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“You can make the argument that the classical liberal world order has perhaps outlived its normal life span,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale historian. “Obviously, Trump is doing that kind of thinking — not in a manner that is very polite or very decorous for sure, but in a sense responding to the inner strains that have been building for a long time.”

His “America First” approach has rewritten the compact between the United States and the countries it allied with in World War I and thereafter, leaving them to find their own way in this new era

Just last week, Mr. Macron called for the creation of a “true European army” because the continent can no longer depend on the United States. “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” he said. “When I see President Trump announcing that he’s quitting a major disarmament treaty, which was formed after the 1980s Euro-missile crisis that hit Europe, who is the main victim? Europe and its security.”

“He had an unshakable faith in the idea that what was best for the world would be best for the United States,” as Patricia O’Toole wrote in “The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made,” her biography published this year. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has made clear that he believes if something is good for the rest of the world, it must be bad for the United States.

Unlike Wilson, Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular in Europe. Only 27 percent of people in a 25-nation survey by the Pew Research Center had confidence in the American president to do the right thing in world affairs — and only 9 percent have such confidence in France. Mr. Trump cited the survey on the campaign trail this fall to prove that he has the United States’ interests at heart.

In effect, Mr. Trump’s every-country-for-itself philosophy is a return to 19th-century great power politics, one that its advocates call more realistic than Wilson’s naïve romanticism.

Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College, has argued that Mr. Trump is not an isolationist, as some see him, but is reinventing internationalism to take on American enemies like China, Iran and Russia in a more cleareyed way. “He appears determined to upend the international system as thoroughly and disruptively as he has upended American politics,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gaddis said internationalism remained the dominant force in the United States when there was still a Cold War and what is remarkable is that it lasted so long once that existential threat evaporated.

“I’m not surprised that some of these foundations have been shaken at this point,” he said. “I have no idea what is going to replace them. I’m not sure I like how it’s shaking. It’s a little too shaky, it seems to me.”

Across the democratic world, an enormous divide has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries

Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them. This is now a truism, but it took far too long for economic and policy elites to recognize what was happening

This is a central theme of the political writer John Judis’s excellent and compact book “The Nationalist Revival,” published this fall

Judis sees the rise of nationalism as a reaction to “the illusions and excesses of globalization.” By unleashing footloose capital and undercutting national and even international efforts to regulate the economy in the public interest, globalization “is incompatible with social democracy in Europe or with New Deal liberalism in the United States.”

He proposes a useful distinction between “globalism” and “internationalism.” He’s against the first but for the second

Globalism, Judis argues, “subordinates nations and national governments to market forces or to the priorities of multinational corporations.

Internationalism, on the other hand, accepts that nations may sometimes have to “cede part of their sovereignty to international or regional bodies to address problems they could not adequately address on their own.”

critics of Trumpism need to recognize the ways in which globalism undercuts the rights and fortunes of large numbers of democratic citizens. The dispossessed often turn to nationalism for relief against their own sense of powerlessness.

Thinking about powerlessness is also important for understanding the backlash against immigration

there is nothing new (or necessarily indecent) about citizens saying that nations have a right to control their borders and to decide what levels of immigration they want to accept at any given time.

The challenge for the left and for all advocates of humane immigration policies is to move the debate from angry abstractions about “open borders” and toward a practical engagement with basic questions:

What level of immigration is optimal at this moment for the nation as a whole? What will it take to reach a consensus for creating a path toward citizenship for immigrants who are here illegally? And how do we build a stronger civic culture that acknowledges the rights but also the duties of the native-born and immigrants alike?

friends of liberal democracy need to keep two ideas in mind at the same time.

On the one side, they should not automatically cast those who worry about the decay of national sovereignty as reactionaries. On the other, they must continue to insist — and urgently so in 2019 — that American patriotism and the defense of constitutional democracy are one and the same.

German has its own share of wonderful, untranslatable words. One of those, “Zeitgenossen,” is particularly apt for the moment. If you look it up in a German-English dictionary, you will find that it means “contemporaries,” those who happen to live in the same day and age. But it means more than that. The German word “Genosse,” meaning “comrade” or “associate,” also implies a mutual responsibility.

I spoke mainly to Leavers, since they were the disrupters. I heard many true stories and many strong opinions, but as the years went by I began to attend more and more to the hints of dreaming between the lines, in what was not said as well as what was said. I noticed three things.

One was a strong sense of oppression, of being censored, and an attendant resentment. There were several occasions when Leavers I spoke to left pregnant gaps that could only have been filled with anti-immigrant sentiments that they weren’t “allowed” to say.

for many, casual racism is regarded as a lost patrimony; that as much as Leavers might oppose immigration, they are no less resentful of the “elites” rendering it awkward to categorize people along racial lines

I used to be skeptical of the idea that Britain hadn’t come to terms with the loss of its empire.

for the freedom to roam the North Sea without engaging with other littoral countries

Another thing I noticed was the internationalism of Leavers — internationalism with a particular flavor: the nostalgia for Ian Smith’s Rhodesi

The third thing was the preoccupation with the state as defender of its people.

that it was the British government’s job to defend native Britons against immigrants; foreign competition; greedy capitalists; and, through the National Health Service, illness.

Australian universities instead.

not a single one of the many Leavers I’ve had hours of conversations with over the years has explicitly expressed wanting it back. How could you? It would be ridiculous.

I believe now that a subliminal empire does persist in the dreaming of a large number of Britons, hinted at in a longing for the return of guilt-free racial categorization, in the idea that my country can be both globally open and privileged in an international trading system where it can somehow turn the rules to its advantage, in the idea of a safe white core protected from the dark hordes beyond by a mighty armed force

the matchless political skills of Margaret Thatcher. She achieved the extraordinary feat of turning into political orthodoxy a plainly contradictory credo, that nationalism and borderless capitalism could easily coexist.

The reality of the new Britain has been a shrunken welfare state, a country ruthlessly exposed to global free-market competition. The blindness of Thatcherism’s supporters has been to accept it as the patriotic solution to the globalism it enabled.

The bizarre and already disproved notion that the global free market might work as an avatar of Britain’s imperial power lies at the heart of the die-hard Brexit psyche. Propagating it was Mrs. Thatcher’s personal success, and that success, as we can now see, was her great failure.

Self-determination, the rule of law between and within countries, liberal economics, and the protection of human rights: the “new world order” that both the George H. W. Bush and the Clinton administrations worked to create was very much in the Wilsonian mold. 

When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, it seemed that the opportunity for a Wilsonian world order had finally come. The former Soviet empire could be reconstructed along Wilsonian lines, and the West could embrace Wilsonian principles more consistently now that the Soviet threat had disappeared.

American leaders during and after World War II laid the foundations of what they hoped would be a Wilsonian world order, in which international relations would be guided by the principles put forward in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and conducted according to rules established by institutions such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the World Trade Organization.

the order of things

The next stage in world history will not unfold along Wilsonian lines. The nations of the earth will continue to seek some kind of political order, because they must. And human rights activists and others will continue to work toward their goals. But the dream of a universal order, grounded in law, that secures peace between countries and democracy inside them will figure less and less in the work of world leaders. 

Although Wilsonian ideals will not disappear and there will be a continuing influence of Wilsonian thought on U.S. foreign policies, the halcyon days of the post–Cold War era, when American presidents organized their foreign policies around the principles of liberal internationalism, are unlikely to return anytime soon. 

Today, however, the most important fact in world politics is that this noble effort has failed.

Wilsonianism is only one version of a rules-based world order among many.

the pre-Wilsonian European order had moved significantly in the direction of elevating human rights to the level of diplomacy. 

The preservation of the balance of power was invoked as a goal to guide states; war, although regrettable, was seen as a legitimate element of the system. From Wilson’s standpoint, these were fatal flaws that made future conflagrations inevitable. To redress them, he sought to build an order in which states would accept enforceable legal restrictions on their behavior at home and their international conduct. 

Although Wilson was an American, his view of world order was first and foremost developed as a method for managing international politics in Europe, and it is in Europe where Wilson’s ideas have had their greatest success and where their prospects continue to look strongest.

His ideas were treated with bitter and cynical contempt by most European statesmen when he first proposed them, but they later became the fundamental basis of the European order, enshrined in the laws and practices of the EU.

the arc of history

The real problem of Wilsonianism is not a naive faith in good intentions but a simplistic view of the historical process, especially when it comes to the impact of technological progress on human social order.

Wilson was the devout son of a minister, deeply steeped in Calvinist teachings about predestination and the utter sovereignty of God, and he believed that the arc of progress was fated

he shared the optimism of what the scholar Herbert Butterfield called “the Whig historians,” the Victorian-era British thinkers who saw human history as a narrative of inexorable progress and betterment. Wilson believed that the so-called ordered liberty that characterized the Anglo-American countries had opened a path to permanent prosperity and peace.

Today’s Wilsonians have given this determinism a secular twist: in their eyes, liberalism will rule the future and bring humanity to “the end of history” as a result of human nature rather than divine purpose

In the early 1990s, leading U.S. foreign policymakers and commentators saw the fall of the Soviet Union through the same deterministic prism: as a signal that the time had come for a truly global and truly liberal world order. On all three occasions, Wilsonian order builders seemed to be in sight of their goal. But each time, like Ulysses, they were blown off course by contrary winds. 

Technical difficulties Today, those winds are gaining strength. Anyone hoping to reinvigorate the flagging Wilsonian project must contend with a number of obstacles

The most obvious is the return of ideology-fueled geopolitics. China, Russia, and a number of smaller powers aligned with them—Iran, for example—correctly see Wilsonian ideals as a deadly threat to their domestic arrangements.

