The winding down of these wars — Iraq by Christmas, Afghanistan tentatively by the end of 2013 — will end a traumatic period that saw American military forces do many of the things policymakers had foresworn after Vietnam.
Yet for all the focus on those drawdowns, the larger strategic change underway is taking place in Europe, where American troops have been stationed in large numbers since World War II. Afghanistan and Iraq, after all, were never meant to be long-term commitments, and while that thinking proved disastrously optimistic, the decade of war in Afghanistan — and two in Iraq, if one draws the timeline back to the 1991 Gulf War — pales next to an American presence on the European continent dating to D-Day, June 4, 1944.
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