If the goalpost is "being an impervious shield". I think a more reasonable expectation would be to prevent or respond to a Kuwait situation and keep shipping open. Obviously that second one is a huge failure.
But we have only seen bombings and angry tweets. The US military is capable of quite a bit more. It's a terrible path to go down (and we may do so in about a month), but we haven't seen the full capability of the military because the orange guy in charge only wants to do bombings and threaten genocide.
It wouldn't be worth disputing the semantics of what kind of black mark this is for the US as a global power, except that you use it to conclude there is no point to maintaining bases in the far east. If you think they don't matter, just look up any discussion of Chinese warplanning.