Over on the homepage today, I write about the foreign-policy intelligentsia’s new minimalism, which seeks to excuse the Obama administration’s reactiveness and failures, and which leads to justifying American withdrawal from the world. What I did not explore was the equally fascinating question of the vagaries of history. Rightly (in the eyes of his critics) or wrongly (to his adherents), Barack Obama is being blamed for a seeming collapse of American policy around the globe. China is ending the fiction of Hong Kong’s independence, the Islamic State continues to butcher its way through the Middle East, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has salvaged a war about to be lost.

Meanwhile, the West’s liberal nations continue down the path of self-emasculation, with the latest report being that Great Britain’s defense spending will drop below the NATO-mandated 2 percent of GDP as soon as 2015. The collective leadership of an essentially bankrupt America decided that the 2008 financial crisis required budget cuts to a military at the same time that Russian tanks were gassing up on the Ukrainian border and Chinese fighter jets were buzzing their American adversaries. Given his penchant for blaming the times or his predecessor rather than himself, President Obama may well be justified in lamenting that he was dealt a bad hand in foreign affairs to begin with (and played it worse).

Yet Obama’s inexperience, lack of interest in the nitty gritty of international politics, and resistance to making hard decisions matter only because of the global disorder he must face. They would matter far less if he were president in more peaceful times, say the 1990s. Then, he would not have been distracted from his desire to fundamentally transform the United States by a powerful China or aggressive Russia, not to mention an ISIS. History has brought together weak leadership (and not just in the U.S.) together with purposeful, dangerous actors. For historians making such judgments, the man and the moment inevitably meet, sometimes unfairly so. Leadership, however, is about dealing with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Indeed, the only way to make it as we wish it to be is to recognize and respond to its reality.

It is thus disturbing that the president continues to dispassionately, coldly, and analytically talk about reducing ISIS to a “manageable problem,” as though they were a noisy neighbor, instead of sophisticated butchers who are actually setting up functioning governing structures in the lands that they are terrorizing. Similarly, Obama’s public pronouncements stretching back to March that there is no military solution to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, short-circuits a whole range of options and sends the clearest possible message to Moscow that it will pay little price beyond supposedly crippling sanctions for its aggression.

Barack Obama’s proclivities would not be the subject of endless columns like these had he been president in different times. Such, however, is the turn of the historical wheel. Bill Clinton refused to take serious action against al-Qaeda in the 1990s, but because it was at that time a smaller threat, his inaction did not seem irresponsible. Yet such passivity was no longer possible after 9/11, which itself occurred because of bad U.S. policy in the previous decade. To his many critics, George W. Bush overreacted after 9/11, thus setting the stage for today’s more radicalized Middle East. Yet he, too, came to office a president focused on and interested in domestic affairs; without the terrorist atrocities of that September, his presidency would likely have had an entirely different arc. The fates are pitiless, but that is cold comfort to a world increasingly uncertain and insecure.