LIKE a poolside daydream, Barack Obama’s plan to get Congress to authorise the use of force in Syria, announced during the Labour Day holiday, did not survive two weeks back at work. Before a deal was struck on September 14th between John Kerry, the secretary of state, and Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, it looked unlikely that the president would get the votes he needed in the House of Representatives and doubtful that he would succeed in the Senate. In narrow political terms, Russia rescued Mr Obama from the thing that presidents fear even more than hurricanes, sex scandals and economic collapse: impotence.

If this was a moment when America’s place in the world shifted, few Americans noticed it. At a Tea Party meeting in northern Virginia on September 16th there was talk of defunding Obamacare, of constitution readings and of the sanctity of property rights. One woman told a story about how government bureaucrats had shut down a birthday party she had hosted for some eight year-olds and also interfered with her freedom to hollow out pumpkins. Nobody mentioned Syria.

This forgetfulness is widely shared. With the government facing a partial shutdown at the end of the month unless a budget is passed, most politicians are busy thinking through the permutations of yet another round of fiscal negotiations. “The economy is like a house fire,” says David Winston, a pollster who advises Republican leaders in the House. “There may be some other things wrong with the building, like a broken window or some bad wiring, but the blaze on the roof is what you really notice.” Yet for all this hurry to move on to the next fight, Mr Obama’s presidency is now tied to what happens in Syria.

It is hard to find anyone outside the White House who admires the way the president has handled the crisis. But some are prepared to extend a little understanding. For two years Mr Obama was harangued by hawks and humanitarians for not acting. Then, when a blatant and horrific chemical-weapons attack on August 21st made him change his mind, he found that American support for military action in Syria was much weaker than it had previously appeared.

Mr Obama misread Congress. He worked hard to persuade both parties that America should punish Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, for breaking the laws of war. But lawmakers found his plan unconvincing. The administration said both that the proposed strike would be big enough to degrade Syria’s military capability and that it would be “unbelievably small”.

Finally, he ended up outsourcing policymaking to Russia, which seized on a throwaway remark made by Mr Kerry—that missile strikes might be averted if Syria handed over all its chemical weapons—and turned it overnight into the administration’s policy.

In Mr Obama’s telling none of this matters. “Folks here in Washington like to grade on style,” he told ABC news. “’I’m much more concerned about getting the policy right.” Polls suggest that Mr Obama is in tune with the country. A survey by the Pew Research Centre found that two-thirds of Americans support the president’s decision to delay missile strikes, even though only a quarter think Syria will actually give up its weapons.

However, the positive approval ratings on foreign affairs that Mr Obama had enjoyed since the start of his presidency have now disappeared. In 2009 66% of Americans approved of the way he handled foreign policy and only 28% disapproved. Now it is 40% for and 57% against. Launching missiles in the Middle East might have made those numbers even worse, though.

For now, the president’s position on Syria appears comfortable. But what happens if Syria fails to stick to the deal? Then, argues Jeremy Shapiro, a former state department official now at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, America will find itself in a repeat of the game of cat-and-mouse played between weapons inspectors and Saddam Hussein, the late Iraqi dictator, between 1992 and 2002.

Time to play “hunt-the-WMD” again

That game was characterised by frequent showdowns that mostly stopped short of the use of force. American officials who lived through this experience (some of whom are now in senior positions) hated it, he says, but it actually worked quite well. “If you have to sacrifice the mental health of a few mid-level officials in the US government then so be it.” If the Assad regime uses chemical weapons again then Mr Obama will be back where he began, counting votes in Congress to see if he can launch a missile strike that he has already deemed to be necessary.

Uncertainty over what happens next is spreading to other areas of Middle-East policy. David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector who runs the Institute for Science and International Security, a think-tank, says that people are wondering whether the president has put himself in a position where any military action against Iran’s nuclear programme would now have to be authorised by Congress first. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which would no doubt be alarmed if this were the case, is keeping quiet.

All American presidents suffer from competing expectations in foreign policy. Voters do not generally want them to attack foreigners. Yet they do want them to look like they are in charge and to use American power to solve problems that other countries cannot. Where Mr Obama has initiated the use of force, he has thus far been lucky: the raid to kill Osama bin Laden did just that. But he will need a lot more luck to get the result he wants in Syria, for he has just given up most of what small amount of control he once had.