This intense focus on the discontinuities in Trump’s handling of foreign policy has eclipsed debate over the continuities; ruptures in style often obscure the enduring substance of problematic policies. When, for instance, four U.S. special-operations soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger, the political circus surrounding Trump’s calls to the soldiers’ families sucked up most of the attention—not the wisdom of continuing the Obama-era policy of sustaining so many low-grade, far-flung counterterrorism campaigns that Congress can’t keep track of them all.

Likewise, in more aggressively prosecuting the Obama administration’s battle against jihadist groups, the Trump administration has helped uproot ISIS from its last strongholds in Syria and Iraq, crippling the world’s most notorious terrorist group and thereby saving an unknowable number of lives in the United States and around the world. As a consequence, however, civilians and U.S. troops in the region are dying in greater numbers. The political scientist Micah Zenko noted this summer that “in Iraq and Syria, at least 55 percent of all civilians killed by airstrikes since the air war began in August 2014 have died under Mr. Trump’s watch.” (U.S. military officials argue that they have taken great care to conduct the most “precise air campaign in the history of warfare” and that ultimately the best way to protect civilians is to defeat the terrorists holding them hostage.)

When The New York Times recently reported that the U.S.-led coalition’s airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq are inadvertently killing civilians at a much higher rate than the coalition claims, no one went on television or held hearings in Congress to denounce Donald Trump as dangerous. Nor was there much of an outcry in the United States this past summer when civilian casualties mounted as the United States and its allies went on the offensive against the Islamic State, or this past spring when more than 100 civilians perished as a result of a U.S. bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul. The alarms that sounded after Trump’s threat to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea have largely stayed silent as innocent Syrians and Iraqis have fallen victim to American firepower.

In August, after Trump announced a plan to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, as Barack Obama and George W. Bush had done before him, Zenko pointed to a jump in Afghanistan of “70 percent more civilian casualties from American airstrikes in the first six months of 2017 than in the first half of 2016.” And he emphasized the risks of “standard operating procedure in Washington,” asserting that Trump was accelerating trends that predated his presidency. “Mr. Trump proudly proclaimed ... that ‘we are killing’ terrorists. He has certainly tried. Every country the United States was bombing when he entered office has seen a sharp increase in the number of bombs dropped since Inauguration Day. But he is also killing unacceptably high numbers of civilians,” Zenko wrote. “Rather than committing to block the pathways by which individuals adopt jihadist ideologies and become attracted to terrorist groups, policy makers of both parties try the same military policies over and over.”