President Biden’s big interview with Time magazine allows him the space to paint a full picture of the world as he sees it. That picture, in turn, reveals the basic problem with Biden’s management of world affairs as president: He thinks and acts like he’s the secretary of defense, awaiting orders to change strategy when the tide turns against the ship of state.

“We are the world power,” the president tells Time as he explains his belief in the power of alliances. Later in the interview, he says: “We have put together the strongest alliance in the history of the world.”

The president seems to think those two statements mean the same thing. They don’t.

The piece presents Biden in as positive a light as possible, so let’s compare the way the writer admiringly describes Biden’s supposedly muscular multilateralism with its results: “He has added two powerful European militaries to NATO, and will soon announce the doubling of the number of countries in the Atlantic alliance that are paying more than the target 2% of their GDP toward defense, the White House says.