The not-Obama narrative also overlooks areas in which Trump has largely continued Obama’s policies, such as the military campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq and even (with the glaring exception of the administration’s escalating rhetoric about initiating another war on the Korean peninsula) elements of the previous administration’s approach to North Korea’s nuclear program, including military exercises, the deployment of missile-defense systems, and the use of sanctions to pressure North Korea into talks.

Even when Trump has appeared to wipe out Obama-era initiatives, the truth in many cases has been less dramatic. Rhodes pointed out that while Trump has placed some new restrictions on American travel and business ties to Cuba—restrictions, incidentally, that have yet to be implemented—he has not severed the diplomatic relations that Obama restored. As for the Paris climate agreement, Rhodes added, the United States can’t fully withdraw until 2020, which means a future administration could rejoin it, and every other country is sticking to the pact, which means “it remains the framework within which the world is going to deal with climate change.”

Danielle Pletka, a senior vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, expressed similar skepticism about Trump’s actions—but argued that in several instances they didn’t go far enough in overturning Obama’s initiatives. “I think of the Trump administration as [having] a very scattershot, not principle-driven, not ideology-driven foreign policy,” she told me. “And insofar as things have gotten rolled back, they’ve gotten rolled back in very nominal ways rather than in meaningful ways that actually reverse the failures of the previous eight years.”

In Syria, for example, “the Trump administration doesn’t say, ‘We need a systematic effort to roll back the failings of the [Obama] administration and show once again that America is the tribune of human freedom in the world,’” Pletka noted. “What they say is, ‘Oh wow, episodically, that chemical-weapons attack was a horror. Let’s hit those guys.’”

Trump has also made clear that his iconoclasm extends far beyond the last administration, according to Jeremi Suri, a historian of the American presidency at the University of Texas at Austin. Trump hasn’t just nixed the TPP; he’s signaled that the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico—which was implemented under Bill Clinton, after the groundwork was laid by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush—could be next. And though it’s common for a new administration to try to distinguish itself from the previous one, Suri said what sets Trump apart is that he “is trying to undo these broader strategic commitments that in fact predate Obama—many of them go back to Ronald Reagan.”

It’s more common for presidents to make tactical adjustments to predecessors’ policies—see Obama trying to exit Iraq quickly without fundamentally changing the U.S. role in the Middle East. As a result, from Eisenhower and Kennedy to Bush and Obama, there has often been more continuity than change when it comes to the grand strategy of U.S. foreign policy.