Yet with a debate framed by Republican hawks’ incessant griping over the president’s supposed weakness, Obama is able to present his foreign policy as eminently reasonable — even restrained.

“The measure of strength internationally is not simply by how many countries we’re occupying, or how many missiles we’re firing,” Obama said in early November, “but the strength of our diplomacy and the strength of our commitment to human rights and our belief that we’ve got to cooperate with other countries together to solve massive problems like terrorism but also like climate change.”

But it’s only in contrast to the GOP hawks’ “bomb everything, everywhere, all the time” agenda that Obama’s actual foreign policy can be convincingly presented as strength through diplomacy, human rights, and cooperation. War in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria) and varying degrees of military intervention in at least four more (Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya) are not the marks of an isolationist president.

And it’s not only Obama who benefits from some Republicans’ outlandish claims. While Hillary Clinton is widely acknowledged as a thoroughgoing hawk whose foreign policy would be comfortable in the GOP field, even this cycle’s Democratic “peace candidate,” Bernie Sanders, can only be so categorized because of the absurdity of pro-war Republican talking points.