Seeing Wilsonianism as a cover for American and, to some degree, EU ambitions, Beijing and Moscow have grown increasingly bold about contesting Wilsonian ideas and initiatives inside international institutions such as the UN and on the ground in places from Syria to the South China Sea.

These powers’ opposition to the Wilsonian order is corrosive in several ways.

It raises the risks and costs for Wilsonian powers to intervene in conflicts beyond their own borders.

The presence of great powers in the anti-Wilsonian coalition also provides shelter and assistance to smaller powers that otherwise might not choose to resist the status quo

Finally, the membership of countries such as China and Russia in international institutions makes it more difficult for those institutions to operate in support of Wilsonian norms: take, for example, Chinese and Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council, the election of anti-Wilsonian representatives to various UN bodies, and the opposition by countries such as Hungary and Poland to EU measures intended to promote the rule of law. 

Biological and technological research, by contrast, are critical for any country or company that hopes to remain competitive in the twenty-first century. An uncontrollable, multipolar arms race across a range of cutting-edge technologies is on the horizon, and it will undercut hopes for a revived Wilsonian order. 

The irony is that Wilsonians often believe that technological progress will make the world more governable and politics more rational—even if it also adds to the danger of war by making it so much more destructive. Wilson himself believed just that, as did the postwar order builders and the liberals who sought to extend the U.S.-led order after the Cold War. Each time, however, this faith in technological change was misplaced

As seen most recently with the rise of the Internet, although new technologies often contribute to the spread of liberal ideas and practices, they can also undermine democratic systems and aid authoritarian regimes.

Meanwhile, the torrent of technological innovation and change known as “the information revolution” creates obstacles for Wilsonian goals

It also makes it harder for national leaders to pursue the compromises that international cooperation inevitably requires and increases the chances that incoming governments will refuse to be bound by the acts of their predecessors. 

Wilsonians prioritize arms control not just because nuclear warfare could destroy the human race but also because, even if unused, nuclear weapons or their equivalent put the Wilsonian dream of a completely rules-based, law-bound international order out of reach. Weapons of mass destruction guarantee exactly the kind of state sovereignty that Wilsonians think is incompatible with humanity’s long-term security. One cannot easily stage a humanitarian intervention against a nuclear power. 

What is more, the technological progress that underlies the information revolution significantly exacerbates the problem of arms control. The development of cyberweapons and the potential of biological agents to inflict strategic damage on adversaries—graphically demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic—serve as warnings that new tools of warfare will be significantly more difficult to monitor or control than nuclear technology.

Today, as new technologies disrupt entire industries, and as social media upends the news media and election campaigning, politics is becoming more turbulent and polarized in many countries.

it’s not for everybody One of the central assumptions behind the quest for a Wilsonian order is the belief that as countries develop, they become more similar to already developed countries and will eventually converge on the liberal capitalist model that shapes North America and western Europe

The Wilsonian project requires a high degree of convergence to succeed; the member states of a Wilsonian order must be democratic, and they must be willing and able to conduct their international relations within liberal multilateral institutions. 

Today, China, India, Russia, and Turkey all seem less likely to converge on liberal democracy than they did in 1990. These countries and many others have developed economically and technologically not in order to become more like the West but rather to achieve a deeper independence from the West and to pursue civilizational and political goals of their own. 

In truth, Wilsonianism is a particularly European solution to a particularly European set of problems

With the specter of great-power war constantly hanging over them, European states developed a more intricate system of diplomacy and international politics than did countries in other parts of the world.

Although it would take another devastating world war to ensure that Germany, as well as its Western neighbors, would adhere to the rules of a new system, Europe was already prepared for the establishment of a Wilsonian order.

The idea of a single legitimate state with no true international peers is as deeply embedded in the political culture of China as the idea of a multistate system grounded in mutual recognition is embedded in that of Europe. There have been clashes among Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, but until the late nineteenth century, interstate conflict was rare. 

In human history as a whole, enduring civilizational states seem more typical than the European pattern of rivalry among peer states.

For states and peoples in much of the world, the problem of modern history that needed to be solved was not the recurrence of great-power conflict. The problem, instead, was figuring out how to drive European powers awa

International institutions face an even greater crisis of confidence. Voters skeptical of the value of technocratic rule by fellow citizens are even more skeptical of foreign technocrats with suspiciously cosmopolitan views

After colonialism formally ended and nascent countries began to assert control over their new territories, the classic problems of governance in the postcolonial world remained weak states and compromised sovereignty. 

expert texpert

The recent rise of populist movements across the West has revealed another danger to the Wilsonian project. If the United States could elect Donald Trump as president in 2016, what might it do in the future? What might the electorates in other important countries do? And if the Wilsonian order has become so controversial in the West, what are its prospects in the rest of the world?

Postcolonial and non-Western states often joined international institutions as a way to recover and enhance their sovereignty, not to surrender it, and their chief interest in international law was to protect weak states from strong ones, not to limit the power of national leaders to consolidate their authority

Yet from the standpoint of Wilson and his fellow progressives, the solution to these problems could not be simply to vest power in the voters. At the time, most Americans still had an eighth-grade education or less

The progressives’ answer to this problem was to support the creation of an apolitical expert class of managers and administrators. The progressives sought to build an administrative state that would curb the excessive power of the rich and redress the moral and political deficiencies of the poor.

The Internet and social media have undermined respect for all forms of expertise. Ordinary citizens today are significantly better educated and feel less need to rely on expert guidance. And events including the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 2008 financial crisis, and the inept government responses during the 2020 pandemic have seriously reduced confidence in experts and technocrats, whom many people have come to see as forming a nefarious “deep state.”

Wilson lived in an era when democratic governance faced problems that many feared were insurmountable. The Industrial Revolution had divided American society, creating unprecedented levels of inequality.

when it comes to international challenges such as climate change and mass migration, there is little evidence that the cumbersome institutions of global governance and the quarrelsome countries that run them will produce the kind of cheap, elegant solutions that could inspire public trust. 

what it means for biden

For all these reasons, the movement away from the Wilsonian order is likely to continue, and world politics will increasingly be carried out along non-Wilsonian and in some cases even anti-Wilsonian lines

the international order will increasingly be shaped by states that are on diverging paths. This does not mean an inevitable future of civilizational clashes, but it does mean that global institutions will have to accommodate a much wider range of views and values than they have in the past.

Non-Wilsonian orders have existed both in Europe and in other parts of the world in the past, and the nations of the world will likely need to draw on these examples as they seek to cobble together some kind of framework for stability and, if possible, peace under contemporary conditions. 

For U.S. policymakers, the developing crisis of the Wilsonian order worldwide presents vexing problems that are likely to preoccupy presidential administrations for decades to come. One problem is that many career officials and powerful voices in Congress, civil society organizations, and the press deeply believe not only that a Wilsonian foreign policy is a good and useful thing for the United States but also that it is the only path to peace and security and even to the survival of civilization and humanity.

Those factions will be hemmed in by the fact that any internationalist coalition in American foreign policy must rely to a significant degree on Wilsonian voters. But a generation of overreach and poor political judgment has significantly reduced the credibility of Wilsonian ideas among the American electorate.

But American foreign policy is always a coalition affair. As I wrote in my book Special Providence, Wilsonians are one of four schools that have contended to shape American foreign policy since the eighteenth century.

Hamiltonians and Wilsonians largely dominated American foreign-policy making after the Cold War, but Obama began to reintroduce some Jeffersonian ideas about restraint, and after the Libyan misadventure, his preference for that approach clearly strengthened.

Trump, who hung a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, sought to build a nationalist coalition of Jacksonians and Jeffersonians against the globalist coalition of Hamiltonians and Wilsonians that had been ascendant since World War II. 

Even as the Biden administration steers American foreign policy away from the nationalism of the Trump period, it will need to re-adjust the balance between the Wilsonian approach and the ideas of the other schools in light of changed political conditions at home and abroad.

Saving the planet from a climate catastrophe and building a coalition to counter China are causes that many Wilsonians will agree both require and justify a certain lack of scrupulosity when it comes to the choice of both allies and tactics. 

The Biden administration can also make use of other techniques that past presidents have used to gain the support of Wilsonians

Even as the ultimate goals of Wilsonian policy become less achievable, there are particular issues on which intelligent and focused American policy can produce results that Wilsonians will like

International cooperation to make money laundering more difficult and to eliminate tax havens is one area where progress is possible.

Concern for international public health will likely stay strong for some years after the COVID-19 pandemic has ended.

Promoting education for underserved groups in foreign countries—women, ethnic and religious minorities, the poor—is one of the best ways to build a better world,

however problematic Wilson’s personal views and domestic policies were, as a statesman and ideologist, he must be counted among the most influential makers of the modern world

Now it’s being given new life by the response to the coronavirus, which is being cast as a pretext for some sort of one-worlder takeover — with Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci held up as potential masterminds, “test and trace” as a scheme for permanent surveillance.

Instead of leading to some sort of globalist consolidation, the rule of the coronavirus is unraveling internationalism everywhere you look.

The virus has exposed global entities as either weak and politically compromised, in the case of the World Health Organization, or all-but-irrelevant, in the case of the United Nations

It has restored or hardened borders, impeded migration, devolved power from the international to national and the national to local

And it has spurred renewed great power rivalry, with “Chimerica” dissolving and a trans-Pacific Cold War looming.

Yes, some forms of test-and-trace may increase tech-industry surveillance power. But in every other respect, the trends and institutions that provoke new world order paranoia are likely to emerge from this crisis battered, discredited or permanently weakened.

