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WASHINGTON President Trump appears to have found himself a new national security adviser.

His name is Barack Obama.

Recent days have brought evidence of two foreign policy successes for the Trump administration:

Then,on Saturday, China and Russia joined in a unanimous U.N. Security Council vote to approve a U.S.-sponsored resolution with tough new sanctions on North Korea, a forceful world response to that countrys missile tests.

These two developments, in addition to being successes, had another thing in common: In both cases, the Trump administration essentially embraced Obama administration policies policies Trump previously derided as a total failure.

On North Korea, Trump has long been making threats and ultimatums, promising severe things and raising the possibility that South Korea and Japan could build nuclear arsenals. He was harshly (if vaguely) critical of the Obama administrations handling of North Korea, saying Obama and Hillary Clinton who were pushing for tougher sanctions werent being strong enough.

And now? Last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered soothing words about North Korea: We do not seek a regime change, we do not seek a collapse of the regime, we do not seek an accelerated reunification of the peninsula, we do not seek an excuse to send our military north of the 38th Parallel, he said. We are trying to convey to the North Koreans: We are not your enemy, we are not your threat.

Those words cleared the way for China and Russia to support the sanctions resolution at the United Nationson Saturday, as The Washington Posts Karen DeYoung reported. Representatives of both countries mentioned Tillersons statement in casting their votes.

Under the headline Trumps North Korea policy resembles Obamas, Politicoon Mondayreported that administration officials were privately sending signals that a pre-emptive attack on North Korea is not on the table and that the Trump administration is pursuing a five-part strategy similar to the strategy undertaken by the Obama administration.

On the Islamic State, likewise, Brett McGurk, a top State Department official under both Obama and Trump, announced that steps taken by Trump notably his delegation of decision-making authority from the White House to commanders in the field contributed to the reclaiming of 8,000 square miles of Islamic State territory.

Trumps decision to give more authority to field commanders makes the military more nimble. The Obama White House was justifiably criticized for its plodding micromanagement of military strategy.But this change is a massage not a reversal of an Obama strategy Trump repeatedly derided as weak and a disaster. By the time Trump took over, the territory controlled by the Islamic State had already fallen substantially from its peak in early 2015.

Trump promised to replace the Obama strategy with a secret plan of his own. But, as DeYoung reported, Trumps Islamic State strategy looks very much like the one the Obama administration pursued: denying territory to the militants while avoiding conflict with Iran and staying out of Syrias civil war.

Its not as if Trump is about to usher in a third term for the Obama national security team. But even if these two cases turn out to be isolated and temporary, they show that within the Trump administration there is at least some instinct to tone down the wild talk and, ever so quietly, to bend to reality.

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