In a little-noticed passage in Robert Gates’s new memoir, the former defense secretary recounts a trip he took to Azerbaijan in the spring of 2010. His mission was to hand the reigning dictator, Ilham Aliyev, a note from President Barack Obama, hailing the importance of the two countries’ relations. Aliyev had been grousing about the U.S. military using his land as a stopover along the supply route to Afghanistan. Just “showing up” brought him back in line, Gates writes, adding, approvingly, “Neither the letter nor I mentioned human rights.”

More than five years into Obama’s presidency, the single word that best sums up his foreign policy is “realist”—in some cases, as one former adviser told me, “hard-nosed,” even “cold” realist.

Like all postwar presidents, Obama speaks in hallowed terms about America’s global mission. But his actions reveal an aversion to missionary zeal. He has ended the regime-changing wars he inherited, and done much to avoid new ones. He rarely hectors foreign leaders about their internal affairs, at least in public. He suffers no ideological hang-ups about negotiating with dreadful rulers or sworn enemies, such as Iran, for the sake of national-security interests. To ease America’s way out of Afghanistan, he has cozied up to Central Asian autocrats and tolerated Pakistan’s duplicity. With almost clinical detachment, he has reassessed U.S. relationships in East Asia, embracing authoritarian regimes in Myanmar and Vietnam to promote trade and check an expansive China.

Obama’s belief in American values isn’t entirely rhetorical; he will sometimes place ideals above interests, though rarely when the two collide. He seems unmoved by the triumphalism that animated George W. Bush’s foreign policy, in part because he sees the bloody, futile legacy it left in the sands of Iraq—but also because it’s just not his style. During his first presidential campaign, when he said he had “enormous sympathy” for the foreign policy of President George H.W. Bush and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft—ultimate realists—many thought Obama was just taking a whack at his predecessor, H.W.’s son. Maybe he was, but he also meant it. Perhaps more than any president since Dwight Eisenhower, Obama defines the national interest narrowly and acts accordingly. And in following this course, he has been much more successful than his critics allow. In fact, his deepest failures have occurred when he has veered off his path.

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At first, Obama was mistaken for the opposite of a realist. When Susan Rice and Samantha Power—ultimate idealists—emerged as key players on his campaign staff and transition team, some saw their presence as a sign of Obama’s idealist leanings. Rice was named U.N. ambassador and Power a National Security Council aide. But the foreign policy appointees who had by far the greatest influence in Obama’s White House, the trio with whom he spoke at length every day—National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon; Donilon’s deputy, Denis McDonough; and John Brennan, counterterrorism adviser—were thoroughgoing realists. Obama nicknamed them “the grim Irishmen,” but he almost always agreed with them and took their advice.

Open In New Window OPTICS: Obama's Awkward Allies (click to view gallery)

Gates, whom he unexpectedly kept on as a holdover from George W. Bush’s administration (and who had served as Scowcroft’s deputy under Bush’s father), emerged as another key adviser in Obama’s first term. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s initial chief of staff, referred to Gates as the “center of gravity” in discussions of foreign affairs.

Early in Obama’s first term, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech laying out an agenda of people-to-people relations, especially women’s rights, the president paid it lip service in some of his own speeches, but he never followed through with action. There isn’t a trace of such sentiments in his dealings with those parts of the world—Afghanistan, China, much of the Arab world—where the theme had particular resonance; other factors, such as security and economics, clearly prevailed.

Even when it came to Obama’s own handful of lofty sentiments, notably his call in 2009 for the abolition of nuclear weapons, he stopped pushing when the resistance proved immovable. He negotiated a truly significant arms-reduction treaty with the Russians, but to win ratification in the Senate, he boosted the budget for nuclear research and development. When the Russians displayed a deep aversion to still more cuts, when U.S.-Russian relations took a dip across the board with Vladimir Putin’s return as president and when other crises overwhelmed Obama’s agenda, the talk of a nuclear-free world disappeared.

It’s curious that a president so previously inexperienced in foreign policy would emerge, so early in his term, with any worldview, much less a hard-nosed one. Still more intriguing is how a man with a passion for righting domestic wrongs like racism and inequality can seem so cold-blooded in his dealings abroad.