The same counterpoint applies to the narrower, less apocalyptic suggestion that the pandemic lockdowns are an expression of late-stage liberal cosmopolitanism, of the liberal technocrat’s obsession with physical health and state control

In reality, late-stage liberalism is obsessed with health and state supervision for the purposes of personal liberation, pleasure-seeking, tourism and commerce. So a period of lockdown and closed borders is not the apotheosis of liberal cosmopolitanism, but its temporary negation

people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short. They lack not just education, health care, proper clothing and shelter—which most people in most of the world take for granted—but even enough food for physical and mental health. Raising people above that level of wretchedness is not a sufficient ambition for a prosperous planet, but it is a necessary one

the aim of halving global poverty between 1990 and 2015 was achieved five years early

Most of the credit, however, must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow—and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution.

Poverty rates started to collapse towards the end of the 20th century largely because developing-country growth accelerated, from an average annual rate of 4.3% in 1960-2000 to 6% in 2000-10.

making those things happen is not as difficult as cynics profess. The world now knows how to reduce poverty.

China (which has never shown any interest in MDGs) is responsible for three-quarters of the achievement. Its economy has been growing so fast that, even though inequality is rising fast, extreme poverty is disappearing.

China pulled 680m people out of misery in 1981-2010, and reduced its extreme-poverty rate from 84% in 1980 to 10% now.

Poorer governance in India and Africa, the next two targets, means that China’s experience is unlikely to be swiftly replicated there

If developing countries maintain the impressive growth they have managed since 2000; if the poorest countries are not left behind by faster-growing middle-income ones; and if inequality does not widen so that the rich lap up all the cream of growth—then developing countries would cut extreme poverty from 16% of their populations now to 3% by 2030.

Around two-thirds of poverty reduction within a country comes from growth. Greater equality also helps, contributing the other third.

A lot of targeted policies—basic social safety nets and cash-transfer schemes, such as Brazil’s Bolsa Família—help

the biggest poverty-reduction measure of all is liberalising markets to let poor people get richer. That means freeing trade between countries (Africa is still cruelly punished by tariffs) and within them

Experts such as Mr Bellinger have warned Congress in public hearings that unless America sets clear, internationally accepted rules for its own drone strikes, it can hardly condemn Russian or Chinese aerial killings with any credibility

Mr Obama made it clear that drone strikes would continue.

The other reason why they want him to lead America back onto higher moral ground is that they fear for their own reputations, if they lend help to drone attacks

The president spoke of winding down the boundless, militarised war on terror that he inherited. He envisioned using law enforcement, intelligence and foreign allies to contain threats not so different from the ones that America faced before September 11th 2001

a former White House counter-terrorism chief recently appointed to run the CIA, the government would prefer to move away from CIA strikes (which are secret and deniable) towards drone attacks controlled by the armed forces (which would be more transparent). In addition to oversight by Congress, Mr Obama suggested new controls: perhaps a special court with powers to authorise killings, or an independent overseer within the executive branch.

. Since the war on terror has lasted for so long and shows no sign of ending, it was time to “bring in” the American public by explaining the rules for drones, he says

. Other countries will soon have killer drones

Only if America can describe the international legal framework for its own strikes with “specificity” will it be able to shape the new laws of war.

Globalization and its masters have capitalized on enormous pay gaps between West and East, at a huge profit for them, and huge cost to others.

Unfortunately, a lack of maturity and prudence today exists among not just the new populist class, but parts of the political establishment

. A growing number of voters are going into meltdown because they believe that politicians — and journalists — don’t see what they see.

Sadly, the leaders of today’s Wutbürger movements never grasped the difference between anger driven by righteousness and anger driven by hate.

The upper class has gained much more from the internationalization of trade and finances than the working class has, often in obscene ways.

Bankers get bonuses despite making idiotic decisions that trigger staggering losses.

Giant enterprises like Facebook or Apple pay minimal taxes, while blue-collar workers have to labor harder — even taking a second or third job — to maintain their standard of living.

In Germany a recent poll showed that only 14 percent of the citizens trusted the politicians. This is an alarming figure, in a country where faith in a progressive, democratic government has been a cornerstone of our postwar peace.

Amid their mutual finger-pointing, neither populist nor established parties acknowledge that both are squandering people’s anger, either by turning this anger into counterproductive hatred or by denouncing and dismissing it.

Mrs. Clinton has the chance to change, by leading a political establishment that examines and processes anger instead of merely producing and dismissing it

That, too, seems to be a proposition — sensible internationalism — that center-right and left can agree upon.

It is here, perhaps, that the conscientious center-right and center-left can join forces. Both should reject the steady diet of xenophobia on the right and identity politics on the left. Both should insist on a revival of civic education.

a sense of shared responsibility for the fate of our neighbors, especially those facing economic or other hardship, should be the basis of our public policy discussion

“We can talk about a specific factory moving from Ohio or Indiana to Mexico and the jobs that might be saved or lost in a move like that, but the long-term factor is that each of those factories have so many fewer workers. We are talking about 7 percent of the U.S. workforce now working in industrial jobs.”

Neither party, he said, is focusing on the real challenges — creating lifetime learners who can navigate through economic shifts we cannot now anticipate.

Sasse is unusual because, sadly, so few pols talk to voters like adults, addressing rather than denying complexity and appealing to American ideals rather than base fears and tribal prejudices

denunciations from family-planning groups and their Democratic allies and praise from pro-life officials and Republicans.

officially known as the “Mexico City policy” and referred to as “the global gag rule” by its critics

repealed and reinstated every time a different political party has assumed power in the White House.

Even when the rule has not been in effect, however, existing federal law has barred the use of U.S. funds to pay for abortions anywhere in the world.

sparked a flurry of angry responses from Democratic lawmakers and women’s health organizations.

“We won’t go back to coat hanger medicine.”

Pelosi said in a statement that Trump’s order “returns us to disgraceful era that dishonored the American values of free speech and inflicted untold suffering on millions of women around the world.”

the group said, it received $30 million in aid from the United States Agency for International Development

that implementation of the Mexico City policy was linked to increases in abortion rates in sub-Saharan African countries

couldn’t draw “definitive conclusions about the underlying cause of this increase.”

“This is a vital step in the journey to make America great again, recognizing and affirming the universal ideal that all human beings have inherent worth and dignity, regardless of their age or nationality,”said Tony Perkins

“Funding foreign groups that promote or participate in abortion violates the principle that there should be a ‘wall of separation’ between taxpayer money and abortion,”

Trump has started to “make good on his promises to the millions of pro-life Americans that helped him ascend to this office.”

“marked an expansion of existing legislative restrictions that already prohibited U.S. funding for abortion internationally,”

the foundation said, NGOs could use non-U.S. funds to engage in abortion-related activities as long as they kept separate accounts for any U.S. money received.

Obama’s resistance to direct intervention only grew. After several months of deliberation, he authorized the CIA to train and fund Syrian rebels, but he also shared the outlook of his former defense secretary, Robert Gates, who had routinely asked in meetings, “Shouldn’t we finish up the two wars we have before we look for another?”

In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct U.S. military intervention. These included the threat posed by al‑Qaeda; threats to the continued existence of Israel (“It would be a moral failing for me as president of the United States” not to defend Israel, he once told me); and, not unrelated to Israel’s security, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran.

Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square.

As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.

“When you have a professional army,” he once told me, “that is well armed and sponsored by two large states”—Iran and Russia—“who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict …” He paused. “The notion that we could have—in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

The message Obama telegraphed in speeches and interviews was clear: He would not end up like the second President Bush—a president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation, even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term. Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan.

The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments,

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me).

The danger to the United States posed by the Assad regime did not rise to the level of these challenges.

Obama generally believes that the Washington foreign-policy establishment, which he secretly disdains, makes a fetish of “credibility”—particularly the sort of credibility purchased with force. The preservation of credibility, he says, led to Vietnam. Within the White House, Obama would argue that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”

American national-security credibility, as it is conventionally understood in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the cluster of think tanks headquartered within walking distance of the White House, is an intangible yet potent force—one that, when properly nurtured, keeps America’s friends feeling secure and keeps the international order stable.

All week, White House officials had publicly built the case that Assad had committed a crime against humanity. Kerry’s speech would mark the culmination of this campaign.

But the president had grown queasy. In the days after the gassing of Ghouta, Obama would later tell me, he found himself recoiling from the idea of an attack unsanctioned by international law or by Congress. The American people seemed unenthusiastic about a Syria intervention; so too did one of the few foreign leaders Obama respects, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She told him that her country would not participate in a Syria campaign. And in a stunning development, on Thursday, August 29, the British Parliament denied David Cameron its blessing for an attack. John Kerry later told me that when he heard that, “internally, I went, Oops.”

Obama was also unsettled by a surprise visit early in the week from James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, who interrupted the President’s Daily Brief, the threat report Obama receives each morning from Clapper’s analysts, to make clear that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a “slam dunk.” He chose the term carefully. Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in the run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W. Bush a “slam dunk” in Iraq.

While the Pentagon and the White House’s national-security apparatuses were still moving toward war (John Kerry told me he was expecting a strike the day after his speech), the president had come to believe that he was walking into a trap—one laid both by allies and by adversaries, and by conventional expectations of what an American president is supposed to do.

