Some future Thucydides will surely point to the Aug. 28, 2014 declaration by President Obama that, “We don’t have a strategy yet,” as some sort of significant point in the long war of the West against Islamist extremism. A low point? The beginning of the end? The collapse of coherence? Who knows. But to not have strategy for a war with Islamist extremism 13 years into it is, well, what we lawyers call “an admission against interest.”

“Islamist extremism” is what British Prime Minister David Cameron announced as the common enemy the day after his lassitudinous counterpart in the tan suit across the Atlantic meandered from topic to topic. And Cameron said far more about *ISIS. He bluntly declared the enemy did not arise as a consequence of the Iraq War, that it existed even before the Sept. 11 attacks, that it was not the product of poverty, and was “not some foreign conflict thousands of miles away that we can hope to ignore.” Focused and specific — everything Obama was not — Cameron went on to lay out Great Britain‘s strategy.