Excluding our crackpots and bigots, historians, memoirists and biographers will surely take into account the challenges he faced because of the two wars he inherited – one of which, Afghanistan, he always supported.

Even so, as we faced the rest of the world, Obama was going to be different, or so we hoped. The hundreds of thousands who joyously hailed him in Grant Park and the 1.5 million who turned out for his first inauguration were ecstatic with anticipation. The policies of the past were dead and gone. Or so we innocents thought.

While Obama Care and his TPP trade pact may or may not prove significant in any future assessment, his final legacy will certainly be based more on what he does and doesn't do about the Middle East, Iran, China and Russia. Obama once told reporters in the summer of 2014 that his guiding principle was "Don't do stupid shit," a lesson that he seemed to have taken to heart when he tried dealing rationally with Iran despite Israel and its American acolytes' fierce opposition, and with Cuba, ignoring the fevered disapproval by unforgiving Florida-based Cuban émigrés.