Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.

With his new offensive against Islamic State terrorists in Syria, Barack Obama has a chance to revive his presidency, but the only way he can do that is to become a brand-new president, one who will be almost unrecognizable to his supporters. Obama must go from being the president who was elected to end wars—his most treasured self-image—to the president who finally leads one effectively. And he must now do it in two countries where for most of his presidency he has most resisted getting more deeply involved—Iraq and Syria.

“His whole national persona since 2004 has been about the question: Can he get us out of Iraq?” says former Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns, harking back to Obama’s signature speech calling the Iraq invasion a “dumb” war. “It is almost Shakespearian that he would be dragged back into another conflict in the same countries where he opposed the use of force.” Nonetheless, Burns believes, Obama now has no choice. The Islamic State’s spread now threatens not only Iraq and Syria but also essential U.S. allies, including Jordan and Turkey. “There is no question that the president has to act,” says Burns.


So is Obama now a war president? As air strikes in Syria commenced Monday, there was no longer any doubt that this is his new role. “I can confirm that U.S. military and partner forces are undertaking military action against ISIL terrorists in Syria using a mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles,” the Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. John Kirby, announced, saying that the “decision to conduct these strikes was made earlier today by the U.S. Central Command commander under authorization granted him by the commander in chief.”

For Barack Obama, what is happening now no longer falls into the category of cleaning up old wars. This is no longer the war of the Afghan “surge,” which was mainly intended to end a war that was already underway. Or Obama’s aggressive policy of launching covert drone strikes and special operations missions against al Qaeda and its affiliates. This is a wholly new war, Obama’s very own, and it is out in the open. And it is happening in a country, Syria, where the president has until now resisted the entreaties of his entire national-security team to get involved militarily, refusing to arm the Syrian rebels and temporizing over whether to strike Bashar al-Assad over his alleged use of chemical weapons.

It’s now clear that the perilously swift rise of the Islamic State, and perhaps too the perilous downward slide of the president’s poll numbers, has forced him to radically re-evaluate his presidency—and to shed, at long last, the state of denial he has appeared to inhabit regarding the most precious myth of his presidency: that he was close to defeating al Qaeda, and bringing America back from a “perpetual war footing.” If Obama can at long last discard that superannuated narrative and forcefully confront the Islamic State—as he promised to do in his Sept. 10 speech to the nation—then the waning perception of him as an effective leader could change in a short period of time.

It’s not that Obama has been shy about using force in the past six and a half years. But he has preferred to do it covertly. His entire presidency has been about downgrading war to something we don’t even call war any more, and keeping it out of the headlines when necessary (or blasting it into the headlines, as with the mission to take out Osama bin Laden in May of 2011, when politically useful). He has been mainly about avoiding the legacy of George W. Bush and assiduously building up the image of a president who, more than anything, wished to ultimately live up to one of the most prematurely awarded Nobel peace prizes of all time.

That’s all gone with the harsh new wind from the Middle East. On Wednesday, at the very appropriate forum of the U.N. Security Council—which Obama will preside over for the second time in his presidency—we will hear a lot about “coalition building” against the Islamic State. That is fine—all the best presidents build coalitions—but very little in the end gets done without firm American leadership. And that’s what Obama has avoided for six years of “leading from behind” or pushing others forward—as he did with France and Britain against Libya.

The risk today, however, is that Obama will be forced to compromise on his pledge of no new boots on the ground. In his Sept. 10 speech, he said: “It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” And yet as many as 1,700 U.S. troops are now acting in a vague role as advisers and trainers in Iraq, and it is reasonable to think that some U.S. operatives are helping to direct air strikes into their targets in Syria. The question is whether that can continue, or whether Obama will be forced to widen U.S. involvement. The martial model remains, for the White House, to use the Kurdish peshmerga and Iraqi forces as well as sympathetic Sunni tribes in Iraq on the ground. Whether he can take on the Islamic State in the same way in Syria, with America still officially aligned against Assad, and putative U.S. allies such as the Free Syrian Army forces ineffective, is another question.

Clearly, Obama’s entire legacy as president is now at stake all over again. According to a CBS News/New York Times poll released last week, just 34 percent of Americans approved of the president’s handling of foreign policy issues, the lowest ever recorded. And yet this poll, taken from Sept. 12 to Sept. 15, probably doesn’t account for the dramatic shift in approach since the president’s Sept. 10 speech, and the more than 150 air strikes he’s conducted since then in Iraq, not to mention what’s just occurred in Syria.

Few saw it coming, but the campaign against the Islamic State will loom large in the history of the Obama presidency. Modern presidential legacies tend to be defined by foreign policy. When you think of John Kennedy, what comes to mind: his many fiscal measures, or his management of the Cuban missile crisis? Lyndon Johnson is remembered more for bungling Vietnam than for ramming the Great Society through Congress. Ronald Reagan is lionized for supposedly winning the Cold War far more than for transforming the tax code, and George W. Bush will be forever identified with the disastrous and unnecessary Iraq war, even more than for his mismanagement of the economy. There are exceptions, of course: History will always recall Herbert Hoover as the president who precipitated the Great Depression. Bill Clinton’s historical stature, at present, remains a murky mix of domestic growth and foreign-policy drift (plus Monicagate). But the more distant we get from any president, the more we see his contribution in foreign-policy terms.

So it is likely to be with Obama, especially as the debate over Obamacare and other major domestic issues fades. If he is able to degrade the Islamic State significantly, then combined with other recent actions his record could start to improve on foreign policy. With U.S. help, a new Afghan “unity” government—the president was on the phone at least half a dozen times to make it happen—could well bolster, or at least salvage, his legacy in that critical war. In Europe, after enduring months of caustic criticism of his policy toward Vladimir Putin, Obama may have forced, through added sanctions, the Russian president to pause in his devil-may-care seizure of Ukrainian territory.

Obama once looked like a strong foreign-policy president—and he brought that story off as recently as the 2012 presidential campaign, when Mitt Romney’s efforts to contest him on this issue failed. Perhaps now he can again.