Perhaps more than any president since Dwight Eisenhower, Obama defines the national interest narrowly and acts accordingly.

Much can be explained by what might seem the most unlikely source—his truly seminal years as a community organizer in Chicago, working for an outfit modeled explicitly on the principles of Saul Alinsky. (Alinsky died in 1972, more than a decade before Obama moved to Chicago, but his thinking permeated the city’s activist groups.) Right-wing critics, especially at Fox News, have long latched onto this in their attempt to paint Obama as a dangerous lefty. But even more than usual, they had no idea what they were talking about. Alinsky was a Machiavelli of urban protest movements. In his great book Rules for Radicals (subtitled “A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals”), Alinsky stressed this as his No. 1 rule: “As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. … That means working in the system. … We will start with the system because there is no other place to start from except political lunacy.” His tactics involved exploiting and playing jujitsu with power structures, not overthrowing them.

This realism—starting with the world as it is, in order to make effective changes—runs as a near-constant thread through Obama’s presidency. He articulated this view early on, in a speech that, several aides say, he worked on the longest and wrote almost entirely on his own—his Dec. 10, 2009, Nobel Peace Prize lecture in Oslo. The prize was premature and, in retrospect, preposterous. But the speech was an astute statement about war and peace in the modern era, a sophisticated discourse on the use of force and the limits of power, and—as it’s turned out—a guide to almost everything he has done in foreign policy since.

In the past few years, I’ve brought up the Nobel speech with several of Obama’s aides, and they all agree: It’s “a template to how he approaches problems,” says one; a “framework for how he thinks about U.S. power,” says another. Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, says, “When people ask me to summarize his foreign policy, I tell them to take a close look at that speech.”

It was a nervy lecture, given the occasion and the audience. “The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace,” Obama said at one point. The global security of the post-World War II era, he added, was achieved not just by peace treaties, but by “the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” To acknowledge the occasional necessity for force, he went on, isn’t an act of cynicism but “a recognition of history, the imperfection of man and the limits of reason”—the world as it is.

He did note, in what many took as a swipe at Bush’s unilateralism, that, in a world where “threats are more diffuse and missions more complex, America cannot act alone” but must call on allies who share our interests and obligations. Even here, though, his reasoning was coldly realistic: “I am convinced that adhering to … international standards strengthens those who do, and isolates and weakens those who don’t.” For Obama, following norms is important, in part for its own sake, but more because it legitimizes the exercise of U.S. national power. That’s realism with a capital R.

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Especially during his first term, Obama made foreign policy in a calculated manner. He accepted his generals’ advice to deploy 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan and switch to a more aggressive counterinsurgency strategy. But he made it clear, in closed-door meetings, that he expected swift progress—specifically that the Afghan army take the lead in the fight within 18 months. This didn’t happen, so, almost 18 months to the day, Obama announced that he was scaling back the mission and pulling out all those “surge” troops. The month before, a SEAL team had killed Osama bin Laden. As a result, Obama could declare victory and go home (or at least begin to). But in fact, he was pulling out because the strategy hadn’t worked.

The generals were shocked: They had expected him to withdraw just a few thousand troops and give their strategy more time. They hadn’t realized that he had been serious: He had calculated how much he was willing to risk on their gamble of a strategy, in terms of lives, money and time—and he was determined to risk no more.

AP Photo

He displayed a similar calculus in Libya. When Muammar Gadhafi started mowing down protesters and threatening to exterminate whole towns like rats, Obama’s advisers were split on what to do. The military wanted to stay out, citing the lack of vital interests. Some of his White House advisers, joined by Clinton, wanted to go in heavy with military force to prevent a humanitarian disaster.

Obama rejected both factions. According to aides and officials who were at the decisive meeting, he said—as if thinking out loud—that, while America had no vital interest in Libya, it did have some interest, especially since the Arab League had unanimously beseeched the world for help, the U.N. Security Council seemed ripe for a resolution and the main NATO allies seemed unusually keen to take action, too. He insisted that any U.S. action involve no boots on the ground and a division of labor with the allies: We would do the heavy work on the front end (drones, cruise missiles, smart bombs—the stuff only we can do); they would take on the bulk of the long-term effort. One aide described this approach to a New Yorker reporter as “leading from behind”—a much-ridiculed term that, in substance, was really quite shrewd. Michèle Flournoy, then the undersecretary of defense, says, “This was classic Obama, looking for some third way, an approach that’s effective but that’s also commensurate with our limited interests.”

