I think something serious changed in the last two years regarding our defense policy, especially regarding the Global War On Terror.  Some might call it the Obama Doctrine.  Perhaps a better term would be the Petraeus Doctrine.

• General David Petraeus "wrote the book" on counterinsurgency.  Some lessons in that book: "Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be," and "Some of the best weapons do not shoot."
• The "surge" in Iraq was no surge in US Coalition troops.  The peak number of Coalition troops in Iraq in 2007 was 182,668 in October.  There were more Coalition troops there two years earlier: 183,000 in November and December of 2005.
• As reported by The Times of London in September 2007: "American forces are paying Sunni insurgents hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to switch sides and help them to defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq."

• In April 2008, General Petraeus testified on Iraq to Congress as follows:

A number of factors have contributed to the progress... Another important factor has been the attitudinal shift among certain elements of the Iraqi population.

• In June of 2010, General Petraeus was put in charge of US forces in Afghanistan, reporting to General James Mattis, head of US Central Command.
• In July 2010, General Mattis said this:

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle. I'll tell you, I've slept peaceably among murderers who were on our side. ...If [FDR] can make common cause with Joe Stalin to defeat Hitler, I would think that we can make common cause with people that would annihilate Manhattan if they had half a chance.

• In February 2011, Robert Gates, US Secretary of Defense, said the following to West Point cadets and officers:

But in my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.

• As reported on April 25, 2011, more than 480 Taliban escaped from an Afghan prison.
• On April 25, 2011, The New York Times wrote, "In a striking policy shift, the Afghanistan-Pakistan review appears to embrace the concept of Afghan-led reconciliation with the Taliban."
• On April 28, 2011, President Obama announced that he would nominate General Petraeus as the new head of the CIA.
• On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces in the middle of Pakistan, in a raid that is reported to have involved multiple helicopters, explosions, and gunfire and lasted more than 20 minutes, all within 800 yards of the Pakistan Military Academy.
• On May 16, The Washington Post ran the headline, "US speeds up direct talks with Taliban."

• We are writing off the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, just as Secretary Gates said.  (Libya was an exception, apparently over Gates' objections, and largely to mollify our European allies.)
• That means the Islamists can have at it.  Call it the "new containment."  The "Arab peninsula" will continue to be Arab and Muslim.  What is now Arab and Muslim will continue to be Arab and Muslim, even more so.
• It is going to suck to be Israel (even worse than it has been).  Its one friend, the US, is no longer its friend.
• The US's real mission in all this is: keep Islamists from killing Americans in America.  We are not nation building.  There is no real "war" in Afghanistan.  We are there simply to keep the pressure on Pakistan, which has dozens of nuclear warheads and plenty of anti-American jihadis.
• The enforcement strategy will be "virtually no force": bribes, deals, surgical strikes, and head games.  (If the military is your career, bone up on all that "full spectrum" and "asymmetric" business, when you are not busy integrating openly gay recruits into your unit.)
• Let the "Arab awakening" happen.  For a while, at least, they'll be too busy killing each other to be coming after us.  And maybe when the dust settles, they'll be more realistic about who their real enemies are.