The high oil price also strengthened Russia and Venezuela — not that many have noticed. For another casualty of the Iraq war has been America’s ability to think like a global power. Even if we eventually pull out of Iraq altogether, we will have been bogged down in that country for the decade in which China rose to real world-power status, Latin America drifted to the far left and Russia successfully used pipeline politics to divide Europe — all trends that commanded hardly any attention from the Bush administration and even less from Obama.

Finally, there are few domestic items that are often overlooked. One in particular worries me: America’s ability to care for its wounded veterans. In historical terms, the number of U.S. fatalities in Iraq has been low — some 4,400, compared with nearly 60,000 in Vietnam. But thanks in part to extraordinary advances in medical technology, the number of severely wounded veterans — men and women who will need the highest level of medical and psychological care for the rest of their lives — is far higher than ever before. We need innovative programs — programs such as Musicorps, which I described last year — but high levels of bureaucratic energy are required to create and fund them. And the bureaucracy is understandably tired.