Friends of the US around the world may well hope that the dramatic repudiation of the Obama administration in the 2014 midterm congressional elections portends a shift away from this pattern of American retreat (which in truth is less an orderly withdrawal and more a scuttle, led by the historically ill-informed and the strategically ignorant). That hope, alas, would be misplaced. The Constitution vests virtually all effective power over foreign policy in the presidency, and while Obama's has been an administration singularly insouciant about constitutional niceties, it seems very unlikely that an administration that has decided to govern domestically through administrative and regulatory fiat (i.e., to govern without Congress) is going to do anything but ignore admonitions from the new Congress to undertake one of its famous "re-sets" and get serious about world affairs.

Moreover, there is little in the administration's make-up to suggest that its key foreign policy figures, including the President and the Secretary of State, believe a fundamental policy reset is needed. Whatever the people around John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson may have thought of themselves, the Obama administration really does believe itself composed of "the best and the brightest", men and women who need not take counsel from critics or even consider the possibility that they may have misread the dynamics of early 21st century history. That Obama might even toy with the idea of bringing senior Republican figures onto his national security team in this moment of crisis, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did prior to America's entry into World War II, is almost inconceivable, given the President's self-regard and hyper-partisanship.

As for pressure from below, from the electorate, it is certainly true that tweeted beheadings of American journalists and aid workers got the American people's attention, and Obama's air war against IS was the result. But at the time of  writing, that mild muscle-flexing seems another exercise in feckless half-measures rather than the effort to "degrade and destroy" the neo-caliphate that the President promised Americans (and the world) prior to the bombing campaign. Moreover, there is no indication that the Obama scuttle was a decisive factor in the 2014 midterm elections, save as one more entry in a long catalogue of the administration's failures. Elections in 2006 may well have been that rare exception to the rule that midterms in the US political cycle are almost exclusively about domestic (meaning economic) issues; tired of a war in Iraq that seemed to be going nowhere, the American people registered their dissatisfaction with Bush administration foreign policy by handing the House of Representatives back to the Democrats (and, in what history may eventually view as a great irony, got the boondoggle of Obamacare as a result, three years later). But the old patterns reasserted themselves in 2014, in a campaign conducted almost exclusively as a referendum on Obama's domestic policies (including Obamacare).

Thus the best that Congress can do over the next two years is to wield its power of the purse and its investigative authority in such a way as to put some spine back into US foreign policy. Further administration-proposed cuts in military preparedness can be resisted, and reversed. A bipartisan congressional effort to provide serious defensive aid (including anti-tank weapons) to Ukraine is not inconceivable, and might even garner the votes necessary to override a presidential veto. Congressional hearings exploring (and exposing) the failures of Obama administration foreign policy over the past six years might help clarify a public record that has been muddied by mainstream media Obamaphilia, which continues, if at a lesser level of passion than before.