“The more we reflect on the confirmation hearings for the proposed promotion of Senator Hagel to the Pentagon, the more we are left with a feeling that the Senate is failing to address the central question. The same is true for Senator Kerry’s elevation to the State Department. The solons gave him a total pass. The armed services committee did a better job in exposing Senator Hagel. But neither hearing confronted the question that is at the bottom of all this sturm and drang. Where is this administration going strategically in respect of foreign policy?”

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Those words are from one of our editorials opposing the confirmation of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. They come to mind now that he is being fired. They remind us that whatever else Mr. Hagel’s faults, and they are legion in our view, he is not the problem with President Obama’s foreign policy. Nor, for that matter is Secretary of State Kerry, who is even less competent than Mr. Hagel. Nor is the national security adviser, Susan Rice, nor the Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, as problematic as they are. The real problem is the president.

It was the president who ran for office opposing the war to liberate Iraq and who yanked our troops out of there more than a half century before the topic should have arisen. It was the president who whistled Dixie as the dollar collapsed. It was the president who campaigned on the theory that Afghanistan was the right war and then plotted a retreat in that same land, whence Osama Bin Laden plotted his attack on America. It was the president who launched a reset of relations with Russia that resulted in their collapse. It was the president who concocted a pivot to Asia that turned out to be a pivot to nowhere.

We don’t mean to suggest that Secretary Hagel is immune from criticism for his tour at defense. It may be true, as the New York Times reports, that he has a fine rapport with enlisted soldiers (and the modern enlisted man and woman is magnificent). Yet it’s no wonder that the Times remarks that Mr. Hagel “has sometimes left reporters struggling to describe what he has said in news conferences.” It has been occasionally even excruciating, as in the above Youtube.com video in which Mr. Hagel attacks the United States congress at a press conference on foreign soil. We do mean to suggest that cashiering Mr. Hagel isn’t going to fix our foreign policy.

In the foreseeable future, this is a job for Congress. It has the constitutional power to declare war, to raise armies and establish a navy (the air force takes off from a runway other than the Constitution). It has the power to grant letters of marque and reprisal, empowering private parties to engage in the war on terror. It has the power to ratify — and, importantly, not to ratify — treaties. It has the power of the purse. It has the power to confirm (or not to confirm) ambassadors, cabinet secretaries, and military officers. It has oversight of our United Nations budget, our relations with the International Monetary Fund, and all the international octopi.

The Senate knew it was making a mistake with Mr. Hagel; one could see it in his confirmation hearing, where after one senator after another dressed the defense nominee down in terms normally heard by a drill sergeant in basic training. It seems that the Senate simply dasn’t block one of its own (though there are exceptions when a conservative president puts up a conservative nominee, as George H.W. Bush discovered when he put up Senator Tower of Texas). The nomination of a successor to Mr. Hagel provides a chance for the Senate to begin asserting its rightful role in answering the question of where, in respect of foreign policy, this administration is going.