Sometimes presidents have to make things up as they go along.
President Obama's decisions have had an improvisational air these past three weeks. His course on Syria kept shifting, at times seemingly guided by offhand remarks.
But the results are what count.
"If it works out in the end, the president's allowed to be uncertain," says Tim Naftali, a former director of the Nixon presidential library. "Oftentimes, the judgment you get during the crisis is not the judgment you get at the end."
There's still plenty of opportunity for problems to emerge when it comes to implementing the deal to rid Syria of chemical weapons, announced Saturday by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
No one has tried to dispose of weapons of mass destruction on such an accelerated timetable — and certainly not in the middle of an ongoing civil war. Obama's critics note that this deal does nothing to drive Syrian President Bashar Assad from power.
Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called the deal "an act of provocative weakness on America's part." In a statement, they wrote, "It requires a willful suspension of disbelief to see this agreement as anything other than the start of a diplomatic blind alley."
“ If you get under the skin of most crises, they'd have this kind of ad hockery.