In late April, a month after the United States lobbied the U.N. Security Council to support a NATO operation shielding anti-Qaddafi rebels in Libya from slaughter, Ryan Lizza published a detailed report in these pages called “The Consequentialist.” Lizza set out to describe the evolution of the President’s foreign-policy thinking and the way it applied to the regional phenomenon known as the Arab Spring. Political actors and think-tank grandees struggled to situate Obama somewhere on the idealist-realist scale, and White House aides hastened to define his priorities: the measured withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, continued vigilance against terrorism, restoration of American prestige abroad, and a deeper engagement with issues ranging from ascendant China to nuclear proliferation.

Illustration by TOM BACHTELL

The article, which ran to more than nine thousand words, did not exactly follow the inverted-pyramid schema once taught in newsrooms and journalism schools across the land. In fact, it was the very last paragraph that captured the imagination of many readers—not least that of conservative pundits and Presidential candidates. “Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine,” Lizza wrote. “One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as ‘leading from behind.’ ” He concluded:

That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength.

Leading from behind. You could almost hear the speed-dials revving at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. The phrase ricocheted from one Murdoch-owned editorial page and television studio to the next; Obama was daily pilloried as a timorous pretender who, out of a misbegotten sense of liberal guilt, unearned self-regard, and downright unpatriotic acceptance of fading national glory, had handed over the steering wheel of global leadership to the Élysée Palace. We were, as Mitt Romney put it, “following the French into Libya.” The President was “dithering,” Sarah Palin declared. John McCain wanted boots on the ground. Michele Bachmann, the G.O.P.’s arch-isolationist, said, “I would not have gone in,” while Newt Gingrich declared, “This is about as badly run as any foreign operation we’ve seen in our lifetime.” John Bolton, George W. Bush’s U.N. Ambassador, was sure that Obama had “set himself up for massive strategic disaster.” Rick Perry, for his part, shot an elephant in his pajamas.

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Six months later, as Libyans rejoice at the prospect of a world without an unhinged despot, many of Obama’s critics still view a President who rid the world of Osama bin Laden (something that George Bush failed to do) and helped bring down Muammar Qaddafi (something that Ronald Reagan failed to do) as supinely selling out American power. Yet the Administration’s policies—a more apt description, admittedly, would have been “leading from behind the scenes”—were tailored to limiting circumstances. To review the facts: When the Tunis- and Cairo-inspired uprising in Libya began, last February, the United States was still at war in two Muslim countries and was regarded with deep mistrust throughout the region. Moreover, the U.S. military was overextended, which is why Defense Secretary Robert Gates opposed any involvement.

Obama, engulfed by crises domestic and foreign, did not initiate the idea for a no-fly zone in Libya—the Europeans did—but, once he saw that Qaddafi was on the brink of slaughtering thousands of rebels in Benghazi and other eastern cities, he pushed for an even broader mandate for NATO forces. Victory for Qaddafi threatened the most promising development of the Arab Spring—an end to fear. Not only did the resolution supporting NATO pass the U.N. Security Council 10–0 (with five abstainers, among them Russia and China); the mission itself had the political backing of the Arab League and material support from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Qatar. The operation could not easily be defined as a Western crusade.

One of the wearying aspects of the Libyan conflict was that it far exceeded the hundred-hour attention-span limit set after the first Gulf War. But an unintended consequence of the prolonged conflict was that the “ragtag” Libyan fighters improved their skills on the battlefield and enabled civil institutions to arise from the rubble of a reign of terror. Sometimes, Qaddafi’s comic qualities—the Sgt. Pepper Goes to Carthage getups, the “voluptuous” Ukrainian nurses and “virgin” bodyguards—obscured the depths of his cruelty: the basement torture chambers, the terror operations, the support lent to criminal dictators from Idi Amin to Charles Taylor. Under Qaddafi, the creation of an unsanctioned N.G.O., for instance, was a capital offense; in liberated Benghazi, dozens of such N.G.O.s sprang up, even before Tripoli was freed. Opposition newspapers and television stations appeared. Nothing guarantees that Libya’s path will be straight and pacific, even with the advantages of a small population and a large oil industry. But these emergent institutions were developed above all by Libyans, not by Ahmed Chalabi or the Central Intelligence Agency. They are indigenous; they have legitimacy.

What the Libyan example portends for the nearby killing floor of Syria is unclear. Part of Obama’s anti-doctrinal doctrine is that it insists on the recognition of differences in a way that Bush’s fixed ideas did not. Complex as Libya was, and remains, Syria is infinitely more so. Qaddafi had been despised in the Arab world for decades; support in the region for his removal was hardly impossible to conjure. Bashar al-Assad is proving himself no less a despot, but Syria, because of its relationship with Iran, has ties to countries on the Security Council (Russia, for one) that Libya did not. Obama has tried to embolden the opposition; he has urged countries like Turkey to cut off trade, and pushed for tougher sanctions, to make it clear that displays of tyranny will not be without cost.

With what results? There are no sure outcomes in foreign policy, only a calculation of consequences, guided by an appraisal of national interests and values. The trouble with so much of the conservative critique of Obama’s foreign policy is that it cares less about outcomes than about the assertion of America’s power and the affirmation of its glory. In the case of Libya, Obama led from a place of no glory, and, in the eyes of his critics, no results could ever vindicate such a strategy. Yet a calculated modesty can augment a nation’s true influence. Obama would not be the first statesman to realize that it can be easier to win if you don’t need to trumpet your victory. ♦