EVEN in cash-strapped times, America’s defence secretary does not so much travel overseas as make an imperial progress. The Pentagon’s boss flies aboard an airborne command post originally built to run nuclear wars, crammed with scores of aides, and often escorted by mid-air refuelling tankers. The plane’s antiquity adds an extra superpower frisson. With its clunky gadgets and cold-war decor it feels like a set from Dr Strangelove, jammed into a Boeing 747.

In an America tired of war, the Pentagon knows that it needs new missions. Trade and diplomacy duly dominated planning for the most recent foreign trip made by Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator who has served as Barack Obama’s defence secretary since 2013. The expected highlight was a stop in India to woo the newly elected government of Narendra Modi (a Hindu nationalist with no special love of America). There were to be talks about such shared concerns as China’s rise and Afghan stability after American combat troops leave in 2016. Officials hoped to flog India some weapons. After years of slogging combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, Team Obama yearns to engage more with Asia and other dynamic regions, and to talk about something other than war. Alas, when planning foreign policy, the rest of the world gets a vote.

Minutes after take-off from Andrews Air Force Base on August 5th, sombre aides circulated details of a two-star American general killed by an Afghan soldier. The following day in Germany, after meeting commanders of American forces in Europe, the defence secretary fielded questions about whether the killing would affect American pull-out plans in Afghanistan (no, he replied), and whether he was alarmed by Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s border (absolutely, he said). Not long after Mr Hagel landed in Delhi on August 7th, news broke that air strikes were imminent in Iraq against the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS). The following night Mr Hagel missed a banquet with his hosts to attend an Iraq crisis meeting with the president and colleagues by video-link. A speech to Indian bigwigs on August 9th offered a last chance to urge closer ties between the two powers. His audience listened politely, then peppered him with sceptical questions. Why cannot America be more active in the Middle East, Mr Hagel was asked. Another questioner brought up gridlock in Washington: did Mr Obama’s government really have the energy, time or inclination to deepen ties with India?

Small wonder that Mr Hagel told troops in Germany that America had “a thankless job in many ways”. No great power faces the same expectations. No other defence minister receives such torrents of intelligence from every continent, whether in the air or huddled with sleepless generals in some heavily guarded foreign hotel. Yet after two land-wars without clear-cut victories, Mr Obama’s government has a sharp sense of the limits of American influence. Other countries sense America’s limits too.

Mr Hagel is a Republican of the Colin Powell school, committed to unrivalled American military power—“I’m not interested in a fair fight”—but adamant that force should be used only for a clear objective and with a viable exit strategy. He was durably marked by service in the Vietnam war (breaking new ground for a Pentagon boss, he served as a sergeant, not as an officer). Long before his appointment by a Democratic president, he broke with his party over Iraq, regretting his vote for a war resolution in 2002, and arguing that no military solution could be imposed on Iraq from the outside. Today, he sounds rather ruthless about Afghanistan, a country he says has historically been essentially “ungovernable”. America will give Afghans more time and space to build institutions to govern themselves. But “they have either got to do it, or it won’t be done.”

He sounds as coldly realist about Iraq. He calls the jihadists of IS a “very significant threat to the security of Iraq”. Within strict guidelines set out by Mr Obama, America will support Iraqi forces and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in the country’s north. But, he insists: “This is not a US responsibility.”

In recent days a divide has opened between Mr Obama and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Mr Obama continues to stress that no American military solution exists to crises in Iraq and Syria, and to assure the public that he knows how war-weary they are. Mrs Clinton, distancing herself from an unpopular president, retorts, in effect, that crises can still be made worse by America’s absence. Asked by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic about Mr Obama’s boast (in an off-the-record chat with reporters) that his core strategic doctrine is “don’t do stupid shit”, she sniffed that that is “not an organising principle” for a great nation.

Turn inward, and the world will still find you

Mr Hagel occupies a distinctive position in this debate. Interviewed before Mrs Clinton’s criticisms went public, he does not challenge Mr Obama’s caution about using military power. He finds American war-weariness understandable. But it troubles him, too. Mr Hagel does not fear isolationism as much as “insulationism”: the temptation to think that America can turn inward and be safe. He cites a 1945 speech by Franklin Roosevelt in which the dying president summed up the lesson of the world war: that America’s well-being “is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away.” Speaking in Chicago earlier this year Mr Hagel came up with his own formulation, urging America to see that global leadership is an advantage not a burden, and declaring: “We do not engage in the world because we are a great nation. Rather, we are a great nation because we engage in the world.”

Now, high above Asia in his airborne command post, Mr Hagel notes a puzzle: since its founding America has been unusually wary of foreign entanglements, yet at the same time uniquely confident that it can fix the largest problems. That is a good balance. A turbulent world needs America to keep sight of it.