Assuming no dramatic shift in world events between now and 2016, which parts of Obama’s foreign-policy tenure will be judged most positively and which most poorly? Overall, how will his actions abroad be judged against his recent predecessors’?

Big items on Obama’s foreign-policy to-do list are still hanging fire�an Iran deal, big trade agreements, the Ukraine standoff, the war against ISIS, a territorial shoving match with China, and more. History’s full verdict on the president depends on how these problems play out. Since we don’t know the end of the story, let’s make a wild-but-plausible guess. Suppose that on January 20, 2017, all of these policies have produced inconclusive results�how will Obama’s international record look then? The answer: almost exactly the way it looks now. Pundits will say the president had a good first term, followed by a lousy second one. That verdict is roughly correct, but as historians dig deeper, they’ll probably add two things.

First, some of the confusion of the second term started much earlier. The fits and starts of Obama’s response to the Arab Spring in 2011�intervention in Libya, nonintervention in Syria, confusion and contradiction in Egypt�will be judged harshly. Amid a regionwide upheaval at least as great as the one that rocked the communist world in 1989, America had no coherent idea of what to do.

Second, Obama himself will get most of the credit for good results�and the blame for bad. The more we learn about his administration’s inner workings, the clearer the picture of presidential control that emerges. This is the usual pattern of retrenchment�a chief executive who knows what he wants and accepts no back talk. Obama had little foreign-policy experience but strong views about reducing America’s global footprint. For both better and worse, he made his views stick.