Roads for Kentucky instead of Kabul: With the U.S. still deep in the economic doldrums, President Barack Obama has begun to shift priorities away from expensive involvement in foreign wars and toward development back home.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has no trouble admitting he's tired of the job he started in late 2006. He helped bring American troops home from Iraq. And though he might feel it's happening too quickly, he also approves the plan to gradually bring U.S. soldiers home from Afghanistan. He has served two masters who couldn't be more different, former President George W. Bush and current President Barack Obama, and yet his reputation remains not only intact, but good. And though he is 67, the job still hasn't worn him out.

So why is he calling it quits? "To tell you the truth," he said in a recent interview with Newsweek, "that's one of the many reasons it's time for me to retire, because frankly I can't imagine being part of a nation, part of a government … that's being forced to dramatically scale back our engagement with the rest of the world."

Gates is retiring on a melancholy note because he believes in his country's historic mandate to make the world a better place. As he sees it, the same thing that happened in Vietnam is now happening in Afghanistan. "We came to the right strategy and the right resources very late in the game," he said. He doesn't, however, say whether he thinks it is now too late for Afghanistan -- or whether the mission could have succeeded at all.

Expensive Dreams

A majority of Americans shares the outgoing defense secretary's ambivalence about Afghanistan. They believe that, in the wake of 9/11, toppling the Taliban regime and hunting down al-Qaeda was the right thing to do. Of course, it was nice to imagine that Afghanistan, a poor country that had disintegrated into tribalism and was in the grip of its warlords, could somehow blossom. But now the war is in its 10th year and is costing $2 billion (€1.4 billion) a week, and the United States is adjusting its priorities to conform with the widely held view that if Washington is to be involved in any reconstruction effort, it ought to be at home in America, where it is urgently needed.