Sublime

Barack Obama came to see it as an alternative to the messy, costly wars that topple governments and require years of American occupation. In the words of John Brennan, one of President Obama’s closest advisers whom Obama eventually tapped to run the CIA, instead of the “hammer” America now relies on the “scalpel.”

President Truman and the European heads of government believed that only Eisenhower, the supreme commander in World War II, had sufficient credibility to bring those forces into being—and at the same time to be taken seriously by the Soviets.