic—but he also argued that “American military power is peculiarly unsuited to a policy … which has to be enforced persistently and patiently for an indefinite period of time.” Decades before Vietnam or the billions spent arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan, Lippmann viewed an open-ended, all-encompassing policy of containment as a “strategic monstrosity.” Few today doubt the threat of terrorism, but the “global war” against it includes demands for military responses to civil wars and cruel regimes when the purpose and outcome of intervention—often a wish to “do something” in places where the suffering is unbearable—is uncertain at best.

The Obama Administration hasn’t helped itself with its rhetorical wobbling, which opens the door to dangerous miscalculations by its adversaries and by its friends—for instance, insisting, in August, 2011, that for “the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” or promising, this past March, that Russia would “pay a price” for its annexation of Crimea. But despite those missteps, it has mostly managed to implicitly ask the right questions before it employs force: If we do that, then what? Will it help or make bad things worse? How does it end? And, in Lippmann’s language, will it “squander our substance and our prestige”—a squandering that the George W. Bush crew managed to accomplish in just a short time.

Not a lot gets written about wars unfought and cruise missiles unlaunched. But history unwritten may turn out to be Obama’s great achievement, a legacy likely to leave him with a ranking considerably higher than the latest Quinnipiac poll.

Jeffrey Frank was a senior editor at The New Yorker and is the author of “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage.”

Photograph by Pete Souza/The White House.