Obama’s realism about engaging with the world as it is runs deep. It may be as much a moral stance for him as the “freedom agenda” was for Bush.

Many have wondered why Obama dropped bombs for the rebels in Libya but balked at even arming the rebels in the Syrian civil war, especially since then-CIA Director David Petraeus devised a plan in 2012 for doing so, a strategy endorsed by Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In fact, Obama’s template was the same; the conclusions were different. As one former official put it, “In Libya, there was open desert, so we could fire on forces effectively, while in Syria, it was urban warfare, with good guys, bad guys and civilians intermingled. Plus, the Libyan rebels seemed to have a shot at forming a cohesive government, while this seemed less so in Syria.” Most of all, this former official says, Obama feared the “slippery slope” of escalation. This conflict wasn’t merely a civil war; it was tethered to a regional conflict, which the United States had little power to control. Obama “did not want to get involved, on the ground, in a proxy war between the Saudis and the Iranians.”

In the past year, though, Obama got sucked into the Syrian crisis anyway, in what has devolved into the most disastrous foreign misstep of his presidency—and it happened because he lost sight of his realist North Star. In August, according to the United States and its allies, Bashar Assad’s regime fired rockets loaded with nerve gas at an area dominated by Syrian rebels, killing nearly 1,500 people. Obama had publicly warned, five times in the previous year, that Assad would cross a “red line” if he used chemical weapons. No realist would lay down such a marker without a plan for what to do when it was crossed. Now he was in a corner of his own making.

He thickened the mess by devising a plan for retaliatory airstrikes, and making the bare bones of it public, without first ensuring international backing—a prerequisite, by his own standards, for military action undertaken to enforce “international norms.” Then he announced that he wouldn’t attack without congressional authorization but didn’t take a vote count ahead of time. Just as Congress was about to vote down his request for authority, Vladimir Putin stepped in with a plan—to his client, Assad, an order—to strip Syria of chemical weapons under international inspection. It might have looked like hard-headed realism, but in reality Obama just caught a break: The crisis was resolved despite, not because of, his actions. One former senior official says, “When people—serious people—say Obama is indecisive and uncertain, they’re talking about this episode with Syria.”

Historians might assess Obama’s foreign policy by how another Middle Eastern crisis is, or is not, resolved—Iran’s nuclear program. As we now know, around the time of the Syrian imbroglio, U.S. and Iranian diplomats were holding backdoor talks about the prospects of an accord to cap Iran’s nuclear program, making it extremely difficult for them to build A-bombs, in exchange for lifting economic sanctions. The interim deal that has since been signed is another classic case of international realism: Obama undertook the talks, despite—and with no mention of—Iran’s domestic repression, its support for Hezbollah and its military assistance to the Syrian regime.

Obama had made this point in his Nobel speech: Human rights can’t be imposed through “exhortation” but often require a combination of firm pressure and diplomatic incentives, for “no repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.” Sometimes, he added, it’s necessary to engage with dreadful regimes, even if doing so “lacks the satisfying purity of indignation.” It was the opposite of Bush’s policy (at least in his presidency’s first six years), as summarized by Vice President Dick Cheney: “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” Obama knew that defeating Iran was fantasy, so he negotiated with it, in the hopes of extracting tangible security benefits.

The Alinsky-inspired organizers in Chicago, of course, aren’t the only source of Obama’s thinking about dealing with these sorts of tensions. Obama’s realism about engaging with the world as it is runs deep; it may be as much a moral stance for him as the “freedom agenda” was for Bush. In the early stages of the 2008 presidential campaign, New York Times columnist David Brooks asked Obama if he had ever read Reinhold Niebuhr. Obama replied that Niebuhr was one of his favorite philosophers, and said that he took from his writings “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things.” Obama has been at his shrewdest, and best, when he’s kept his mind riveted on that idea.