Obama seemed relaxed, calm, confident. I asked him about Mitt Romney’s attacks on him as indecisive, timid and nuanced. I don’t quite know why being nuanced is a bad thing, but that is what Romney said.

Obama responded that Romney and the rest of the Republican field are going to be playing to their base until the primary season is over. After that, he said, he looked forward to having a foreign policy debate. Overall, I think it’s going to be pretty hard to argue that we have not executed a strategy over the last three years that has put America in a stronger position than it was when I came into office, he said.

I think Obama has good reasons to be confident on this front. He entered the Oval Office with the United States deeply unpopular around the world, with vast commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, difficult relations with many countries, and a large part of the world feeling it had been ignored by an America obsessed by the war on terror. Obama was determined to pare down America’s commitments, its military footprint, and regain trust and goodwill abroad.

And, for the most part, he succeeded. There were 140,000 troops in Iraq when he came into office. There are zero now. He added troops in Afghanistan, but there, too, a drawdown has begun. He scaled back the nation building aspect of American interventions, but ferociously embraced and expanded the counterterrorism angle, fighting al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups.

Obama ordered more drone attacks in the first two years of his presidency than George W. Bush did in his entire two terms – eight years. And the results have been noteworthy. Most of al Qaeda’s senior leadership has been killed. The strategy’s crowning success was, of course, the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

If the war against al Qaeda is the most visible and dramatic success story, the most significant long-term success might be in Asia, where Obama has pivoted. Asia is the new arena of global wealth, power and politics, and Obama decided to expand American presence in the region with a flurry of diplomatic, political and military moves over the last six months. He did so carefully and skillfully so that it was seen by Asian countries as a response to their request rather than a unilateral assertion of American power. When historians write about an Obama doctrine, they might point to his new Asia strategy, his declaration that America is a Pacific power and we’re here to stay.