Every few years the National Intelligence Council has produced a document it calls serially Global Trends [fill in the future year]. The latest edition, out just in time for Barack Obama's second term, is Global Trends 2030.

If you chose to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," you never had a doubt that you could also turn off, tune out, drop back in, and get a job -- a good job -- any time you wanted. It's not a feeling the young would recognize now.

Barack Obama arrived in Washington in 2009 buoyed by the slogan "change we can believe in." The bitter Hagel hearings will be a fierce reminder that, when it comes to foreign policy, old is new, and the words "change" and "Washington" don't belong in the same sentence.