I was in the audience in Washington on Aug. 1, 2007, when candidate Barack Obama gave the speech in which he famously declared, "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets [in Pakistan], and President Musharraf won't act, we will." I didn't consider that bit of bluster the headline; I was much more struck by his insistence that in the post-9/11 world, "we are no longer protected by our own power." Shows what I know. The campaign aides I spoke with in the ensuing days were tremendously frustrated that the real message of the speech had been lost in a noisy debate over whether Obama was trying to swagger his way to the nomination.

Now, almost four years later, and long after Gen. Pervez Musharraf left office in Islamabad, Obama has made good on his pledge, sending a team of Navy SEALs across the border into Pakistan to take out the highest-value target of them all. And suddenly, for the first time since taking office, Obama has the hard glitter of the warrior -- like George W. Bush in his "mission accomplished" moment, only without the bomber jacket and the hokum. It's a bizarre irony for a candidate who once said, "I want to go before the United Nations and say, 'America's back!'"

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The great despair of Obama's foreign policy advisors in 2007 was how relentlessly he was pegged as the "soft" candidate. Obama opposed the war in Iraq, advocated nuclear nonproliferation, and cherished the U.N. -- so he was soft. He was willing to talk to America's adversaries without preconditions and Hillary Clinton wasn't -- so she was tough. The very terms reeked of the Cold War mentality that had shaped Hillary and her generation, and then lived on way past its sell-by date.

Obama's advisors said at the time that he understood American national security now depended less than it used to on military power and more on how America behaved, and was seen to behave, in the world. Ending torture was thus a matter not just of morality but security. At the same time, Obama had no compunction about killing terrorists, even on neutral soil. He wasn't harder or softer than Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush; he was something new in the world. "The difference between a revolutionary foreign policy and a conservative foreign policy is profound," as Sarah Sewall, a counterinsurgency expert at Harvard and a key foreign policy advisor, told me then.

Well, you'd have trouble seeing that just now, wouldn't you? The president has been revealed as Jack Bauer, trampling on the niceties of law in pursuit of justice -- or as "Cool Hand Barack," as Maureen Dowd has christened him. He said he wouldn't quibble over international law when it came to America's security -- and he didn't. Of course getting Osama bin Laden, by whatever means, was a deeply satisfying victory. But it's very strange to contemplate that the one promise Obama kept from that paradigm-setting speech was the one in which he offered to break the rules rather than to restore respect for them.

Okay, that's not quite fair. Candidate Obama promised to wind down the war in Iraq and ramp up the war in Afghanistan, and of course he has done both. But those decisions were scarcely transformational; a third-term Bush might well have done the same. Perhaps the most important promise he has been able to keep is to "turn the page on the diplomacy of tough talk and no action," as he said in the 2007 speech, by engaging adversaries as well as allies. He has ended torture, but he has not closed Guantánamo or stopped the odious practice known as rendition. A combination of the budget crisis and a recalcitrant Congress has prevented him from making good on his vows to double foreign aid by 2012 and from substantially increasing "the numbers and capabilities of our diplomats, development experts, and other civilians." He has moved much more timidly towards nuclear disarmament than he had said he would.

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