As Barack Obama prepares to deliver his final State of the Union address Tuesday night, the U.S. president and his aides have insisted he will not be content simply to run out the clock on foreign policy and is acting decisively to tackle crises piling up around the globe.
But former U.S. officials and experts familiar with the White House's thinking say he appears locked into policies aimed more at containing such threats and avoiding deeper U.S. military engagement in the last year of his presidency.
This, they say, all but guarantees that the toughest geopolitical challenges will be inherited by Obama's successor. That will likely give fuel to Republican presidential candidates who are eager to use Obama's foreign policy woes to attack, by extension, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, who served as his first-term secretary of state.