12:09 am
Obama’s Foreign Policy: Turning the Supertanker
The NYT is reporting that President-elect Obama picked his three key national security advisors because they share his view that we need a fundamental shift in the direction of U.S. foreign policy:
[A]ll three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — were selected in large part because they have embraced a sweeping shift of resources in the national security arena.
The shift, which would come partly out of the military’s huge budget, would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states.
Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.
But the adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the three have all embraced “a rebalancing of America’s national security portfolio” after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years.
Mr. Obama’s advisers said they were already bracing themselves for the charge from the right that he is investing in social work rather than counterterrorism, even though President Bush repeatedly promised such a shift, starting in a series of speeches in late 2005. But they also expect battles within the Democratic Party over questions like whether the billion dollars in aid to rebuild Afghanistan that Mr. Obama promised during the campaign should now be spent on job-creation projects at home. . . .
“This is not an experiment, but a pragmatic solution to a long-acknowledged problem,” Denis McDonough, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, said in an interview on Sunday.
“During the campaign the then-senator invested a lot of time reaching out to retired military and also younger officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to draw on lessons learned,” Mr. McDonough said. “There wasn’t a meeting that didn’t include a discussion of the need to strengthen and integrate the other tools of national power to succeed against unconventional threats. It is critical to a long-term successful and sustainable national security strategy in the 21st century.”
This is nothing less than a revolutionary change in how the United States thinks about and interacts with the rest of the world. Obama’s vision, as I’ve noted before, is both pragmatic and idealistic: he sees the United States as both a leader and a model, but also recognizes that it cannot be that without the necessary resources:
[A]n Obama administration is likely to pursue a foreign policy based on sound strategic principles and coherent tactics. Realism should trump ideology, and principles should trump interests. Call it pragmatic idealism, if you must apply a label.
In addition, an Obama administration will repair America’s disastrously dysfunctional foreign policy apparatus: providing the State Department with the resources it needs; streamlining foreign assistance; reestablishing a robust and proactive public diplomacy; and clarifying the overlapping roles of State, NSC, Defense, and Homeland Security. It will emphasize both innovation and results, rewarding creativity and encouraging critical thinking.
As the Times notes, both Jones and Gates have gone out of their way to speak out for these kinds of changes. Clinton doesn’t have a similar track record, but I would be very surprised were she not to share their views.
But make no mistake: this will not be an easy task. The military-industrial complex and its allies in Congress will resist any attempt to redirect resources away from DOD (in fact, they’re already trying). Reform of the rest of the national security apparatus — particularly State, USAID, and DHS — will take considerable time and nearly infinite patience. Reestablishing some sort of public diplomacy capacity with the personnel, resources, and independence necessary to accomplish an extraordinarily difficult mission will take even longer.
This is an enormous undertaking. To use a popular cliché, Obama is trying to turn a supertanker, and that will take time. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.
One last observation: if the NYT story is correct, Hillary’s move makes a lot more sense than it did before. Obama is tasking her with nothing less than a total overhaul of the way the United States conducts foreign policy — the first such effort since Harry Truman tasked George Marshall and Dean Acheson to modernize American national security policy in the aftermath of the Second World War.
If she pulls it off, she’ll go down in history, along with Madison, Monroe, Seward, Marshall and Acheson, as one of the greatest Secretaries of State in American history. And in the process, she just might lay the groundwork for a future Presidential run — and do it with a record of accomplishment that she could not have matched had she spent the next eight years in the Senate.
This is going to be fun to watch.