Of course, some people think it was really Barack Obama who defeated ISIS. Explaining the defeat of ISIS, the Washington Post writes, “Obama’s ISIS policy is working for Trump … an acknowledgment that in Syria, Trump is using President Barack Obama’s playbook. So far, it’s working out pretty well for him.”

No doubt the credit for successful policies never originates with a single administration but rather with several, and the desire to receive credit should never get in the way of simply doing the right thing. Ronald Reagan famously said, “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit” — perhaps because he knew that public memory was as short as the news cycle can make it.

Who now can remember, as progressives cast themselves as the defenders against the Russian menace, how recently president Obama laughed at Mitt Romney’s suggestion that the Kremlin could ever be a threat? Ha ha. But it’s enough perhaps that Russia is finally facing one of the biggest military buildups since the end of the Cold War, whoever ordered it — though some will point out no doubt that the buildup may have begun in Obama’s final year, when “reality finally kicked in.”