It was Dwight Eisenhower, a very different kind of American president to Donald Trump, who warned that “we will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.” There’s no record of him using that precise wording, but the phrase stuck because it seemed so succinctly to capture his many speeches on the dangers of getting driven to war for the wrong reasons.

Eisenhower was no pacifist. But as a career soldier and World War II’s supreme allied commander in Europe, he knew the costs, risks and limitations of war in ways that the men taking decisions in the Middle East today do not.

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