So just about every aspect of American power and its role in people’s lives since World War II lurks somewhere in Obama’s background—our capacity to keep the peace abroad and to disrupt it; our capacity to transform individual lives through both our generosity and our callousness; the allure of our democratic values and our imperfection in realizing them. Yet the strangeness of this background to many Americans left plenty of space for people to misunderstand or misrepresent how it impacted his view of American foreign policy.
