Take your time Mr President. Ignore the sniping. Don't be rushed. Impatience is the scourge of the age.
In the year since Barack Obama's election victory, admirers as well as adversaries have grown restless. What has the president got to show for his time in the White House? Where are the achievements to measure up to the soaring rhetoric?
To my mind, Mr Obama has kept pretty busy. He has put through a successful economic stimulus package; shored up the financial system; travelled three quarters of the way towards healthcare reform; and rewritten policy on climate change. In each case, you can point to notable imperfections, but it is hard to argue he has spent too much time on his golf handicap.
The clamour for instant decisions and even faster results has been particularly insistent in the arena of foreign policy. George W. Bush was assailed for starting a needless war in Iraq. Mr Obama's crime has been to win the Nobel peace prize for preferring to talk before he shoots.
For critics on the right of politics, diplomacy and engagement have become synonyms for vacillation and weakness. To want to be liked is to be feeble; doubly so if the liking is being done by feckless Europeans. Mr Obama should be picking fights.
Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, is the most vocal resident of this parallel universe. Mr Cheney disowns the sensible policy shifts of Mr Bush's second term. The earlier force-first strategy was the way to keep the US safe. Never mind the blood-letting in Iraq; forget that al-Qaeda regrouped in Pakistan; ignore the defiance of North Korea and Iran. The US showed itself resolute enough to lose all its friends.
Doubts about Mr Obama's foreign policy are not confined to the irredentist right. Many of those who liked the idea of restoring America's international prestige also hanker for a bit more urgency. Make up your mind, they whisper; decide what you intend to do in Afghanistan.
I cannot think of a strategic decision where rushing to judgment would be more foolish. Even before this summer's election debacle holed the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai's government, Mr Obama was confronted only with a choice between bad choices. Why would he grab at one of them before weighing the evidence?
Last month I listened to General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, set out his case for a troop surge. His speech at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies was a model of clarity and evidence-based analysis. His conclusion – that the US and its allies are destined to lose to the Taliban unless they launch a fully-fledged counter-insurgency campaign – seemed irrefutable.
Yet General McChrystal thought victory uncertain even with extra troops; and the organising logic of his argument – that a commitment sustained over many years to build a viable Afghanistan state offered the only hope of success – seemed, on reflection, to be its central weakness.
Unwavering resolve may not be available. Voters may not be willing to expend sufficient blood and treasure for long enough to give general McChrystal his shot. If nation-building is the only alternative, perhaps Mr Obama should be thinking instead about an exit strategy.
Yet drawing back scarcely looks palatable. The latest terror attacks in Pakistan have served as a reminder of the extremist threat to that nuclear-armed state. Who can say that a Taliban victory in Afghanistan would not be a precursor for the triumph for jihadists in Pakistan? What about a more focused counter-terrorism campaign against al-Qaeda? It sounds attractive – until one recognises that a stalemate would take the Taliban more than half-way to victory.
