Since US-centric whanking is ok on this journal, one might as well contribute.

I think it can be said that USA is a militaristic nation. I have always thought it odd, this habit of electing generals as presidents. The War on Christmas didn't remove that impression either.

Well, G Washington is definitely number one, in every way: he was the general who put down his sword and went home when it was over (how many generals have you heard of who would do that?), then came back and established two terms as an informal limit to how long a President should serve, and as icing on the cake, put together a magnificent Farewell Address, filled with advice that of course has been assiduously ignored by almost all the Presidents who came after him.
Grover Cleveland is number two, as one of the very few who actually followed that advice, and as a man so resolutely anti-imperialist he wouldn't even annex Hawaii.
OTOH, Woodrow Wilson, who tore up GW's principle of not getting involved in Europe's endless internal wars, and sent troops to Mexico and to the nascent USSR as well as into WWI, was the opposite of these two. He ranks dead last far as I'm concerned.
Eisenhower and Clinton were both reasonably quiet, competent, and good for prosperity, unlike their successors, Kennedy/Johnson in the first case, Dubya in the second.
Truman, who fought the first undeclared war of the Cold War, in Korea, and showed total, unconstitutional contempt for Congress in its genesis, would be on an even lower ring of Hell than Wilson, but only if Wilson had never existed.
As for the US being a militaristic nation, any doubts on that score should have been removed by the overwhelming vote in favor of the military commissions bill, in both houses.

Good choices. As for the USA being militaristic, not sure I'd wholly agree, very defintional.

Go on....

Eisenhower wasn't all that quiet, even though he didn't have any major wars after Korea. He was extremely active in the covert side of imperialism and encouraged the shift of the American right from isolationism to imperialism. He brought in the Dulles "Rollback" Brothers who went ahead with the 1953 coup in Iran after Truman had flatly refused to do so. The Iran template was used elsewhere around the world during Ike's time(Guatemala, Vietnam, Congo, etc.) and by subsequent Cold War presidents. His aversion to out and out military engagement was as much budgetary as anything else, nukes being more "bang for the buck."