During comments capping off his Asian trip, President Obama defended his foreign policy as less hawkish than the hypothetical policies of some of his critics, insisting the wars they would’ve conceivably started wouldn’t have accomplished much.

Obama presented his own policy as using military force “as a last resort,” and defended not invading Syria, while failing to mention that invading Syria was his stated policy goal for quite some time and didn’t happen only because of overwhelming public opposition.

Obama also defended the decision not to send arms to Ukraine’s military, arguing that Ukraine’s military wouldn’t deter Russia just by having better weapons, and that “economic pressure” from his new sanctions would work better.

In his defense of his policies, he made it clear that he views his own policy as the bare minimum military aggression for the US to engage in, and the publicly acceptable gradient, at least in his mind, is between his own hawkish policy and other, even more hawkish alternatives.