For those looking or hoping for signs that U.S. President Barack Obama has shifted away from what many would argue as his grand strategy of modified retrenchment, recent headlines have provided plenty of fodder. His televised announcement that he’s expanding an airstrike campaign initiated last month in Iraq to provide cover to U.S. personnel and religious minorities into one aimed at “degrading and ultimately destroying” the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) appears to mark something of a volte-face for a president who has been determined to avoid repeating what he sees as his predecessor’s cardinal mistake of bogging down the nation in Middle East conflicts of indefinite length and dubious strategic value.  That this campaign includes increasing military assistance to elements of the Syrian opposition in that country’s toxic civil war, action Obama had stoutly resisted for three years against the counsel of his national-security team, suggests that he concluded the merits of inaction had become outweighed by its risks. This comes on the heels of a rather pugnacious speech in Estonia, in which he coupled condemnation of Russia’s behavior in Ukraine with vows that this “moment of testing” will be met with a vigorous response, thereby providing the rhetorical basis for the creation of a rapid-response NATO force that will counter possible Russian transgressions against the alliance’s members.

Yet more indicative of a resurgence of U.S. foreign-policy activism than this apparent course correction, which is limited in scope and remains consistent with Obama’s aversion to costly external adventures, is something that has gone relatively unnoticed by commentators: growing public disenchantment with retrenchment and the sense that it hasn’t advanced American security. This nascent shift in popular sentiment will help shape how the next administration, Democrat or Republican, approaches the world. Obama’s successor will most likely display fewer inhibitions about wielding American power.

While Obama’s recent actions mark an escalation in rhetoric, they substantively represent a modification in tactics and underscore his continuing search for aligning America’s security requirements with its finite resources. His political ascent propelled by his consistent opposition to the Iraq War and his reelection campaign in 2012 resting in no small part on satisfying public clamoring for bringing the troops home, Obama was in no rush to go back into Iraq. Indeed, even as he announced a concerted bombing campaign against ISIS and the dispatch of 475 additional U.S. service members to Iraq, Obama stressed that this was a “counterterrorism strategy…different from the [combat] wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Betraying his own limited conception of how to counter the threat posed by ISIS, which U.S. intelligence concedes is uncertain and not imminent,  Obama has spoken elsewhere of “shrink[ing] ISIL’s sphere of influence, its effectiveness, its financing, its military capabilities to the point where it is a manageable problem.” By forgoing U.S. troops and relying instead on local ground forces in Iraq and Syria, in combination with American airstrikes, the president is hoping this goal can be achieved without the pitfalls of full-scale intervention.

Similar restraint continues to characterize Obama’s response to the standoff with Russia. He has yet to complement criticism of the Kremlin’s sponsorship of separatist forces in eastern Ukraine with military support to Kiev, which is favored by some in Congress and even among a few White House advisers, out of fear of further heightening tensions and potentially drawing the United States into a conflict over a country whose fate impinges far less on American security than it does on Russia’s. Firm declarations of U.S. fealty to the security of NATO members in Eastern Europe and the Baltic are seen as necessary for allaying the concerns of nervous allies, but it’s also hoped that reiterating existing commitments to countries already under America’s defense umbrella, as opposed to issuing new guarantees to those outside it, will, alongside Russia’s limited capacity for power projection, prove sufficient in deterring Vladimir Putin from entertaining ambitions beyond Ukraine. 

All of this is to say that any expectations of a more adventurous, less circumspect Obama foreign policy are likely misplaced; an aversion to risk and a judicious balancing of competing domestic and external priorities will continue to serve as this administration’s lodestar. As I have previously argued, Obama’s somewhat-constricted vision of U.S. power is as much a function of his formative experiences as it is of structural factors, such as strategic overextension, resource constraints and anti-interventionist public opinion. His distinctly cosmopolitan adolescence, growing up in ethnically diverse Hawaii and living for some time in Indonesia, shaped his view of America as a nation among many, rather than the center of the world, while his personal exposure to the country’s checkered history on racial equality undoubtedly yielded a more nuanced view of U.S. exceptionalism.

