President Obama gave special attention to foreign policy at his 2015 State of the Union, addressing the current global situation in Iran, Cuba, Syria and Ukraine. Obama supported what he called a "moderate opposition" to the Islamic State and continued to support Ukraine’s fight against what he termed "Russian bullying." Tying together both his foreign and domestic accomplishments, Obama stated that the "shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong." This is a bold statement, especially as crisis still looms in many areas of the world. It is when we examine Obama’s nuanced and balanced approach to foreign policy in comparison to his predecessors that we find exactly what he has to be proud of.

Throughout the Cold War, the United States pursued a policy of intervention, opposing socialism wherever it occurred—even when democratic. This led us into the despicable process of overthrowing democratically elected governments and propping up dictators, ignoring other countries’ rights to self-determination in order to serve our own ideological and corporate needs. The ideology of interventionism resurfaced in the 2000s as the Bush administration’s global "war on terror" lead us into long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For all of the failures of our interventions in foreign affairs, however, the failure of the United States to react has also caused considerable harm on many fronts. The Clinton administration, fearing a repeat of our unfortunate failure in Somalia, largely ignored the Rwandan genocide, allowing over half a million to perish. The Bush administration chose not to intervene in the Sudan as Janjaweed forces committed genocide against black Africans from Darfur through murder, rape and torture. Genocides tend to occur in a vacuum of power, when the rule of law is weak and people become vulnerable. As the world’s only superpower with the world’s largest military, the United States has a moral obligation to prevent atrocities when no other force can. If we fail to act in these circumstances, we will keep seeing genocides occur again and again.

Purely isolationist ideologies have proven to be equally as harmful as interventionist ideologies in foreign policy, and it’s clear that neither ideology will suffice. The real source of the problem arises when presidents use a one-size-fits-all ideology to tackle complex geopolitical issues. When playing with the delicate balance of the world, we must not constantly apply some blanket doctrine to all issues, as previous presidents have, and, instead, we should fully understand and closely consider the implications of intervening in each situation individually and act accordingly.

It is in this respect that Obama has taken a truly novel approach to foreign policy, relying neither on interventionist or isolationist dogma in making tough decisions. At his State of the Union address last week, Obama stressed diplomacy as the first and most important step in any confrontation but maintained that the United States could use war as a "last resort." In 2011, the Obama administration assisted NATO and Libyan revolutionaries in removing an isolated and unpopular dictator without putting American soldiers on the ground. At the same time, revolutionaries in Syria sought to overthrow their own dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

So why get involved in one conflict, but not the other? The Obama administration saw that Bashar al-Assad had allies in Russia and Iran, meaning intervention would likely mean a long and involved proxy war with Russia. At the same time, the Free Syrian Movement, the main rebel group opposing Assad, was quickly infiltrated by al-Qaeda and came to use more grotesque, terroristic tactics as the war became increasingly involved. Previous administrations have addressed these types of situations by supporting what they believed to be the lesser of two evils; in Afghanistan in the 1980s the United States armed the Mujahideen, the radical Islamist group which would later become the Taliban, in its fight against the Soviet Union. In Syria, rather than choose the lesser of two evils, the Obama administration exercised some critical restraint and avoided yet another prolonged war in which we have no real ideological allies. The key differences between the Libyan and Syrian conflicts, including their connections to other governments and the probable outcome of American involvement, is lost when ideology alone is considered.

Obama’s approach to foreign policy is risky, politically speaking, as it has the potential to alienate both interventionists and isolationists alike. But as a second-term president, Obama is clearly more interested in pursuing sound foreign policy than popular foreign policy. While fighting the Islamic State head-on may have been a politically favorable tactic, the president clearly understands that terrorists do not operate like conventional enemies and aren’t simply quashed in an adrenalin-fueled rush into the middle east. However, when ISIS threatened the democratic and western-aligned Kurdish region of northern Iraq, the president quickly re-armed the Kurds and assisted with airstrikes. When the Islamic State threatened to ethnically cleanse the Yazidi culture from Iraq, the president ordered airstrikes against Islamic State targets, breaking their siege on Mount Sinjar in August and saving approximately 50,000 Yazidis as the Islamic State retreated from Kurdistan. A key combination of low-risk airstrikes and support of Kurdistan has saved thousands of innocent lives and protected real American allies while still avoiding the political quicksand that has trapped previous administrations in the Middle East. Certainly, the Middle East is no utopia right now, but between protecting democracy, preventing genocide and avoiding proxy war, the president has done a phenomenal job of selecting the best of only bad options.

For a clear measure of how sound our foreign policy decisions have been, we need only compare the Obama administration’s policies with the decisions congressional Republicans would have him make. Republican fear-mongering over Iran’s nuclear program has attempted to throw the United States closer to war, as congressional Republicans have put forward legislation to place economic sanctions on Iran before we have completed negotiations. During his State of the Union address, the president stressed that these premature sanctions would certainly undermine our chances at diplomacy and push Iran into defiance. Congressional Republicans are similarly stubborn regarding Obama’s attempts to open up Cuba, instead preferring to stick with our unproductive and hypocritical cold-war era policy of blockade and sanctions.

When it comes to foreign policy, congressional Republicans seem to operate on political dogma, not a desire to make friends of our former enemies and work towards diplomatic solutions. The United States had previously supported Egyptian Prime Minister Hosni Mubarak, but after millions of Egyptians took to the streets calling for his ouster, Obama severed ties with the dictator. Conservatives criticized Obama for failing to support Mubarak, ignoring the fact that invading a country to prop up a dictator is one of the United State’s classic Cold-War era blunders. Egypt’s current democratically elected president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi doesn’t appear to have the power-grabbing or theocratic tendencies of his predecessors, and we’ve probably reached the best possible situation we could have reasonably hoped for in Egypt. But between Egypt and Cuba, congressional Republicans seem to be stuck in a Cold-War era mindset of standoffishness and belligerency, promoting brute force and ideology before diplomacy and deftness. Generally, it is not for lack of brute fighting strength that we have failed internationally, but, instead, our failures have come from an orthodox reliance on political dogma and an inability to adequately consider the lives of those involved overseas. Ignoring genocides, ruining democracies and installing dictators won’t cut it for the 21st century, and Barack Obama appears to be the first president to understand that.