Late on Friday afternoon, Obama determined that he was simply not prepared to authorize a strike. He asked McDonough, his chief of staff, to take a walk with him on the South Lawn of the White House. Obama did not choose McDonough randomly: He is the Obama aide most averse to U.S. military intervention, and someone who, in the words of one of his colleagues, “thinks in terms of traps.” Obama, ordinarily a preternaturally confident man, was looking for validation, and trying to devise ways to explain his change of heart, both to his own aides and to the public

The third, and most important, factor, he told me, was “our assessment that while we could inflict some damage on Assad, we could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a UN mandate, and that that would have potentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened it.

Others had difficulty fathoming how the president could reverse himself the day before a planned strike. Obama, however, was completely calm. “If you’ve been around him, you know when he’s ambivalent about something, when it’s a 51–49 decision,” Ben Rhodes told me. “But he was completely at ease.”

Obama also shared with McDonough a long-standing resentment: He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries. Four years earlier, the president believed, the Pentagon had “jammed” him on a troop surge for Afghanistan. Now, on Syria, he was beginning to feel jammed again.

The fourth factor, he said, was of deeper philosophical importance. “This falls in the category of something that I had been brooding on for some time,” he said. “I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security issues is very broad, but not limitless.”

Obama’s decision caused tremors across Washington as well. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the two leading Republican hawks in the Senate, had met with Obama in the White House earlier in the week and had been promised an attack. They were angered by the about-face. Damage was done even inside the administration. Neither Chuck Hagel, then the secretary of defense, nor John Kerry was in the Oval Office when the president informed his team of his thinking. Kerry would not learn about the change until later that evening. “I just got fucked over,” he told a friend shortly after talking to the president that night. (When I asked Kerry recently about that tumultuous night, he said, “I didn’t stop to analyze it. I figured the president had a reason to make a decision and, honestly, I understood his notion.”)

The president asked Congress to authorize the use of force—the irrepressible Kerry served as chief lobbyist—and it quickly became apparent in the White House that Congress had little interest in a strike. When I spoke with Biden recently about the red-line decision, he made special note of this fact. “It matters to have Congress with you, in terms of your ability to sustain what you set out to do,” he said. Obama “didn’t go to Congress to get himself off the hook. He had his doubts at that point, but he knew that if he was going to do anything, he better damn well have the public with him, or it would be a very short ride.” Congress’s clear ambivalence convinced Biden that Obama was correct to fear the slippery slope. “What happens when we get a plane shot down? Do we not go in and rescue?,” Biden asked. “You need the support of the American people.”

At the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, which was held the week after the Syria reversal, Obama pulled Putin aside, he recalled to me, and told the Russian president “that if he forced Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons, that that would eliminate the need for us taking a military strike.” Within weeks, Kerry, working with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, would engineer the removal of most of Syria’s chemical-weapons arsenal—a program whose existence Assad until then had refused to even acknowledge.

The arrangement won the president praise from, of all people, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, with whom he has had a consistently contentious relationship. The removal of Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpiles represented “the one ray of light in a very dark region,” Netanyahu told me not long after the deal was announced.

John Kerry today expresses no patience for those who argue, as he himself once did, that Obama should have bombed Assad-regime sites in order to buttress America’s deterrent capability. “You’d still have the weapons there, and you’d probably be fighting isil” for control of the weapons, he said, referring to the Islamic State, the terror group also known as isis. “It just doesn’t make sense. But I can’t deny to you that this notion about the red line being crossed and [Obama’s] not doing anything gained a life of its own.”

today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for him.

“I’m very proud of this moment,” he told me. “The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”

By 2013, Obama’s resentments were well developed. He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.”

over the past few months, I’ve spent several hours talking with him about the broadest themes of his “long game” foreign policy, including the themes he is most eager to discuss—namely, the ones that have nothing to do with the Middle East.

I have come to believe that, in Obama’s mind, August 30, 2013, was his liberation day, the day he defied not only the foreign-policy establishment and its cruise-missile playbook, but also the demands of America’s frustrating, high-maintenance allies in the Middle East—countries, he complains privately to friends and advisers, that seek to exploit American “muscle” for their own narrow and sectarian ends.

“Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power,” he said. “That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.”

For some foreign-policy experts, even within his own administration, Obama’s about-face on enforcing the red line was a dispiriting moment in which he displayed irresolution and naïveté, and did lasting damage to America’s standing in the world. “Once the commander in chief draws that red line,” Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and then as secretary of defense in Obama’s first term, told me recently, “then I think the credibility of the commander in chief and this nation is at stake if he doesn’t enforce it.” Right after Obama’s reversal, Hillary Clinton said privately, “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice.”

Obama’s defenders, however, argue that he did no damage to U.S. credibility, citing Assad’s subsequent agreement to have his chemical weapons removed. “The threat of force was credible enough for them to give up their chemical weapons,” Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia, told me. “We threatened military action and they responded. That’s deterrent credibility.”

History may record August 30, 2013, as the day Obama prevented the U.S. from entering yet another disastrous Muslim civil war, and the day he removed the threat of a chemical attack on Israel, Turkey, or Jordan. Or it could be remembered as the day he let the Middle East slip from America’s grasp, into the hands of Russia, Iran, and isis

spoke with obama about foreign policy when he was a U.S. senator, in 2006. At the time, I was familiar mainly with the text of a speech he had delivered four years earlier, at a Chicago antiwar rally. It was an unusual speech for an antiwar rally in that it was not antiwar; Obama, who was then an Illinois state senator, argued only against one specific and, at the time, still theoretical, war. “I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein,” he said. “He is a brutal man. A ruthless man … But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors.” He added, “I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.”

This speech had made me curious about its author. I wanted to learn how an Illinois state senator, a part-time law professor who spent his days traveling between Chicago and Springfield, had come to a more prescient understanding of the coming quagmire than the most experienced foreign-policy thinkers of his party, including such figures as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, not to mention, of course, most Republicans and many foreign-policy analysts and writers, including me.

This was the moment the president believes he finally broke with what he calls, derisively, the “Washington playbook.”

“isis is not an existential threat to the United States,” he told me in one of these conversations. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.” Obama explained that climate change worries him in particular because “it is a political problem perfectly designed to repel government intervention. It involves every single country, and it is a comparatively slow-moving emergency, so there is always something seemingly more urgent on the agenda.”

At the moment, of course, the most urgent of the “seemingly more urgent” issues is Syria. But at any given moment, Obama’s entire presidency could be upended by North Korean aggression, or an assault by Russia on a member of nato, or an isis-planned attack on U.S. soil. Few presidents have faced such diverse tests on the international stage as Obama has, and the challenge for him, as for all presidents, has been to distinguish the merely urgent from the truly important, and to focus on the important.

My goal in our recent conversations was to see the world through Obama’s eyes, and to understand what he believes America’s role in the world should be. This article is informed by our recent series of conversations, which took place in the Oval Office; over lunch in his dining room; aboard Air Force One; and in Kuala Lumpur during his most recent visit to Asia, in November. It is also informed by my previous interviews with him and by his speeches and prolific public ruminations, as well as by conversations with his top foreign-policy and national-security advisers, foreign leaders and their ambassadors in Washington, friends of the president and others who have spoken with him about his policies and decisions, and his adversaries and critics.

Over the course of our conversations, I came to see Obama as a president who has grown steadily more fatalistic about the constraints on America’s ability to direct global events, even as he has, late in his presidency, accumulated a set of potentially historic foreign-policy achievements—controversial, provisional achievements, to be sure, but achievements nonetheless: the opening to Cuba, the Paris climate-change accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and, of course, the Iran nuclear deal.

These he accomplished despite his growing sense that larger forces—the riptide of tribal feeling in a world that should have already shed its atavism; the resilience of small men who rule large countries in ways contrary to their own best interests; the persistence of fear as a governing human emotion—frequently conspire against the best of America’s intentions. But he also has come to learn, he told me, that very little is accomplished in international affairs without U.S. leadership.

Obama talked me through this apparent contradiction. “I want a president who has the sense that you can’t fix everything,” he said. But on the other hand, “if we don’t set the agenda, it doesn’t happen.” He explained what he meant. “The fact is, there is not a summit I’ve attended since I’ve been president where we are not setting the agenda, where we are not responsible for the key results,” he said. “That’s true whether you’re talking about nuclear security, whether you’re talking about saving the world financial system, whether you’re talking about climate.”

One day, over lunch in the Oval Office dining room, I asked the president how he thought his foreign policy might be understood by historians. He started by describing for me a four-box grid representing the main schools of American foreign-policy thought. One box he called isolationism, which he dismissed out of hand. “The world is ever-shrinking,” he said. “Withdrawal is untenable.” The other boxes he labeled realism, liberal interventionism, and internationalism. “I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can’t, at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery,” he said. “We have to choose where we can make a real impact.” He also noted that he was quite obviously an internationalist, devoted as he is to strengthening multilateral organizations and international norms.

If a crisis, or a humanitarian catastrophe, does not meet his stringent standard for what constitutes a direct national-security threat, Obama said, he doesn’t believe that he should be forced into silence. He is not so much the realist, he suggested, that he won’t pass judgment on other leaders.

Though he has so far ruled out the use of direct American power to depose Assad, he was not wrong, he argued, to call on Assad to go. “Oftentimes when you get critics of our Syria policy, one of the things that they’ll point out is ‘You called for Assad to go, but you didn’t force him to go. You did not invade.’ And the notion is that if you weren’t going to overthrow the regime, you shouldn’t have said anything. That’s a weird argument to me, the notion that if we use our moral authority to say ‘This is a brutal regime, and this is not how a leader should treat his people,’ once you do that, you are obliged to invade the country and install a government you prefer.”

