"Cold-Blooded Realpolitik"

"In the first year of the Obama presidency, conservatives rushed to portray the president as a weak-kneed liberal who would rather appease terrorists than fight. They accused him of abandoning the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies, taking the pressure off Iran, and playing at being president of the world while giving his own country’s interests short shrift. They insisted that his distrust of American power and doubts about American exceptionalism were making the country steadily less safe.
"But this narrative never really fit the facts."

Ross Douthat in The New York Times describes President Obama as "temperamentally conservative" on foreign policy.