It was one of the great promises of Barack Obama's presidency: that the world might be transformed by the leadership of a President who had an African Muslim father, who lived in Indonesia as a boy and who offered a foreign policy vision that promoted talking to enemies above threatening them. The idea literally brought some of Obama's supporters, shell-shocked by the horror of Iraq, to tears. Not so his opponents, who warned that the idea was dangerously naive and that negotiating with the U.S.'s enemies was a formula for disaster.
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