“I am very much the internationalist,” Obama said in a later conversation. “And I am also an idealist insofar as I believe that we should be promoting values, like democracy and human rights and norms and values

“Having said that,” he continued, “I also believe that the world is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place, and full of hardship and tragedy. And in order to advance both our security interests and those ideals and values that we care about, we’ve got to be hardheaded at the same time as we’re bighearted, and pick and choose our spots, and recognize that there are going to be times where the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something that’s terrible, but not believe that we can automatically solve it. There are going to be times where our security interests conflict with our concerns about human rights. There are going to be times where we can do something about innocent people being killed, but there are going to be times where we can’t.”

If Obama ever questioned whether America really is the world’s one indispensable nation, he no longer does so. But he is the rare president who seems at times to resent indispensability, rather than embrace it.

“Free riders aggravate me,” he told me. Recently, Obama warned that Great Britain would no longer be able to claim a “special relationship” with the United States if it did not commit to spending at least 2 percent of its GDP on defense. “You have to pay your fair share,” Obama told David Cameron, who subsequently met the 2 percent threshold.

Part of his mission as president, Obama explained, is to spur other countries to take action for themselves, rather than wait for the U.S. to lead. The defense of the liberal international order against jihadist terror, Russian adventurism, and Chinese bullying depends in part, he believes, on the willingness of other nations to share the burden with the U.S

This is why the controversy surrounding the assertion—made by an anonymous administration official to The New Yorker during the Libya crisis of 2011—that his policy consisted of “leading from behind” perturbed him. “We don’t have to always be the ones who are up front,” he told me. “Sometimes we’re going to get what we want precisely because we are sharing in the agenda.

The president also seems to believe that sharing leadership with other countries is a way to check America’s more unruly impulses. “One of the reasons I am so focused on taking action multilaterally where our direct interests are not at stake is that multilateralism regulates hubris,”

He consistently invokes what he understands to be America’s past failures overseas as a means of checking American self-righteousness. “We have history,” he said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”

In his efforts to off-load some of America’s foreign-policy responsibilities to its allies, Obama appears to be a classic retrenchment president in the manner of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Retrenchment, in this context, is defined as “pulling back, spending less, cutting risk, and shifting burdens to allies

One difference between Eisenhower and Nixon, on the one hand, and Obama, on the other, Sestanovich said, is that Obama “appears to have had a personal, ideological commitment to the idea that foreign policy had consumed too much of the nation’s attention and resources.”

But once he decides that a particular challenge represents a direct national-security threat, he has shown a willingness to act unilaterally. This is one of the larger ironies of the Obama presidency: He has relentlessly questioned the efficacy of force, but he has also become the most successful terrorist-hunter in the history of the presidency, one who will hand to his successor a set of tools an accomplished assassin would envy

“He applies different standards to direct threats to the U.S.,” Ben Rhodes says. “For instance, despite his misgivings about Syria, he has not had a second thought about drones.” Some critics argue he should have had a few second thoughts about what they see as the overuse of drones. But John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, told me recently that he and the president “have similar views. One of them is that sometimes you have to take a life to save even more lives. We have a similar view of just-war theory. The president requires near-certainty of no collateral damage. But if he believes it is necessary to act, he doesn’t hesitate.”

Those who speak with Obama about jihadist thought say that he possesses a no-illusions understanding of the forces that drive apocalyptic violence among radical Muslims, but he has been careful about articulating that publicly, out of concern that he will exacerbate anti-Muslim xenophobia

He has a tragic realist’s understanding of sin, cowardice, and corruption, and a Hobbesian appreciation of how fear shapes human behavior. And yet he consistently, and with apparent sincerity, professes optimism that the world is bending toward justice. He is, in a way, a Hobbesian optimist.

The contradictions do not end there. Though he has a reputation for prudence, he has also been eager to question some of the long-standing assumptions undergirding traditional U.S. foreign-policy thinking. To a remarkable degree, he is willing to question why America’s enemies are its enemies, or why some of its friends are its friends.

It is assumed, at least among his critics, that Obama sought the Iran deal because he has a vision of a historic American-Persian rapprochement. But his desire for the nuclear agreement was born of pessimism as much as it was of optimism. “The Iran deal was never primarily about trying to open a new era of relations between the U.S. and Iran,” Susan Rice told me. “It was far more pragmatic and minimalist. The aim was very simply to make a dangerous country substantially less dangerous. No one had any expectation that Iran would be a more benign actor.”

once mentioned to obama a scene from The Godfather: Part III, in which Michael Corleone complains angrily about his failure to escape the grasp of organized crime. I told Obama that the Middle East is to his presidency what the Mob is to Corleone, and I started to quote the Al Pacino line: “Just when I thought I was out—”“It pulls you back in,” Obama said, completing the thought

When I asked Obama recently what he had hoped to accomplish with his Cairo reset speech, he said that he had been trying—unsuccessfully, he acknowledged—to persuade Muslims to more closely examine the roots of their unhappiness.“My argument was this: Let’s all stop pretending that the cause of the Middle East’s problems is Israel,” he told me. “We want to work to help achieve statehood and dignity for the Palestinians, but I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting—problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity. My thought was, I would communicate that the U.S. is not standing in the way of this progress, that we would help, in whatever way possible, to advance the goals of a practical, successful Arab agenda that provided a better life for ordinary people.”

But over the next three years, as the Arab Spring gave up its early promise, and brutality and dysfunction overwhelmed the Middle East, the president grew disillusioned. Some of his deepest disappointments concern Middle Eastern leaders themselves. Benjamin Netanyahu is in his own category: Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution that would protect Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so

Obama has also not had much patience for Netanyahu and other Middle Eastern leaders who question his understanding of the region. In one of Netanyahu’s meetings with the president, the Israeli prime minister launched into something of a lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and Obama felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations. Finally, the president interrupted the prime minister: “Bibi, you have to understand something,” he said. “I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

Other leaders also frustrate him immensely. Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West—but Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian, one who refuses to use his enormous army to bring stability to Syria

In recent days, the president has taken to joking privately, “All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats.” Obama has always had a fondness for pragmatic, emotionally contained technocrats, telling aides, “If only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this would all be easy.”

The unraveling of the Arab Spring darkened the president’s view of what the U.S. could achieve in the Middle East, and made him realize how much the chaos there was distracting from other priorities. “The president recognized during the course of the Arab Spring that the Middle East was consuming us,”

But what sealed Obama’s fatalistic view was the failure of his administration’s intervention in Libya, in 2011

Obama says today of the intervention, “It didn’t work.” The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya operation carefully—and yet the country is still a disaster.

“So we actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billion—which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess.”

Mess is the president’s diplomatic term; privately, he calls Libya a “shit show,” in part because it’s subsequently become an isis haven—one that he has already targeted with air strikes. It became a shit show, Obama believes, for reasons that had less to do with American incompetence than with the passivity of America’s allies and with the obdurate power of tribalism.

Of France, he said, “Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure” for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the U.S. to “purchase France’s involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us.” In other words, giving France extra credit in exchange for less risk and cost to the United States was a useful trade-off—except that “from the perspective of a lot of the folks in the foreign-policy establishment, well, that was terrible. If we’re going to do something, obviously we’ve got to be up front, and nobody else is sharing in the spotlight.”

Obama also blamed internal Libyan dynamics. “The degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected. And our ability to have any kind of structure there that we could interact with and start training and start providing resources broke down very quickly.”

Libya proved to him that the Middle East was best avoided. “There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa,” he recently told a former colleague from the Senate. “That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.”

Obama did not come into office preoccupied by the Middle East. He is the first child of the Pacific to become president—born in Hawaii, raised there and, for four years, in Indonesia—and he is fixated on turning America’s attention to Asia

For Obama, Asia represents the future. Africa and Latin America, in his view, deserve far more U.S. attention than they receive. Europe, about which he is unromantic, is a source of global stability that requires, to his occasional annoyance, American hand-holding. And the Middle East is a region to be avoided—one that, thanks to America’s energy revolution, will soon be of negligible relevance to the U.S. economy.

Advisers recall that Obama would cite a pivotal moment in The Dark Knight, the 2008 Batman movie, to help explain not only how he understood the role of isis, but how he understood the larger ecosystem in which it grew. “There’s a scene in the beginning in which the gang leaders of Gotham are meeting,” the president would say. “These are men who had the city divided up. They were thugs, but there was a kind of order. Everyone had his turf. And then the Joker comes in and lights the whole city on fire. isil is the Joker. It has the capacity to set the whole region on fire. That’s why we have to fight it.”

The rise of the Islamic State deepened Obama’s conviction that the Middle East could not be fixed—not on his watch, and not for a generation to come.

The traveling White House press corps was unrelenting: “Isn’t it time for your strategy to change?” one reporter asked. This was followed by “Could I ask you to address your critics who say that your reluctance to enter another Middle East war, and your preference of diplomacy over using the military, makes the United States weaker and emboldens our enemies?” And then came this imperishable question, from a CNN reporter: “If you’ll forgive the language—why can’t we take out these bastards?” Which was followed by “Do you think you really understand this enemy well enough to defeat them and to protect the homeland?”

This rhetoric appeared to frustrate Obama immensely. “When I hear folks say that, well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims; when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted,” Obama told the assembled reporters, “that’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

he has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to America commensurate with the fear it generates. Even during the period in 2014 when isis was executing its American captives in Syria, his emotions were in check. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s closest adviser, told him people were worried that the group would soon take its beheading campaign to the U.S. “They’re not coming here to chop our heads off,” he reassured her.

Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do

Several years ago, he expressed to me his admiration for Israelis’ “resilience” in the face of constant terrorism, and it is clear that he would like to see resilience replace panic in American society. Nevertheless, his advisers are fighting a constant rearguard action to keep Obama from placing terrorism in what he considers its “proper” perspective, out of concern that he will seem insensitive to the fears of the American people.

When I noted to Kerry that the president’s rhetoric doesn’t match his, he said, “President Obama sees all of this, but he doesn’t gin it up into this kind of—he thinks we are on track. He has escalated his efforts. But he’s not trying to create hysteria … I think the president is always inclined to try to keep things on an appropriate equilibrium. I respect that.”

Obama modulates his discussion of terrorism for several reasons: He is, by nature, Spockian. And he believes that a misplaced word, or a frightened look, or an ill-considered hyperbolic claim, could tip the country into panic. The sort of panic he worries about most is the type that would manifest itself in anti-Muslim xenophobia or in a challenge to American openness and to the constitutional order.

The president also gets frustrated that terrorism keeps swamping his larger agenda, particularly as it relates to rebalancing America’s global priorities. For years, the “pivot to Asia” has been a paramount priority of his. America’s economic future lies in Asia, he believes, and the challenge posed by China’s rise requires constant attention. From his earliest days in office, Obama has been focused on rebuilding the sometimes-threadbare ties between the U.S. and its Asian treaty partners, and he is perpetually on the hunt for opportunities to draw other Asian nations into the U.S. orbit. His dramatic opening to Burma was one such opportunity; Vietnam and the entire constellation of Southeast Asian countries fearful of Chinese domination presented others.

Obama believes, Carter said, that Asia “is the part of the world of greatest consequence to the American future, and that no president can take his eye off of this.” He added, “He consistently asks, even in the midst of everything else that’s going on, ‘Where are we in the Asia-Pacific rebalance? Where are we in terms of resources?’ He’s been extremely consistent about that, even in times of Middle East tension.”

“Right now, I don’t think that anybody can be feeling good about the situation in the Middle East,” he said. “You have countries that are failing to provide prosperity and opportunity for their people. You’ve got a violent, extremist ideology, or ideologies, that are turbocharged through social media. You’ve got countries that have very few civic traditions, so that as autocratic regimes start fraying, the only organizing principles are sectarian.”

He went on, “Contrast that with Southeast Asia, which still has huge problems—enormous poverty, corruption—but is filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people who are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses and get education and find jobs and build infrastructure. The contrast is pretty stark.”

In Asia, as well as in Latin America and Africa, Obama says, he sees young people yearning for self-improvement, modernity, education, and material wealth.“They are not thinking about how to kill Americans,” he says. “What they’re thinking about is How do I get a better education? How do I create something of value?”

He then made an observation that I came to realize was representative of his bleakest, most visceral understanding of the Middle East today—not the sort of understanding that a White House still oriented around themes of hope and change might choose to advertise. “If we’re not talking to them,” he said, referring to young Asians and Africans and Latin Americans, “because the only thing we’re doing is figuring out how to destroy or cordon off or control the malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity, then we’re missing the boat.

He does resist refracting radical Islam through the “clash of civilizations” prism popularized by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington. But this is because, he and his advisers argue, he does not want to enlarge the ranks of the enemy. “The goal is not to force a Huntington template onto this conflict,” said John Brennan, the CIA director.

“It is very clear what I mean,” he told me, “which is that there is a violent, radical, fanatical, nihilistic interpretation of Islam by a faction—a tiny faction—within the Muslim community that is our enemy, and that has to be defeated.”

“There is also the need for Islam as a whole to challenge that interpretation of Islam, to isolate it, and to undergo a vigorous discussion within their community about how Islam works as part of a peaceful, modern society,” he said. But he added, “I do not persuade peaceful, tolerant Muslims to engage in that debate if I’m not sensitive to their concern that they are being tagged with a broad brush.”

In private encounters with other world leaders, Obama has argued that there will be no comprehensive solution to Islamist terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to modernity and undergoes some of the reforms that have changed Christianity.

, Obama described how he has watched Indonesia gradually move from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation; large numbers of Indonesian women, he observed, have now adopted the hijab, the Muslim head covering.

Why, Turnbull asked, was this happening?Because, Obama answered, the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have funneled money, and large numbers of imams and teachers, into the country. In the 1990s, the Saudis heavily funded Wahhabist madrassas, seminaries that teach the fundamentalist version of Islam favored by the Saudi ruling family, Obama told Turnbull. Today, Islam in Indonesia is much more Arab in orientation than it was when he lived there, he said.

“Aren’t the Saudis your friends?,” Turnbull asked.Obama smiled. “It’s complicated,” he said.

But he went on to say that the Saudis need to “share” the Middle East with their Iranian foes. “The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians—which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen—requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace,”

“An approach that said to our friends ‘You are right, Iran is the source of all problems, and we will support you in dealing with Iran’ would essentially mean that as these sectarian conflicts continue to rage and our Gulf partners, our traditional friends, do not have the ability to put out the flames on their own or decisively win on their own, and would mean that we have to start coming in and using our military power to settle scores. And that would be in the interest neither of the United States nor of the Middle East.”

One of the most destructive forces in the Middle East, Obama believes, is tribalism—a force no president can neutralize. Tribalism, made manifest in the reversion to sect, creed, clan, and village by the desperate citizens of failing states, is the source of much of the Muslim Middle East’s problems, and it is another source of his fatalism. Obama has deep respect for the destructive resilience of tribalism—part of his memoir, Dreams From My Father, concerns the way in which tribalism in post-colonial Kenya helped ruin his father’s life—which goes some distance in explaining why he is so fastidious about avoiding entanglements in tribal conflicts.

“It is literally in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism,” he told me. “I understand the tribal impulse, and acknowledge the power of tribal division. I’ve been navigating tribal divisions my whole life. In the end, it’s the source of a lot of destructive acts.”

“Look, I am not of the view that human beings are inherently evil,” he said. “I believe that there’s more good than bad in humanity. And if you look at the trajectory of history, I am optimistic.

“I believe that overall, humanity has become less violent, more tolerant, healthier, better fed, more empathetic, more able to manage difference. But it’s hugely uneven. And what has been clear throughout the 20th and 21st centuries is that the progress we make in social order and taming our baser impulses and steadying our fears can be reversed very quickly. Social order starts breaking down if people are under profound stress. Then the default position is tribe—us/them, a hostility toward the unfamiliar or the unknown.”

He continued, “Right now, across the globe, you’re seeing places that are undergoing severe stress because of globalization, because of the collision of cultures brought about by the Internet and social media, because of scarcities—some of which will be attributable to climate change over the next several decades—because of population growth. And in those places, the Middle East being Exhibit A, the default position for a lot of folks is to organize tightly in the tribe and to push back or strike out against those who are different.

“A group like isil is the distillation of every worst impulse along these lines. The notion that we are a small group that defines ourselves primarily by the degree to which we can kill others who are not like us, and attempting to impose a rigid orthodoxy that produces nothing, that celebrates nothing, that really is contrary to every bit of human progress—it indicates the degree to which that kind of mentality can still take root and gain adherents in the 21st century.”

“We have to determine the best tools to roll back those kinds of attitudes,” he said. “There are going to be times where either because it’s not a direct threat to us or because we just don’t have the tools in our toolkit to have a huge impact that, tragically, we have to refrain from jumping in with both feet.”

I asked Obama whether he would have sent the Marines to Rwanda in 1994 to stop the genocide as it was happening, had he been president at the time. “Given the speed with which the killing took place, and how long it takes to crank up the machinery of the U.S. government, I understand why we did not act fast enough,” he said. “Now, we should learn from tha

I actually think that Rwanda is an interesting test case because it’s possible—not guaranteed, but it’s possible—that this was a situation where the quick application of force might have been enough.

“Ironically, it’s probably easier to make an argument that a relatively small force inserted quickly with international support would have resulted in averting genocide [more successfully in Rwanda] than in Syria right now, where the degree to which the various groups are armed and hardened fighters and are supported by a whole host of external actors with a lot of resources requires a much larger commitment of forces.”

The Turkey press conference, I told him, “was a moment for you as a politician to say, ‘Yeah, I hate the bastards too, and by the way, I am taking out the bastards.’ ” The easy thing to do would have been to reassure Americans in visceral terms that he will kill the people who want to kill them. Does he fear a knee-jerk reaction in the direction of another Middle East invasion? Or is he just inalterably Spockian?

“Every president has strengths and weaknesses,” he answered. “And there is no doubt that there are times where I have not been attentive enough to feelings and emotions and politics in communicating what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.”

But for America to be successful in leading the world, he continued, “I believe that we have to avoid being simplistic. I think we have to build resilience and make sure that our political debates are grounded in reality. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the value of theater in political communications; it’s that the habits we—the media, politicians—have gotten into, and how we talk about these issues, are so detached so often from what we need to be doing that for me to satisfy the cable news hype-fest would lead to us making worse and worse decisions over time.”

“During the couple of months in which everybody was sure Ebola was going to destroy the Earth and there was 24/7 coverage of Ebola, if I had fed the panic or in any way strayed from ‘Here are the facts, here’s what needs to be done, here’s how we’re handling it, the likelihood of you getting Ebola is very slim, and here’s what we need to do both domestically and overseas to stamp out this epidemic,’ ” then “maybe people would have said ‘Obama is taking this as seriously as he needs to be.’ ” But feeding the panic by overreacting could have shut down travel to and from three African countries that were already cripplingly poor, in ways that might have destroyed their economies—which would likely have meant, among other things, a recurrence of Ebola. He added, “It would have also meant that we might have wasted a huge amount of resources in our public-health systems that need to be devoted to flu vaccinations and other things that actually kill people” in large numbers in America

“I have friends who have kids in Paris right now,” he said. “And you and I and a whole bunch of people who are writing about what happened in Paris have strolled along the same streets where people were gunned down. And it’s right to feel fearful. And it’s important for us not to ever get complacent. There’s a difference between resilience and complacency.” He went on to describe another difference—between making considered decisions and making rash, emotional ones. “What it means, actually, is that you care so much that you want to get it right and you’re not going to indulge in either impetuous or, in some cases, manufactured responses that make good sound bites but don’t produce results. The stakes are too high to play those games.”

