Photograph by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Every year, as the Constitution requires, the President delivers a State of the Union address. And every year, as tradition dictates, he gives a commencement speech at one of the military academies, does a standup routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and announces his pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey. In President Obama’s case, he also generally delivers, around this time of a year, a hugely hyped speech that aims to right his listing Presidency and provide clarity to a picture that he himself has muddied.

On September 9, 2009, the issue was health care. Obama addressed a joint session of Congress about his reform plan after a long, hot summer of Tea Party town halls and Presidential passivity. “His advisers knew it was long past time for him to assert himself in a more demonstrable way or risk seeing the entire enterprise slip away,” Dan Balz reported the next day, in the Washington Post. On September 8, 2011, stymied by a stalling economic recovery and sinking approval ratings—his lowest to date—Obama went before Congress to launch the American Jobs Act and revive his Presidency. Last September 11th, the President spoke on Syria in the East Room, a speech made necessary by his own, and his Administration’s, failure to outline a consistent approach to the crisis. And, last night, again at the White House, he sought to answer the question of whether he does (as he said on August 18th) or does not (as he conceded, more memorably, on August 28th) have a strategy to counter the growing political power of Islamic extremism in Iraq and Syria.

“So this is our strategy,” he said pointedly last night. It was the only touch of defensiveness in a speech that, like many of Obama’s speeches, projected confidence and steady resolve—a crisp counterpoint to the elisions and vagaries of recent weeks. He announced a four-point approach to roll back and “ultimately” destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham. The most significant step, as has been forecast for days, is a “systematic campaign of airstrikes” that will almost certainly extend from Iraq into Syria; the other three points were promises of assistance to the Iraqi security forces, the Syrian opposition, and America’s other partners in the fight. Semioticians will debate whether this constitutes a bona-fide strategy or a series of next steps, but, either way, taken together, these actions constitute a very real increase in America’s role in—and Obama’s ownership of—a conflict to which, as he said last month, “there’s not going to be an American military solution.”

This is the central irony of Obama’s speech—and, it must be said, of his approach. The caution that he has shown, the time that he has taken to reach a decision, are admirable and wise; the course of action that he has set out is, despite its increasing scope, narrowly targeted. (This is no war on terror or on radical Islam.) Even so, as he acknowledged last night, “we cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves.” And there is, at this point, little to suggest that Iraqis can do much of anything for themselves but continue their slide into mutual mistrust and retributive violence. The security forces that Obama has now pledged to train, equip, and advise are seen, by many Sunnis, as a force of subjugation; Shiite militias, empowered by the previous Iraqi government and backed by Iran, have terrorized the population we intend to protect. The situation in Syria is less promising still. The anti-Assad rebels there have been unable to keep their weapons out of the hands of ISIS, which does raise the question: which side will we be arming?

In this sense, last night’s peroration—with its ode to American exceptionalism—was beside the point. Not because America isn’t terrific, which it is, or because our “technology companies and universities” aren’t “unmatched,” which they are, but because America’s success in this new and important mission will not depend, in the last analysis, on our values, our strength, or our can-do spirit. It will depend on partners who are at best unreliable and possibly incapable. If they falter, what becomes of the U.S. effort? That question was neither asked nor answered in the President’s speech, but there is always next year.