There was something reassuring about seeing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stride into the well of the House of Representatives to address a joint session of Congress on Tuesday morning. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to look to that podium and see an adult.

Whenever you see Barack Obama mount that rostrum, what usually follows is a string of marginalia: proposals for childcare subsides, free community college and expanded broadband access for rural communities. Even if you think those are worthwhile ideas, they’re the kind of things you expect to hear from a city council member or a state legislator. But from a president of the United States? While the world burns? One is reminded of a quote from one of Mr. Obama’s Democratic predecessors, John F. Kennedy:

“It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a president to handle, isn’t it? I mean, who gives a [expletive] if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25 in comparison to something like this?”

He said that, of course, off the record.

Now, Obama’s immaturity is not unique in the Oval Office. Indeed, our last three presidents have all seemed stuck in a kind of undergraduate arrested development: Bill Clinton, the talented but undisciplined student who knew just enough – and possessed sufficient charm – to bluff his way through every class; George W. Bush, the hail-fellow-well-met frat brother whose heart was reliably in the right place but who could rarely deliver results proportionate to his intentions; and now Barack Obama, the pensive, disaffected kid who goes home for Thanksgiving and lectures his family about America’s vast catalog of sins.

At least the first two were fun.

There’s something different about Obama’s peculiar form of prolonged adolescence, however. It carries with it a sort of ennui; a sense of perpetual fatigue that often reveals itself in dismissiveness. As a result, you get the sense that the president doesn’t take the most important parts of his job – the parts that Kennedy believed were the sum total of the office – all that seriously.

That’s how you end up referring to a group of terrorist marauding through the Middle East as “A JV team” or appointing the kind of secretary of state who reacts to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by characterizing it as “[behaving] in 19th century fashion.” I’m sure that one kept them up late at night in the Kremlin.

It’s also how you end up slow-walking to a diplomatic agreement with Iran that will, in the best-case scenario, leave the country perpetually on the cusp of a nuclear breakout – and claiming that you won’t submit the resulting treaty to Congress, in clear violation of the Constitution.

That’s what made Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks Tuesday so remarkable. He was doing what the president of the United States has thus far refused to: leveling with the Congress about the dangers ahead.

He pointed out that, at the same time that Iran is supposed to be working toward a peaceful co-existence with the United States, Tehran spent last week conducting a military exercise in which it blew up a mock version of a U.S. aircraft carrier. He described how the Iranian regime “hangs gays, persecutes Christians, jails journalists and executes even more prisoners than before.” And he explained how ISIS and Iran both share the goal of militant Islamist conquest – they simply disagree about which of them will ultimately come out on top.

As Netanyahu noted, “In this deadly game of thrones, there’s no place for America or for Israel, no peace for Christians, Jews or Muslims who don’t share the Islamist medieval creed, no rights for women, no freedom for anyone.”

It was not hysterical. It was not emotive. It was just the facts, laid out in chilling detail. It was essential for America to hear that from a chief executive. It’s a shame it wasn’t our own.