The other meeting took place two months later, in the Oval Office, between Obama and the general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong. This meeting took place only because John Kerry had pushed the White House to violate protocol, since the general secretary was not a head of state. But the goals trumped decorum: Obama wanted to lobby the Vietnamese on the Trans-Pacific Partnership—his negotiators soon extracted a promise from the Vietnamese that they would legalize independent labor unions—and he wanted to deepen cooperation on strategic issues. Administration officials have repeatedly hinted to me that Vietnam may one day soon host a permanent U.S. military presence, to check the ambitions of the country it now fears most, China. The U.S. Navy’s return to Cam Ranh Bay would count as one of the more improbable developments in recent American history. “We just moved the Vietnamese Communist Party to recognize labor rights in a way that we could never do by bullying them or scaring them,” Obama told me, calling this a key victory in his campaign to replace stick-waving with diplomatic persuasion.

I noted that the 200 or so young Southeast Asians in the room earlier that day—including citizens of Communist-ruled countries—seemed to love America. “They do,” Obama said. “In Vietnam right now, America polls at 80 percent.”

The resurgent popularity of America throughout Southeast Asia means that “we can do really big, important stuff—which, by the way, then has ramifications across the board,” he said, “because when Malaysia joins the anti-isil campaign, that helps us leverage resources and credibility in our fight against terrorism. When we have strong relations with Indonesia, that helps us when we are going to Paris and trying to negotiate a climate treaty, where the temptation of a Russia or some of these other countries may be to skew the deal in a way that is unhelpful.

Obama then cited America’s increased influence in Latin America—increased, he said, in part by his removal of a region-wide stumbling block when he reestablished ties with Cuba—as proof that his deliberate, nonthreatening, diplomacy-centered approach to foreign relations is working. The alba movement, a group of Latin American governments oriented around anti-Americanism, has significantly weakened during his time as president. “When I came into office, at the first Summit of the Americas that I attended, Hugo Chávez”—the late anti-American Venezuelan dictator—“was still the dominant figure in the conversation,” he said. “We made a very strategic decision early on, which was, rather than blow him up as this 10-foot giant adversary, to right-size the problem and say, ‘We don’t like what’s going on in Venezuela, but it’s not a threat to the United States.’

Obama said that to achieve this rebalancing, the U.S. had to absorb the diatribes and insults of superannuated Castro manqués. “When I saw Chávez, I shook his hand and he handed me a Marxist critique of the U.S.–Latin America relationship,” Obama recalled. “And I had to sit there and listen to Ortega”—Daniel Ortega, the radical leftist president of Nicaragua—“make an hour-long rant against the United States. But us being there, not taking all that stuff seriously—because it really wasn’t a threat to us”—helped neutralize the region’s anti-Americanism.

“The truth is, actually, Putin, in all of our meetings, is scrupulously polite, very frank. Our meetings are very businesslike. He never keeps me waiting two hours like he does a bunch of these other folks.” Obama said that Putin believes his relationship with the U.S. is more important than Americans tend to think. “He’s constantly interested in being seen as our peer and as working with us, because he’s not completely stupid. He understands that Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished. And the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn’t suddenly make him a player.

“The argument is made,” I said, “that Vladimir Putin watched you in Syria and thought, He’s too logical, he’s too rational, he’s too into retrenchment. I’m going to push him a little bit further in Ukraine.”

“Look, this theory is so easily disposed of that I’m always puzzled by how people make the argument. I don’t think anybody thought that George W. Bush was overly rational or cautious in his use of military force. And as I recall, because apparently nobody in this town does, Putin went into Georgia on Bush’s watch, right smack dab in the middle of us having over 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq.” Obama was referring to Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, a former Soviet republic, which was undertaken for many of the same reasons Putin later invaded Ukraine—to keep an ex–Soviet republic in Russia’s sphere of influence.

“Putin acted in Ukraine in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp. And he improvised in a way to hang on to his control there,” he said. “He’s done the exact same thing in Syria, at enormous cost to the well-being of his own country. And the notion that somehow Russia is in a stronger position now, in Syria or in Ukraine, than they were before they invaded Ukraine or before he had to deploy military forces to Syria is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs or in the world generally. Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence. Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine looked like an independent country but was a kleptocracy that he could pull the strings on.”

Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he said.

“I think that the best argument you can make on the side of those who are critics of my foreign policy is that the president doesn’t exploit ambiguity enough. He doesn’t maybe react in ways that might cause people to think, Wow, this guy might be a little crazy.”“The ‘crazy Nixon’ approach,” I said: Confuse and frighten your enemies by making them think you’re capable of committing irrational acts.

“But let’s examine the Nixon theory,” he said. “So we dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II, and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments

“There is no evidence in modern American foreign policy that that’s how people respond. People respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it’s really important to somebody, and it’s not that important to us, they know that, and we know that,” he said. “There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not.

Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.”

“If you think about, let’s say, the Iran hostage crisis, there is a narrative that has been promoted today by some of the Republican candidates that the day Reagan was elected, because he looked tough, the Iranians decided, ‘We better turn over these hostages,’ ” he said. “In fact what had happened was that there was a long negotiation with the Iranians and because they so disliked Carter—even though the negotiations had been completed—they held those hostages until the day Reagan got elected

When you think of the military actions that Reagan took, you have Grenada—which is hard to argue helped our ability to shape world events, although it was good politics for him back home. You have the Iran-Contra affair, in which we supported right-wing paramilitaries and did nothing to enhance our image in Central America, and it wasn’t successful at all.” He reminded me that Reagan’s great foe, Daniel Ortega, is today the unrepentant president of Nicaragua.

Obama also cited Reagan’s decision to almost immediately pull U.S. forces from Lebanon after 241 servicemen were killed in a Hezbollah attack in 1983. “Apparently all these things really helped us gain credibility with the Russians and the Chinese,” because “that’s the narrative that is told,” he said sarcastically.

“Now, I actually think that Ronald Reagan had a great success in foreign policy, which was to recognize the opportunity that Gorbachev presented and to engage in extensive diplomacy—which was roundly criticized by some of the same people who now use Ronald Reagan to promote the notion that we should go around bombing people.”

“As I survey the next 20 years, climate change worries me profoundly because of the effects that it has on all the other problems that we face,” he said. “If you start seeing more severe drought; more significant famine; more displacement from the Indian subcontinent and coastal regions in Africa and Asia; the continuing problems of scarcity, refugees, poverty, disease—this makes every other problem we’ve got worse. That’s above and beyond just the existential issues of a planet that starts getting into a bad feedback loop.”

Terrorism, he said, is also a long-term problem “when combined with the problem of failed states.”

What country does he consider the greatest challenge to America in the coming decades? “In terms of traditional great-state relations, I do believe that the relationship between the United States and China is going to be the most critical,” he said. “If we get that right and China continues on a peaceful rise, then we have a partner that is growing in capability and sharing with us the burdens and responsibilities of maintaining an international order. If China fails; if it is not able to maintain a trajectory that satisfies its population and has to resort to nationalism as an organizing principle; if it feels so overwhelmed that it never takes on the responsibilities of a country its size in maintaining the international order; if it views the world only in terms of regional spheres of influence—then not only do we see the potential for conflict with China, but we will find ourselves having more difficulty dealing with these other challenges that are going to come.”

I’ve been very explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China,” Obama said. “I think we have to be firm where China’s actions are undermining international interests, and if you look at how we’ve operated in the South China Sea, we have been able to mobilize most of Asia to isolate China in ways that have surprised China, frankly, and have very much served our interest in strengthening our alliances.”

A weak, flailing Russia constitutes a threat as well, though not quite a top-tier threat. “Unlike China, they have demographic problems, economic structural problems, that would require not only vision but a generation to overcome,” Obama said. “The path that Putin is taking is not going to help them overcome those challenges. But in that environment, the temptation to project military force to show greatness is strong, and that’s what Putin’s inclination is. So I don’t underestimate the dangers there.”

“You know, the notion that diplomacy and technocrats and bureaucrats somehow are helping to keep America safe and secure, most people think, Eh, that’s nonsense. But it’s true. And by the way, it’s the element of American power that the rest of the world appreciates unambiguously

When we deploy troops, there’s always a sense on the part of other countries that, even where necessary, sovereignty is being violated.”

Administration officials have told me that Vice President Biden, too, has become frustrated with Kerry’s demands for action. He has said privately to the secretary of state, “John, remember Vietnam? Remember how that started?” At a National Security Council meeting held at the Pentagon in December, Obama announced that no one except the secretary of defense should bring him proposals for military action. Pentagon officials understood Obama’s announcement to be a brushback pitch directed at Kerry.

Obama’s caution on Syria has vexed those in the administration who have seen opportunities, at different moments over the past four years, to tilt the battlefield against Assad. Some thought that Putin’s decision to fight on behalf of Assad would prompt Obama to intensify American efforts to help anti-regime rebels. But Obama, at least as of this writing, would not be moved, in part because he believed that it was not his business to stop Russia from making what he thought was a terrible mistake. “They are overextended. They’re bleeding,” he told me. “And their economy has contracted for three years in a row, drastically.

