After listening to President Obama’s last two major speeches—his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance in Oslo and his announcement at West Point of a renewed commitment to fighting the war in Afghanistan—many of his leftist supporters are a bit confused. Perhaps the most understandable was the response from Israel Lobby author Stephen Walt, who suggested that everyone just ignore the Oslo speech and hope that its admirable defense of American power will have no influence on the president’s future decisions. While there was much to quibble about in both of these speeches—his foolish announcement of an exit date before buildup in Afghanistan and his blind faith in the value of diplomacy with North Korea and Iran—there can be no denying that after nearly a year in office, Obama seems to be waking up to the fact that his duties as commander in chief require him to face up to the facts of life in a dangerous world. And that has to be something that people like Walt and the members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee can’t be happy about.

In analyzing Obama’s Oslo oration, it is most useful to contrast it with the speech he gave to the Arab and Islamic world in Cairo in June. That paean to moral equivalence seemed to win him his Nobel in that it appeared to promise that his administration would be unwilling to see a world where “evil” existed and must be fought. In Oslo, he spoke out about the need for a foreign policy in which human rights and democracy—heretofore supposedly only the obsession of dread neoconservatives—was integral to our national goals. In Cairo, such talk was conspicuously absent.

One can also well imagine how disappointed Obama’s Norwegian hosts were when they heard him speak of the necessity of using American military power in just wars like the one the United States is fighting in Afghanistan. Nor could they have been prepared for his frank avowal that American military power not only conquered fascism in World War II but also largely kept the peace since then. This was, as others have noted, exactly the sort of thing George W. Bush often said during his presidency and often earned him the jeers of the European Left, which cheered Obama’s Cairo speech and its promise of a “post-American” foreign policy.

We ought not to ignore the flaws in Obama’s recent pronouncements, nor his propensity to curry favor among those who hate the country that elected him. But it may well be that the story of his time in office will be determined by the outcome of the ongoing battle between those in his administration who see the world from the point of the view of the Cairo speech and those who see it as enunciated in West Point and Oslo. If so, then hope is possible that as events lead us inevitably toward further confrontations with Iran, Obama will come to realize that engagement must be replaced with action. As his dithering on Iran illustrates, there is still plenty of reason to doubt Obama’s ability to come to the right conclusions about the hard choices facing America. But slowly and perhaps against his will, Barack Obama may have come to realize that as president, he must face up to America’s foreign-policy challenges with the same responses that earned his predecessor the hatred of the leftist elites.