On October 20, 2011, the day that Libyan rebel fighters found Colonel Muammar Qaddafi hiding in a desert culvert, hauled him out, and killed him, President Barack Obama called a press conference in the Rose Garden, and announced that we had “achieved our objectives.” (Hillary Clinton, who was then Secretary of State, put it more archly, telling a reporter, “We came, we saw, he died.”) The previous spring, when the United States had decided to join in the nato air strikes against Libya, the White House said that regime change was not the objective, and that persuaded Russia not to veto a Security Council mandate authorizing action to protect Libyans from their ruler “by all necessary measures.” Russia was furious about nato’s mission creep, but Obama said, “Faced with the potential of mass atrocities, and a call from the Libyan people, the United States and our friends and allies stopped Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks.” Now, he said, America’s part was done and the Libyans were free to establish full democracy. The President added, “This comes at a time when we see the strength of American leadership across the world. We’ve taken out Al Qaeda leaders, and we’ve put them on the path to defeat. We’re winding down the war in Iraq, and have begun a transition in Afghanistan.”

Four years later, Libya is a battle-worn wasteland, a bitter outcome; after all, Obama had come into office promising to extricate America from the gratuitous war he had inherited in Iraq and to resist embarking on any further such misadventures. Last Monday, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, the President admitted that the example of Libya weighed at least as heavily as that of Iraq against any impulse to use force to impose order abroad. He still maintains that taking on Qaddafi was “absolutely” the right decision, as he told Thomas Friedman, in the Times, last year, but that doing so has taught him not to engage in such action again without a plan to “fill a vacuum” after victory.

At the U.N., Obama noted that our commitment to international order is nowhere “more tested than in Syria,” which is caught between President Bashar al-Assad, who “slaughters tens of thousands of his own people,” and the Islamic State, which “beheads captives, slaughters the innocent, and enslaves women.” Either way, the President said, you’re dealing with “an assault on all humanity.” For that reason, Obama has held on to only two definite positions on Syria during the past four years: that Assad must go and that there can be no accommodating “an apocalyptic cult” like isis.

Vladimir Putin, who arrived at the General Assembly intent on portraying the United States as a global bully, was not about to let Obama have it both ways. In his address, which he delivered on Monday, after Obama spoke, the Russian President said that America had a penchant, in the post-Cold War, post-9/11 world, for promoting democratic revolutions abroad. These reminded him, he said, of “certain episodes from the history of the Soviet Union,” when “attempts to push for changes within other countries based on ideological preferences often led to tragic consequences and to degradation rather than progress.”

In the Middle East and North Africa, Putin continued—meaning Iraq and Libya—“aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions,” along with “violence, poverty, and social disaster,” and a climate where “nobody cares a bit about human rights.” Instead of democracy, bloodshed and fanaticism had filled the vacuum, he said, and the greatest threat to world order today was isis, which was born of and flourished in the wreckage of states dismantled by unchecked American power.

Putin’s own aggressive foreign interference, most recently in Crimea and Ukraine, has cost him dearly on the international stage, where he has a well-founded reputation as a brutal political cynic. Nevertheless, he went on to say, “I cannot help asking those who have caused this situation, Do you realize now what you’ve done?” He didn’t expect an answer, he said, but he made it plain that, in Syria, you have to take sides. “We think it is an enormous mistake to refuse to coöperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces, who are valiantly fighting terrorism face to face,” Putin said, and, with blunt contempt for the Obama Administration’s failed effort to muster an independent, democratic Syrian resistance force, he added, “We should finally acknowledge that no one but President Assad’s armed forces and Kurdish militias are truly fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria.” On the contrary, Putin insinuated, the Americans were trying to work with some of those other terrorist groups, and he warned, “They are just as clever as you are, and you never know who is manipulating whom.”

It is not surprising that the Obama-Putin contretemps was widely reported as a duel. The two Presidents do not suffer each other gladly, and it was impossible to parse all the overlapping and coded agendas in their speeches. And yet, for all their sparring, there was an undercurrent of common cause in their pronouncements on Syria. Putin was plainly seeking to reassert Russia’s position as a power broker in the Middle East, and Obama made no move to block him.

The President has preferred to pay the price of doing too little in Syria, rather than too much. It would be easy to blame him for that, if one could forget about Libya and Iraq, to say nothing of the fact that, last week, the Taliban captured a major city in Afghanistan for the first time since the United States installed the current regime in Kabul, fourteen years ago. Obama did tell the U.N. that he was prepared to put the fight against isis ahead of the fight against Assad, and to work with Russia and Iran to that end, as long as those nations worked to help ease Assad out. That seemed a minor concession, and one couldn’t help wondering why more than two hundred thousand Syrians had died before it could be offered. Then, the next day, Russian planes began bombing an assortment of targets around Syria, and the death toll rose again. ♦