A mere four years into what has come to be called the Global War on Terror, it has already become difficult to remember what an extraordinary revolution the events of September 11 really were. Overnight, America's alliances changed, America's military objectives changed, America's diplomatic priorities were transformed. Overnight, the Global War on Terror--or the GWOT, as it is now inelegantly nicknamed--became the new organizing principle around which all other aspects of American foreign policy fell into place. This transformation can in some ways be compared to the extraordinary adjustments to U.S. policy that accompanied the start of the Cold War. Then, as now, American diplomats, scholars and policymakers had to accustom themselves to thinking differently about a new kind of ideological and military threat. Then, as now, they had to come up with new institutions to deal with the new realities of American power in an altered world.

But there is a difference: By 1949, more or less four years into the Cold War, the Truman Administration already understood that military power alone would not defeat the USSR. Pro-Soviet Communist parties were very powerful in France, Italy and elsewhere in Europe. The Soviet Union was funding those groups and, at the same time, filling East German warehouses with guns and ammunition in preparation for an invasion. Seeing this double challenge, the Adminstration very early on began to build new institutions to fight the Soviet threat. At home, these eventually included the modern Defense Department, the National Security Council and the CIA. Abroad, the United States created the Marshall Plan; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the Breton Woods organizations; and the small but enormously influential Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Institutions like these not only kept the Red Army on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie, they also attracted the admiration and envy of Eastern Europeans. In the end, the mere existence of a strong, free and prosperous Western Europe beside a weak, totalitarian and impoverished Eastern Europe proved more powerful than all the American military's European divisions put together. The Berlin Wall fell, in other words, because of the political, economic and ideological success of the Western alliance. The Soviet bloc wasn't defeated so much as persuaded to switch sides.

After September 11, the Bush Administration did recognize the new reality at the military level. Very rapidly we had working bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. We rediscovered the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban coalition that we had ignored in the past. We successfully fought a high-tech war in Afghanistan with surprisingly few casualties. We began helping other countries around the world--the Phillipines, India--cope with al-Qaeda cells. We won an unexpectedly quick victory over the forces of Saddam Hussein.