The president who campaigned on ending America's wars …
OBAMA VIA NBC: "I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war."
… is now leading the country into a new one.
OBAMA VIA FOX NEWS: "This is what America is prepared to do — taking action against immediate threats while pursuing a world in which the need for such action is diminished."
Wednesday, Obama spoke before the United Nations not as a peacetime president but as a commander in chief overseeing another foreign war. It's a legacy the Nobel Prize laureate probably never envisioned for himself.
Hence the new label the media keeps attaching to his name.
MSNBC: "He is clearly a reluctant warrior."
CNN: "He's obviously a reluctant warrior."
MSNBC: "He is the reluctant warrior."
Granted, it might be a little strange to attach that label to him now, seeing as he's long supported a robust military strategy. Syria is now the seventh Arab country he's ordered airstrikes in since taking office.
Even in 2009, as he picked up his Nobel prize, Obama offered a vigorous defense of the use of military force when a war is considered "just."
OBAMA VIA NOBEL FOUNDATION: "To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."
Reluctant or not, Obama is now a wartime president — in a turn of events former State Department official Nicholas Burns calls "almost Shakespearian."
So does the president consider himself a wartime president? A reporter posed that exact question to President Obama earlier this week.
According toThe Washington Post, "The president smiled, but he did not answer."
This video includes images from Getty Images.
