Amid the often jarring inconsistency of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, one thing has always been crystal clear: He loves a big show of American military force.

“You gotta knock the hell out of them — Boom! Boom! Boom!” Trump said of Islamic State terrorists at a January 2016 rally in Iowa, punctuating each “boom” with a punch of his fist.

That same impulse has been apparent over the past 10 days as Trump pummeled a Syrian air base with cruise missiles, threatened military action against North Korea over its nuclear weapons program and praised the U.S. military’s first-ever use of a massive 11-ton bomb, nicknamed the “mother of all bombs,” to kill Islamic State militants in Afghanistan.

“So incredible. It’s brilliant. It’s genius,” Trump said on Tuesday of the missile strike in Syria. “Our technology, our equipment is better than anybody by a factor of five.”

As he searches for a coherent foreign policy during his first months in office, Trump has celebrated but often inflated the effect of military actions. The massive shows of strength, at times, have seemed to be a strategy unto themselves.

“If you look at what’s happened over the last eight weeks and compare that really to what’s happened over the past eight years, you’ll see there’s a tremendous difference, tremendous difference,” Trump told reporters after the military unleashed the giant bomb on a largely unpopulated region of the Afghan wilderness. “This was another very, very successful mission.”

U.S. military officials estimated that the giant bomb killed 36 Islamic State fighters.

Trump’s full-on embrace of military force offers a sharp contrast to Barack Obama, who promised to end America’s wars and who worried publicly about escalation and overreach, often to the point of paralysis. Trump has taken the polar opposite approach, and for the moment he seems to be benefiting.

Some foreign leaders took comfort in the speed of Trump’s response after Syrian President Bashar Assad allegedly used chemical weapons against his own people.

“In Asia, they appreciated the decisiveness,” said Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and president of the Center for a New American Security. “They see this as a sign that the administration will move quickly in response to events.”

The tough talk and the cruise missile strike have provided a small boost to Trump’s approval rating at home and have drawn widespread cable news coverage, distracting from his domestic struggles and the ongoing probe into contacts between his campaign officials and Russia.

Trump also has drawn praise from a foreign policy community that has blanched at his criticism of NATO and worried about his isolationist, “America First” instincts.

The big question is whether Trump’s recent military maneuvers can be fashioned into a long-term strategy or whether they are the Trump foreign policy equivalent of an angry tweet.