The Iran deal marks a shift in America’s approach to waging economic violence abroad in the form of sanctions. Consider that, in 2013, during the same week sabres were rattling to wage war with Syria, Obama somehow pivoted to beginning talks for peace with Iran. During the intervening 19 months, his administration also began to roll back the violence of the economic embargo with Cuba. While George W Bush ended his two terms trying to escalate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has dialed down those battlefronts overwhelmingly, while also trying to make sure diplomacy trumps the mass destruction of economic sanctions.

Regarding the violence of mass incarceration, Obama has gone where no sitting president has gone before – quite literally, in visiting a federal prison on Thursday. In addressing the NAACP on reducing incarceration and personally calling for the return of felons’ voting rights (he’d previously done so through Attorney General Eric Holder, long the president’s point man on race before he left the administration for a crude and shameful job), Obama boxed Bill Clinton into having to tell the NAACP that he was wrong in violently going on the lock-up war path in the 1990s. This will force Hillary to denounce Bill and face mass incarceration, something she’s already had to address (but without having to acknowledge Bill’s role as Incarcerator-in-chief).