It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Although Obama never presented himself as a pacifist candidate, his 2007-2008 presidential campaign was predicated in part on the promise to end the war in Iraq and properly prosecute the war in Afghanistan. In March 2008, he declared of Iraq, “When I am commander in chief, I will set a new goal on day one: I will end this war.” Later that year, he listed his first two priorities for making America safer as “ending the war in Iraq responsibly” and “finishing the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.” The president also promised a foreign policy that relied more on diplomacy and less on military might in his first inaugural address, telling his audience that “our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” Well before the tumult of the Arab Spring and its aftermath, Obama famously offered to extend a hand to those willing to unclench their fist.

In many ways, Obama has kept his word. He ended Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom—the combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively, that Bush bequeathed to him—and drastically reduced U.S. troop levels from their peaks in both countries. In the midst of the Arab Spring, the president led a limited military campaign against Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi with the support of the United Nations and a multinational coalition. He has been reluctant to intervene in Syria’s civil war in any significant way despite intense pressure to do so from both inside and outside his administration. In 2013, Obama announced his intention to shift the United States away from “a perpetual wartime footing.” He said, “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end.” And Obama has repeatedly shown his commitment to diplomacy by reestablishing relations with Burma and Cuba, and by striking a nuclear deal with Iran.

And yet while America’s military footprint abroad is fainter today than when Obama took office, it’s also more dispersed. Not counting the probable expansion of the anti-ISIS campaign to Libya and other parts of Africa in the near future, the U.S. military is, by my reckoning, involved in more countries now than when Obama took office in 2009, albeit to varying degrees.

To be fair, defining U.S. “military involvement” is tricky, partly because there are many levels of engagement between no military involvement and full-scale invasion, and partly because so much of the U.S.’s military activity is done from the shadows. That’s why, in consultation with Anthony Cordesman at Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Chris Harmer at the Institute for the Study of War, I’ve limited the definition of military involvement to countries that the United States is consistently bombing (overtly or covertly); where regular U.S. troops are engaged in combat; or where regular U.S. troops are providing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in support of another military force that is engaged in combat. By that definition, the U.S. is currently fighting in roughly eight countries. (For sanity’s sake, my definition excludes special-operations forces; Ken McGraw, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, told me in early February that special-operations personnel were deployed in 82 countries that week alone.)