Indeed, stripped to its essence, what the President has outlined isn't some grand strategy to transform the region or even to "ultimately destroy" ISIS; it's a much narrower transactional one to protect the homeland.

5 reasons why an expanded mission to strike James Foley's killers in Syria won't work. And why it's going to happen anyway.

Don't be fooled by the Iraq airstrikes. He's the risk-averse president he's always been -- and that should be just fine by us.

America has to get over its obsession with happy endings or definitive solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Because right now there are not any – either to the impasse in Gaza or to the broader challenge.

When it comes to Gaza, don't dream about demilitarization or economic miracles. In fact, forget the endgame. Right now, summoning the urgency, the right mediator, and a deal to stop the killing will be hard enough.

Iraq was never the U.S.'s to win. That point -- along with lowered expectations and focused goals -- must be the basis of any new approach to the region.

A cohesive Iraqi state will always be a fiction. ISIS will shoot itself in the foot. And other important truths to guide U.S. policy in today’s increasingly turbulent Middle East.

Obama didn't lose Iraq because it has never been ours to win. And he can't win it now.

Six grand illusions of America’s foreign policy.

Obama might be risk averse, but there are at least five scenarios in which he might use military force in the Middle East.

Obama had tried to convey a careful and reasonable assessment of ISIS’s significance, and of the downsides of possible further U.S. actions in the Middle East. But reasonableness lost out to a groundswell of public sentiment.

Leading from behind would in some respects be the most effective U.S. approach toward countering ISIS in the Middle East, given how success in any such effort will depend heavily on whether Arab publics and governments, including Sunni ones in particular, are seen to be out front in opposing the group.

U.S. involvement means taking sides in those civil wars, and that means making new enemies and eliciting more unfavorable reactions against U.S. interests.

From a U.S. point of view, the policy of not saying anything publicly has also long outlived whatever usefulness it may have had.

If friends and allies of ours get impatient with us for not doing more on behalf of goals that are important to them but not to us, tough.

Americans, following a long tradition of finding monsters overseas to destroy, are now focusing their attention and their energy on a relatively new one: the group variously known as ISIS or ISIL or the Islamic State.

On one side are calls for the United States to do more in response to untoward happenings in hot spots such as Iraq, Syria, or Ukraine. On the other side is a tempered restraint based on the limitations and complications of trying to do anything more in such places.

Different problems need to be considered together.

International agreements are more a matter of intentions and motivations than of capabilities.

The Obama administration's proposal to spend $500 million on training and equipping ‘appropriately vetted elements of the moderate Syrian armed opposition’ leaves unanswered some of the same questions that always have surrounded proposals to give lethal aid to Syrian rebels.