WASHINGTON — Two weeks ago, President Obama went before an audience of generals and spies to declare that “all wars must end” and that he could see a day when even the amorphous struggle with terrorists would essentially come to a close.

But that day is clearly not here.

The disclosure of the government’s vast surveillance of American telephone records and foreigners’ e-mail and other Internet communications on Thursday served as a potent reminder that Mr. Obama continues to deploy many of the national security tools he inherited from his predecessor even as he seeks to turn the corner in the way the United States responds to terrorism.

Whatever his ambivalence about what President George W. Bush called a global war, Mr. Obama has used some of the same aggressive powers in the name of guarding national security even, in the view of critics, at the expense of civil liberties. Rather than dismantling Mr. Bush’s approach to national security, Mr. Obama has to some extent validated it and put it on a more sustainable footing.

The altered landscape of terrorism politics a dozen years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was illustrated by the reaction to a report in The Guardian on the government’s highly classified program. On the one side were Mr. Obama and, in effect, although he made no public comment, Mr. Bush, as well as the establishment leaders of both parties. On the other was a collection of critics from the right and left, an amalgamation that brought the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tea Party-affiliated Freedom Works into the same camp.