So now two presidents in the space of less than three years have bucked overwhelming conventional wisdom, as well as public opinion, and decided that they did not want to lose a war. And what lonely decisions these have been. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the last few years has been the stunningly large number of American thinkers, strategists and pundits who have been perfectly prepared to lose wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. People talk about American decline these days, but it is not in the basic measurements of national power that American decline is to be found. It is in the willingness of the intellectual and foreign policy establishments to accept both decline and defeat.

There is a new doctrine out there that seems to enjoy enormous cache among the smart...