This morning, when President Obama announced that the United States had begun air strikes in Syria, quite a few people on Twitter made nervous jokes that they feared Obama was going to announce his resignation, run to the helicopter in the background, and then simply fly away, tossing a few Nixonian V for victory signs at the press as he shrank to a dot on the horizon. There's a little bit of truth to those jokes—Obama has seemed weary in his public appearances lately, sometimes even bored. This diminishment, this perceived listlessness, is an ailment common to most modern presidents as they've rounded the final corner of their second terms. While watching Obama give that brief statement, you have to wonder what's going on in his head. As he discusses an important foreign policy decision, is he fantasizing just a little bit about life in his post-presidency?

Even Republicans praise Obama's speech-giving abilities (though those same Republicans generally mean that praise as a backhanded compliment at best), but this was nowhere near Obama's finest hour. He delivered the lines poorly, accenting the wrong syllables and putting the emphasis on the wrong words; when he announced that the air strikes were being delivered alongside a coalition including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, he made almost every word sound out of place. The coalition, he said, "makes it clear [pause] to the world [pause] that this is not America's fight alone." Like most of the speeches Obama has given in his second term, his heart didn't seem to be in it.

As the air strikes began, stories about what we were looking to do in Syria started to spread. The BBC reports that the air strikes helped to avert an "imminent" terrorist attack on the West, an attack that the US describes as "major." (Lower down in that article, they also report that 50 Al Qaeda agents and eight civilians died overnight.) Of course, you'd have to be an idiot to completely trust the United States when it claims to have damning information about foreign antagonism, but only an idiot would discount the possibility that Al Qaeda or ISIS is planning attacks, too. But we've watched these air strikes again and again over the last few decades, and we know that even though they may temporarily defuse disastrous situations, they also give birth to a whole new generation of people who hate us. Can anyone doubt that George H.W. Bush's brand of preppy colonialism, where you devastate an entire nation without once getting your shoes dirty, helped inspire a whole wave of young men who now want to see the United States burnt to ash? Maybe Obama's statement this morning, given in front of a presidential means of escape, was so awkward precisely because he recognizes that all he's doing is deferring one generation of hatred for another, further down the line? That was not a man trying to sell us something; that was a man trying to solve his troubles with a credit card.