Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Even the most forgiving judge of Barack Obama, one willing to overlook his preference for chipping onto the sunlit greens of Martha’s Vineyard rather than brooding in the fluorescent glare of the Situation Room, must admit that the President has sometimes been a thick-tongued steward of his own foreign policy. How did the author of “A More Perfect Union” become the author of “The world has always been messy”? Obama, who prides himself on late-night preparation, unshakable rationality, and a writerly ear, is compiling an anthology of botched pronouncements that have, at best, muddied his intentions. August, 2012: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” September, 2013: “I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.” August, 2014: “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet.”

After six years in office, Obama broadcasts his world-weariness with wan gestures and pauses, with loose moments in the White House press room. The world has stubbornly denied him his ambition to transcend its cruelties, pivot smartly to the East, and “do some nation-building here at home.” Obama’s halting cool at the lectern now reads too often as weakness, and when he protests against the charges of weakness he can seem just tired. As the Middle East disintegrates and a vengeful cynic in the Kremlin invades his neighbor, Obama has offered no full and clarifying foreign-policy vision.

His opponents and would-be successors at home have seized the chance to peashoot from the sidelines. What do they offer? Unchastened by their many past misjudgments, John McCain and Lindsey Graham go on proposing escalations, aggressions, and regime changes. Rand Paul, who will likely run for President as a stay-at-home Republican, went to Guatemala recently and performed eye surgeries as a means of displaying his foreign-policy bona fides. Was Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s ophthalmologist-in-chief, impressed?

Chris Christie insists on the efficacy of big men and tough talk—the Great Jersey Guy theory of history. Recently, he suggested that Vladimir Putin would not dare sponsor the bloody destabilization of Ukraine were Christie in charge. “I don’t believe, given who I am, that he would make the same judgment,” Christie said at a meeting of Republican activists. “Let’s leave it at that.” Christie is trying to bone up on world affairs by reading Kenneth Adelman’s book on Ronald Reagan. Adelman was the cheerful adviser to Donald Rumsfeld who insisted that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003, would be a “cakewalk.” Rick Perry, another 2016 hopeful, took a more parochial view of the geostrategic crisis when he suggested that Obama had blithely overlooked the “very real possibility” that the black-hooded executioners from the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham had already infiltrated the United States by way of the Mexican border. (According to Michael Barbaro, of the Times, this piece of intelligence elicited “eye rolls” from Pentagon officials.)

A more punishing critique came from Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former Secretary of State, who, hoping to win herself some distance from an unpopular President, told the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Clinton had a point: “Don’t do stupid stuff”—a mantra in the West Wing—does not have quite the analytical penetration of the Long Telegram. Nor does it account adequately for Obama’s thinking on when American force should and should not be used. But the admonition isn’t without value. Think of the “stupid stuff” in the history of American postwar misadventure: Eisenhower backing C.I.A.-led or -abetted regime change in Iran and Congo; Kennedy sanctioning an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs; Johnson’s colossal escalations and failures in Vietnam; Nixon’s covert efforts to depose Allende in Chile and conduct a war in Cambodia—the beginnings of a list that culminates in George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. To be mindful of such episodes, with all their unintended and far-reaching consequences, does not make one a weak-kneed fool.

The recurring Republican fantasy is that Ronald Reagan—resurrected in the person of a steely, handsome governor, say—would know what to do amid the lurid cruelties and corruptions of the current Middle East. He would, with plainspoken guile backed by the 101st Airborne, set everyone to rights. This fantasy leaves out the reality of Reagan’s unapologetically rapid exit from Lebanon after the Marine Corps barracks were bombed there, in 1983, his enthusiastic support of Saddam Hussein, and his secret overtures to Ayatollah Khomeini.

Obama does himself no favors with his periodic slumbers, his indisciplines of conception and rhetoric. He and his aides take too much comfort in their sense of being misunderstood and stymied. Their mistakes are not few. John Kerry’s recent effort to forge a settlement with Israel and Palestine was heroic, if unsuccessful, but the Administration should have had a serious Plan B, laying out intermediate steps that would sustain negotiations; its failure to do so contributed to the disaster that followed.

Yet it is a mistake, as well, to dismiss caution as weakness, to react to the medieval executions and depredations of ISIS and the adventurism of Vladimir Putin by mocking the very idea of strategic calculation. In foreign policy, there are sins of commission (Vietnam, Iraq) and there are sins of omission (Bosnia, Rwanda). History may find Obama guilty of both, but he has never been incapable of using American leverage and power. Even as he was being mocked as feckless last week, he ordered an air strike in Somalia successfully targeting Ahmed Abdi Godane, the commander of the militant group al-Shabaab. Although American interests, tightly conceived, may not be much implicated in Ukraine, Obama has taken the lead in creating a Western bloc that has imposed intensifying sanctions against Putin’s regime. Putin would not be talking about a ceasefire otherwise. Last week, at the NATO summit, in Wales, Obama also assembled a coalition that would take on ISIS and provide a model for an international response to extremist groups.

This is not a foreign policy that offers the satisfactions of self-expression; it lacks the snarl and the swagger that Obama’s domestic rivals yearn for. But, halfway through this President’s second term, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program have, at last, a realistic chance for success. Russia’s recent aggressions in eastern Ukraine may end in an uneasy truce. The gains have been unshowy and incremental. But when your aim is to conduct a responsive and responsible foreign policy, the avoidance of stupid things is often the avoidance of bloodshed and unforeseen strife. History suggests that it is not a mantra to be derided or dismissed. ♦