A theme of President Barack Obama's counterterrorism policy has been a relentless narrowing of focus. Under his watch the United States has not been at war with terror or radical Islam. It has been in discrete conflicts with al-Qaida's core leadership and its affiliate in Yemen and the Islamic State group. And while Obama's war has waxed and waned, he has never explained its disparate parts as a whole the way his predecessor did.
Michael Flynn, who served as Obama's second Defense Intelligence Agency director, takes the opposite view. "Field of Fight," a new book Flynn co-wrote with historian Michael Ledeen, argues that America is up against a global alliance between radical jihadis and anti-American nation states like Russia, Cuba and North Korea. They say this war will last at least a generation. And they say it will require outside ground forces to go after al-Qaida and the Islamic State as well as a sustained information campaign to discredit the ideology of radical Islam.
One might think a big war is a quaint throwback to the era after 9/11 when President George W. Bush delivered his speech about the "axis of evil." But Flynn is very much a man of the moment. Over the weekend, The Washington Post reported this former special operations officer and three-star general was Donald Trump's leading choice for vice president. At the very least he has the real-estate mogul's ear when it comes to national security.