Obama’s strategy was occasionally referred to as the “Tom Sawyer approach.” Obama’s view was that if Putin wanted to expend his regime’s resources by painting the fence in Syria, the U.S. should let him.

By late winter, though, when it appeared that Russia was making advances in its campaign to solidify Assad’s rule, the White House began discussing ways to deepen support for the rebels, though the president’s ambivalence about more-extensive engagement remained. In conversations I had with National Security Council officials over the past couple of months, I sensed a foreboding that an event—another San Bernardino–style attack, for instance—would compel the United States to take new and direct action in Syria. For Obama, this would be a nightmare.

If there had been no Iraq, no Afghanistan, and no Libya, Obama told me, he might be more apt to take risks in Syria. “A president does not make decisions in a vacuum. He does not have a blank slate. Any president who was thoughtful, I believe, would recognize that after over a decade of war, with obligations that are still to this day requiring great amounts of resources and attention in Afghanistan, with the experience of Iraq, with the strains that it’s placed on our military—any thoughtful president would hesitate about making a renewed commitment in the exact same region of the world with some of the exact same dynamics and the same probability of an unsatisfactory outcome.”

What has struck me is that, even as his secretary of state warns about a dire, Syria-fueled European apocalypse, Obama has not recategorized the country’s civil war as a top-tier security threat.

This critique frustrates the president. “Nobody remembers bin Laden anymore,” he says. “Nobody talks about me ordering 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan.” The red-line crisis, he said, “is the point of the inverted pyramid upon which all other theories rest.

“Was it a bluff?” I told him that few people now believe he actually would have attacked Iran to keep it from getting a nuclear weapon.“That’s interesting,” he said, noncommittally.I started to talk: “Do you—”He interrupted. “I actually would have,” he said, meaning that he would have struck Iran’s nuclear facilities. “If I saw them break out.”

“You were right to believe it,” the president said. And then he made his key point. “This was in the category of an American interest.”

I was reminded then of something Derek Chollet, a former National Security Council official, told me: “Obama is a gambler, not a bluffer.”

The president has placed some huge bets. Last May, as he was trying to move the Iran nuclear deal through Congress, I told him that the agreement was making me nervous. His response was telling. “Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this,” he said. “I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.”

In the matter of the Syrian regime and its Iranian and Russian sponsors, Obama has bet, and seems prepared to continue betting, that the price of direct U.S. action would be higher than the price of inaction. And he is sanguine enough to live with the perilous ambiguities of his decisions

Though in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in 2009, Obama said, “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later,” today the opinions of humanitarian interventionists do not seem to move him, at least not publicly

As he comes to the end of his presidency, Obama believes he has done his country a large favor by keeping it out of the maelstrom—and he believes, I suspect, that historians will one day judge him wise for having done so

Inside the West Wing, officials say that Obama, as a president who inherited a financial crisis and two active wars from his predecessor, is keen to leave “a clean barn” to whoever succeeds him. This is why the fight against isis, a group he considers to be a direct, though not existential, threat to the U.S., is his most urgent priority for the remainder of his presidency; killing the so-called caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is one of the top goals of the American national-security apparatus in Obama’s last year.

This is what is so controversial about the president’s approach, and what will be controversial for years to come—the standard he has used to define what, exactly, constitutes a direct threat.

Obama has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about America’s role in it. The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be little an American president could do to make it a better place. The third is that the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power. The fourth is that the world cannot afford to see the diminishment of U.S. power. Just as the leaders of several American allies have found Obama’s leadership inadequate to the tasks before him, he himself has found world leadership wanting: global partners who often lack the vision and the will to spend political capital in pursuit of broad, progressive goals, and adversaries who are not, in his mind, as rational as he is. Obama believes that history has sides, and that America’s adversaries—and some of its putative allies—have situated themselves on the wrong one, a place where tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and militarism still flourish. What they don’t understand is that history is bending in his direction.

“The central argument is that by keeping America from immersing itself in the crises of the Middle East, the foreign-policy establishment believes that the president is precipitating our decline,” Ben Rhodes told me. “But the president himself takes the opposite view, which is that overextension in the Middle East will ultimately harm our economy, harm our ability to look for other opportunities and to deal with other challenges, and, most important, endanger the lives of American service members for reasons that are not in the direct American national-security interest.

George W. Bush was also a gambler, not a bluffer. He will be remembered harshly for the things he did in the Middle East. Barack Obama is gambling that he will be judged well for the things he didn’t do.

The modern combination between democracy and Judaism was supposed to give birth to a spectacular, pluralistic kaleidoscope. The state would be a great, robust democracy that would protect Jews against persecution and victimhood. Jewish culture, on the other hand, with its uncompromising moral standards, would guard against our becoming persecutors and victimizers of others.

We never gave much thought to the Palestinian Israeli citizens within the Jewish-democratic equation. We also never tried to separate the synagogue and the state. If anything, we did the opposite. Moreover, we never predicted the evil effects of brutally controlling another people against their will. Today, all the things that we neglected have returned and are chasing us like evil spirits.

In the absence of a binding constitution, Israel has no real protection for its minorities or for their freedom of worship and expression.

the only way for us to agree when we disagree is a true, vigorous democracy. A democracy based on a progressive, civil constitution; a democracy that enforces the distinction between ethnicity and citizenship, between synagogue and state; a democracy that upholds the values of freedom and equality, on the basis of which every single person living under Israel’s legitimate and internationally recognized sovereignty will receive the same rights and protections.

His other recent attempts at social control (restrictions on the sale of alcohol or moves to end abortion, which he has described as murder) infuriated secular Turks, but were aimed at winning votes from Muslim conservatives in this still divided society.

Secular intellectuals regard Gezi as a turning point: in the first major political protests since the 1970s, an apolitical younger generation has become politicised — not by big ideas like democracy or nationalism, but for their rights. They were joined by activists for Kurdish, Alevi and gay rights — a coming together of separate causes that is new to Turkey.

As it built its own coalitions at home, it set out internationally to demonstrate that Islam was compatible with democracy. The policy worked. The AKP was re-elected on 22 July 2007, and won a triumphant third term in the 12 June 2011 elections

The AKP, though not democratic, became a democratising force, giving a new sense of belonging and empowerment to a majority of Turks, previously excluded by the old secular elites

His worsening authoritarianism escaped the world’s attention, although in Turkey, there were worries about unaccountability and crony capitalism, the penetration of Fethullah Gulen’s Islamist movement into the police and judiciary, the silencing of the media, and the arrest of many journalists and other critics of the government

It is clear the justice system is not free of politics and has failed to investigate evidence of wider involvement in criminal activity and human rights abuses, particularly in the southeast. Yet with the verdicts, Turkey’s demilitarisation has been underlined.

Much of the AKP success story was based on the economy, which it opened up, building on structural adjustment reforms by the former economy minister Kemal Derviş (2001-02).

. On Cyprus, there is a sense that the AKP government has done what it can, backing the UN peace plan proposed by Kofi Annan for a federal solution.

he AKP government’s biggest achievement so far — and greatest remaining challenge — is its attempt at a solution to the Kurdish question.

“We used to see self-determination as the only solution... Now our Kurds want to look west. Both for economic benefits and because of the regional conjunction, Kurds here see their future in a democratising Turkey that recognises their rights.” Those rights mean an end to ethnic discrimination, full recognition of Kurdish identity with the right to teach Kurdish at school and a decentralisation that will lead to a form of autonomy. For this, constitutional reform is needed.

Further diplomatic incidents led to Turkey’s suspension of military, though not economic, ties with Israel that October. This made Erdogan the darling of the Arab world and played well with the Turkish public. Washington under Obama was not dissatisfied. Then came the Mavi Mamari affair, when a Turkish flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza was attacked in international waters on 31 May 2010 and nine Turkish activists killed. This year, after a very public row, the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu apologised.

There were miscalculations on Syria. After Turkey’s close alliance with President Bashar al-Assad was swiftly reversed at the start of the uprising, Turkey facilitated the rebels, set up refugee camps along the shared border and allowed the opposition Syrian National Council to set up its headquarters in Istanbul. Ordinary Turks welcomed Syria’s refugees but there was no enthusiasm for military involvement, with the risks of unrest among the country’s own Alevi minority (3) and concern at the porous borders that allow infiltration of Al-Qaida-linked jihadists into Turkey.

it should be easy to see that Obama’s America is not retreating and will not retreat from the world

The “rebalancing” to Asia has manifested itself in numerous military and nonmilitary measures that have certainly gotten China’s attention, among its other effects.

Obama’s record shows that he recognizes America’s capacity to project military power around the world is its unique strength and an underpinning to the global order.

He has therefore used American military forces repeatedly in such diverse locales as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Uganda, among others

But Obama also sees an America that is weary of war, fiscally constrained and in the view of many sometimes reckless in its use of force. Whatever one’s views on the latter point, there is little doubt in the eyes of most Americans that the wars of the past dozen years have been very difficult and costly — and that they are not to be repeated.

This reflects a sense that American power is not enhanced by unnecessary wars that waste resources and erode American will. He also talks about ending the major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even while continuing to prosecute military operations on several fronts.

Obama’s priorities are clear: maintaining great-power peace, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and combating Al Qaeda and related groups — on these matters, very little retrenchment is visible in U.S. policy.

has Congress, especially in its willingness to tolerate sequestration and even a government shutdown and a debt default — blunders that could pose far greater threats to American internationalism than anything emanating from the White House.