President Obama, recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, has been at war longer than any other American president in history.

“If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama’s term — a near-certainty given the president’s recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria — he will leave behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war,” reported The New York Times.

Obama prided himself as an anti-war candidate when he first entered the White House. Around this time eight years ago, he vowed to end America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — but that is a promise he has yet to fulfill.

Eliot A. Cohen, a military historian at Johns Hopkins University, said that with Obama as commander-in-chief, the nation has endured a “rather strange” war.

“No president wants to be a war president,” Cohen told The Times. “Obama thinks of war as an instrument he has to use very reluctantly. But we’re waging these long, rather strange wars. We’re killing lots of people. We’re taking casualties.”

When Obama gave an acceptance speech for his 2009 Nobel Prize, he acknowledged that there was a chance he wouldn’t be able to accomplish the goals he had in mind for putting an end to the war that George W. Bush got the country into when he was president.

He said people need to come to terms with “two seemingly irreconcilable truths — that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.”

To read more about President Obama’s broken promises as president, click here.