From the shrieks in much of the British media after Barack Obama’s Nato “free riders” remarks you could be forgiven for thinking the president had gone out of his way in an interview with the Atlantic Monthly to criticise Britain, France and other allies for mishandling the bloody shambles which is now Libya.

A pompous French politician popped up on the airwaves to suggest Obama should look in the mirror. “Obama lays blame for Libya mess on Cameron” thundered the front page of the Times. Surprise, surprise, the long and thoughtful interview, optimistically billed as The Obama Doctrine, wasn’t ALL ABOUT US. It is 20,000 words long and if the offending passages occupy more than 800 of them I’d be amazed. Obama is critical of many people, including the US foreign policy elite and the oil-rich Gulf autocracies.

Mind you, when it comes to the Nato allies, Obama is right. Sheltering under the big American umbrella since 1945, most Europeans have become comfortably well-off and lazy, more concerned with having a nice time than with the basics of self-defence. The richest undefended empire in history – as I like to call the EU – is facing growing problems on its eastern and southern flanks. Both refugees and related violence press on us from Syria, Iraq, and across north Africa to Morocco, and Europe is making a very poor job of tackling them. Of course, we’re free riding.

All this at a time when some idiots think they can float Britain off the continent (Nato defends us, not the EU, the ninnies tell each other) and go it alone. What the Obama interview serves to tell us yet again is that this president may still be an internationalist in outlook, but he is much less of one than most since 1945. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders – Jeremy Sanders as I like to call him – are doing well against expectations to be the next president. Both are isolationists.

Back to us. Here is one key passage from Atlantic which upset Fleet Street and the BBC:

“Free riders?,” I interjected. “Free riders,” he said, and continued. “So what I said at that point was, we should act as part of an international coalition. But because this is not at the core of our interests, we need to get a UN mandate; we need Europeans and Gulf countries to be actively involved in the coalition; we will apply the military capabilities that are unique to us, but we expect others to carry their weight. And we worked with our defense teams to ensure that we could execute a strategy without putting boots on the ground and without a long-term military commitment in Libya.”

Note that the journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, is first to use the expression “free riders”, though the president quickly picks it up and endorses it. Washington has made little secret of its European Nato allies cutting their defence budgets to the bone – breaching the 2% of GDP target – before and after the 2008-09 bankers crisis. Most of them didn’t join the Iraq war either. But then, neither did Senator Obama.

That’s one of many reasons why thoughtful Guardian readers may enjoy the interview. Obama is clever, he’s not bombastic about the use of US military power, let alone overextending it in self-defeating ways, as so many in the Washington power elite, civilian and military, are often too keen to do. The US should not bomb people just to show we’re tough, he says. He respects others. As he reminds one Oval Office visitor: “I’m black, I was raised by a single mother. I get it.”

So Jeremy Corbyn ought to be able to read the piece quite comfortably and agree with most of it. He probably won’t do either because his mindset seems quite rigid in a 1970s leftist sort of way – I mean that kindly – so he is not comfortable with adult conversations about the US role in the world and the global projection of power. Unserious, you might say.

On the other hand, Conservative readers might regard Obama’s world view as a bit too starry-eyed and Corbynite. The armchair warriors have a point, albeit not a huge one. He really did mess up in Syria in 2012-13 by drawing a “red line” against the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, then backing off when it was crossed. There was a case for not starting another war when the US remained embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan, but confusing signals are dangerous to everyone. They start bigger wars – and may yet do around Syria where Russia and Iran cynically have shown less restraint.

A UN official holds a plastic bag containing samples from the site of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Ain Tarma, Damascu, Syria. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters

Goldberg, who has made a study of the president’s foreign policy, prefers to call Obama a “Hobbesian optimist”, someone who thinks the world is a messy and violent place, but that most people are better than they are bad, they want to make it better, to get their kids an education, improve their lives.

Here is the second offending passage:

“When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong,” Obama said, “there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up,” he said. He noted that Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, lost his job the following year. And he said that British Prime Minister David Cameron soon stopped paying attention, becoming “distracted by a range of other things”. Of France, he said, “Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure” for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the US to “purchase France’s involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us.” In other words, giving France extra credit in exchange for less risk and cost to the United States was a useful trade-off – except that “from the perspective of a lot of the folks in the foreign-policy establishment, well, that was terrible. If we’re going to do something, obviously we’ve got to be up front, and nobody else is sharing in the spotlight”. Obama also blamed internal Libyan dynamics ...”

We could probably all agree that this takes more of a personal potshot at Sarkozy than at Cameron, though this Hawaii-born son of a Kenyan scholarship student has no reason to love us. It seems to be the case that his grandfather was mistreated, possibly tortured, as a Mau Mau terrorist suspect during the nastiest phase of Britain’s imperial retreat in the 1950s. Perhaps an Etonian gave the orders.

Either way, the world we have grown used to and take more or less for granted is unravelling in ways we cannot predict. To take just one promising example, did you know that Abdelaziz Bouteflika,79, Algeria’s authoritarian president, is in poor medical shape? Nor did I. But we will because there will be the usual nasty power struggle, in which Islamic State, entrenched over the Libyan border in Sirte, may take an interest: the Bouteflika regime is very anti-Islamist.

Algeria is a serious country with a proper army, capable of great brutality, a tradition it inherited from the French occupation. It is also the EU’s third largest supplier of the gas that keeps us warm and busy. If things go wrong just across the Med from Italy we will all hear about it, even if Dave and the Brexit posse want us to “be distracted by other things”.