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With a rhetorical flourish, President Obama last week drew to a close an era of war. The President's speech on Afghanistan attracted attention, but not as much as it should have done, given its historical moment.

Twenty years ago this summer, Communism collapsed with the failed coup in Russia and the final lowering of the hammer and sickle over the Kremlin in December 1991. That ushered in, courtesy of Francis Fukuyama, the declaration of the "end of history" and the start of the hegemony of the single superpower: one ideology reinforced by values and, just in case anybody didn't quite get it, by military power too.