Examines Obama's aggressive use of innovative weapons and new tools of American power to manage a rapidly shifting world of global threats and challenges.

The Middle East has long been a region of rival religions, ideologies, nationalisms, and ambitions, whose conflicts are largely rooted in the region's political inheritance: the arrangements, unities, and divisions imposed by the Allies after the First World War. Focusing on the formative years of 1914 to 1922, this book reveals how and why the Allies drew lines on an empty map the remade the geography and politics of the Middle East.--From back cover....