"The Greatest Revolution in American Foreign Policy in a Generation"

"On 9/11/2001 the al-Qaida attacks cemented the consensus even further. Until then, the maintenance of a U.S. military that had been only moderately downsized from its Cold War proportions had been justified by the grossly exaggerated threats alleged to have been posed by 'rogue states' like Iraq and North Korea and Iran. Now there was a new enemy to justify a huge, global U.S. military: stateless terrorism. Absurdly, many American statesmen and foreign policy experts treated jihadists not as criminal gangs comparable to the mafia and drug cartels but as soldiers of a virtual superpower, comparable somehow to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Post-9/11 panic, cynically stoked by conservatives for electoral purposes, added layer on layer to a clumsy, labyrinthine homeland security bureaucracy while justifying spending on Pentagon weapons systems whose usefulness in fighting jihadists was slight or nonexistent. The neoconservative scholar Eliot Cohen and the neoconservative editor Norman Podhoretz declared that the U.S. was engaged in 'World War IV' (World War III having been the Cold War). Others called it the Long War.
"Well, World War IV is now over, according to President Obama. The Long War turned out not to be all that long."

Michael Lind in Salon takes a look at President Obama's "new vision of American defense."