Obama’s preference for strategic restraint and calls for guarding against the undisciplined exercise of the country’s military might have always entailed considerably more self-denial to which most Americans are traditionally accustomed when thinking about the world. During his first term, however, he finessed his management of foreign affairs into a political asset by both neutralizing Republican charges of pusillanimity through displays of robustness—the killing of Osama bin Laden, concerted drone strikes against terrorist targets, the 2009 surge in Afghanistan—and appealing to the electorate’s war weariness (withdrawing from Iraq, setting a deadline for the drawdown of forces in Afghanistan, staying out of Syria).   

There are, of course, potential political drawbacks to an overarching approach that champions caution and the avoidance of mistakes, which raises questions of its durability. It lacks both clarity of purpose and the sort of rhetorical pizzazz necessary to mobilize sustained support from a populace accustomed to idealistic, expansionist pronouncements of America’s global role. Moreover, if events on the ground turn sour, a strategy resting on restraint can be plausibly depicted by its domestic opponents as one that, through timidity and retreat, invites aggression from U.S. adversaries.

The confluence of crises in Iraq and Ukraine during the summer effected a stark reversal in the U.S. public’s confidence in Obama’s foreign-policy leadership, even before the beheading of two American journalists generated an outpouring of support for military reprisal against ISIS. According to a Pew Research Center survey in late August, only 36 percent now approve of the president’s handling of world affairs—below even his unenviable overall approval rating of 42 percent. The same poll reveals that 54 percent think Obama is “not tough enough” when it comes to performing his duties as commander in chief, while the proportion of respondents opining that the United States does “too little” to address global problems has almost doubled—from 17 percent to 31 percent—since last November.

Why has modified retrenchment, which has broadly and consistently adhered to the public’s continued preference for focusing on problems at home, fallen into disfavor? The short answer is that most Americans, having been repeatedly told their country’s unprecedented world power was achieved as much by dent of virtue as by formidable manpower and resources, have come to expect a steady, strong hand at the helm in the Oval Office, a decisive leader able to preserve what is seen as this natural margin of advantage over others. Nothing succeeds like success. When a president, rightly or wrongly, is perceived as being at the mercy of events and presiding over a loss of U.S. influence, Americans are quick to push the panic button; an often exaggerated declinist narrative has gained traction at some point in every decade in the postwar era.

Ample historical precedent exists of retrenchment losing public support because of the tide of events, only to give way to a more robust policy option. Against the backdrop of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, John F. Kennedy successfully justified his campaign for the presidency in part on the urgency of a more vigorous prosecution of the Cold War, charging Dwight Eisenhower, who had sought to provide a firmer economic footing for the nation’s foreign policy by cutting defense expenditures, with passively overseeing both the development of a “missile gap” that favored the Kremlin and Soviet advances in the developing world. Similarly, Ronald Reagan rode his way to the White House in 1980 in part by convincing an electorate still scarred by the recent trauma of Vietnam that a reassertion of American power was needed, which he did by taking advantage of a widespread sense of humiliation and impotence over Jimmy Carter’s seemingly ineffective response to the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Obama’s retrenchment may suffer the same political fate. While Republicans failed to outflank the president on world affairs throughout his first term (remember when Mitt Romney struggled to articulate a foreign-policy agenda distinct from Obama’s during the third presidential debate in 2012?), territorial advances by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, as well as Russian incursions in Ukraine, have now enabled them to portray Obama as out of his depth and irresolute in meeting global challenges; these themes feature prominently in current campaigning for this fall’s midterm elections. More notably, even congressional Democrats and former Obama officials have complained that the administration’s deliberative, cautious approach may have overcompensated for George W. Bush’s rashness. That Hillary Clinton, firmly ensconced in her party’s hawkish wing, recently claimed Obama’s strategy lacks an organizing principle indicates she sees political value in distancing herself from her former boss as she prepares for a likely presidential campaign in 2016.