A theme of President Barack Obama's counterterrorism policy has been a relentless narrowing of focus. Under his watch the U.S. has not been at war with terror or radical Islam. It has been in discrete conflicts with al Qaeda's core leadership and its affiliate in Yemen and the Islamic State. 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 Qaeda and the Islamic State as well as a sustained information campaign to discredit the ideology of radical Islam.
