People often compare Barack Obama to John F. Kennedy. Peter Beinart, one of my favorite liberal commentators on American national security, instead compares him to Richard Nixon in his new piece in Time.

Richard Nixon had to handle inherited American foreign policy overreach--the war in Vietnam-- just as Barack Obama is inheriting Bush's overreach in the War on Terror. The U.S. couldn't destroy communism everywhere, so Nixon worked to divide it.  Obama, Beinart argues, is attempting a similar strategy to combat Islamic fundamentalism.  Rather than lump together Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban together, as Bush did, Obama wants to divide these groups, cut deals with reconcilable factions, and contain (or fight) the irreconcilables. This was the feat that Nixon accomplished by reaching out to China. Money quote:

“For roughly two decades, the U.S. had been trying to contain "communism" — another ominous, elastic noun that encompassed a multitude of movements and regimes. But Vietnam proved that this was impossible: the U.S. didn't have the money or might to keep communist movements from taking power anywhere across the globe. So Nixon stopped treating all communists the same way. Just as Obama sees Iran as a potential partner because it shares a loathing of al-Qaeda, Nixon saw Communist China as a potential partner because it loathed the U.S.S.R...It's too soon to know whether Obama's game of divide and conquer will work, but by narrowing the post-9/11 struggle, he's gained the diplomatic flexibility to play the U.S.'s adversaries against each other rather than unifying them against us.”