OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

Last week the State Department's top lawyer, Brian Egan, gave an important but underreported speech that marked the final stage of the Obama administration's normalization of once-controversial Bush-era doctrines about the conduct of war. Before a gathering of geeky international law-loving lawyers in Washington, D.C., Egan announced the Obama administration's official embrace of the same preemption doctrine that justified the invasion of Iraq.

Egan's speech marks the culmination of a continuity project that began, to many people's surprise, at the beginning of Barack Obama's first term. Since 2009, Obama has adopted the notion of a global war against al-Qaeda and associates; he expanded the legal basis of that war to include ISIS; he embraced military detention without trial, military commissions, state secrets and large-scale secret surveillance; and he ramped up drone strikes, deployment of Special Forces and cyberattacks.

Until recently, however, the Obama team had stayed away from the doctrine that justified the invasion of Iraq. That doctrine, known as preemption, is an interpretation of international law rules related to anticipatory self-defense. International law has long permitted nations to deploy force in self-defense in the face of an "imminent" attack from another nation. The George W. Bush innovation was "to adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries," in the words of the National Security Strategy of 2003. "The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction--and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack."

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