As for Hillary, whose penchant, at least rhetorically, is for action, it’s impossible to know what she might have done had she been elected president instead of Obama in 2008. By her own account, Secretary Clinton argued for arming the Syrian rebels early, though that recommendation wasn’t for giving them weapons systems that would have significantly altered the battlefield dynamics. Nonetheless, it was more than the president was willing to do. She and others did manage to persuade a reluctant Obama to intervene against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya—a move Obama now views as a mistake, but which Clinton has not disavowed. This year on the campaign trail, Clinton has called for a no-fly zone in Syria—an idea seemingly in search of a strategy.

But while Obama has been criticized for “inaction,” it doesn’t necessarily follow that action is generally the better course. First, “get caught trying” is more of a predisposition than a sustainable policy. The urge to “do something”—smart or not—is powerful for United States presidents and secretaries of state. The logic is that if you don’t play, you can’t win. And after all, people come to Washington to fix things, not sit on their hands; if you’re in government, your job description virtually compels you to figure out how to make something work, not to argue that it can’t. Democratic and Republican administrations alike are vulnerable to this impulse; more so than to looking at history’s lessons or considering seriously whether action really is superior to inaction.

Second, the urge to be caught trying is also powered by two largely naïve and self-reverential American notions: that most problems, including violent conflicts, can in fact be resolved, and that America is the indispensable power that’s not just mandated, but able, to solve them. The former United States senator George Mitchell, who led peace talks in Northern Ireland, maintains there is no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended. “Conflicts are created and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings.” It all sounds so right and so logical. On the other hand, I spent 20-plus years working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and by the time I left government it was worse than it had been when I began. Despite brilliant success in Northern Ireland, Mitchell, too, had little luck with Israelis and Palestinians as Obama’s special envoy; and neither did Secretary of State John Kerry during Obama’s second term. We all wrongly believed that the conflict was either ripe for a breakthrough or could be made so if only we tried hard enough.

The American image of itself as a fix-it nation is not wholly unwarranted. There are cases in which the United States has in fact contributed mightily to fixing things. In addition to its key role in helping to unwind the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland, the United States also helped create and enforce a more peaceful situation in the former Yugoslavia. The past half century offers many other examples: Just look at the country’s role in Europe and Japan between 1945 and 1950; its creative diplomacy with China; its brokering of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; its hand in ending the Cold War in the late 1980s; and its success pushing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991.