One of the many strengths of Chollet's account is, indeed, its inductive power: from the administration's varied approach to a diverse set of international challenges, he abstracts principles that capture the president's worldview. Obama's long game, Chollet posits, is defined by eight features: balance, sustainability, restraint, precision, patience, fallibility, skepticism, and exceptionalism. These are evidenced in the Administration's pivot to Asia (balance), handling of Afghanistan (sustainability), war against terrorism (precision), response to Russian aggression (patience), and so on. His analysis helps stitch together a coherent strategy from these disparate situations.

The "long game checklist," as Chollet refers to it, is revealing not only for what it includes, but also for what it does not. Largely absent from Obama's foreign policy has been a priority on the promotion of democracy, human rights, rule of law, and other progressive ideals. The author channels Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism and William James' pragmatism in describing the president's innate skepticism towards pursuing an ambitious values agenda. Obama's long game connotes realism and, as Chollet implies, an introspective realism focused on the means of exercising American power more than on the ends. Unlike his predecessors, Obama's legacy is not a vision of new world order, a bridge to a better future, or a struggle against an axis of evil, but a new understanding of America's potential and limits on the world stage.

While the book lives up to its goal of illuminating the "intellectual foundations" of Obama's foreign policy, it also confronts the hard cases in detail. Indeed, the first chapter is devoted to the Syria crisis, seen by many as Obama's norte mare. As Marc LiVecche and I argued in dueling essays in the spring issue of Providence, the red-line episode displayed the Obama doctrine's moral feebleness (my words) and bungling failure (LiVecche's). Chollet disarms our critiques--literally--by recalling a manifestly positive outcome of the tortured diplomatic episode: Assad's total and unconditional abandonment of his formidable chemical weapons arsenal. Even Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, a thorn in the president's side, readily acknowledges his nation and the world are safer as a result of Syria's chemical disarmament, however feeble and bungling the administration's rhetoric during the crisis. Advantage Chollet.

Chollet is less persuasive, however, in arguing that Obama's "unique style of foreign policy... is best suited to leadership in the twenty-first century." The surprising parallels he draws with the foreign policies of Republican predecessors Eisenhower, Nixon, and Bush 41 beg the question of whether the long game is a grand strategy more fit for containing rival superpowers, such as during the Cold War, than for managing asymmetric threats from rogue regimes and non-state actors, such as the United States and its allies face today.