Hawks into doves? Obama’s foreign policy team

For a while, people scoffed at Barack Obama’s run for the presidency, writing him off as a naïve idealist who could never make it halfway through the primaries, let alone into the Oval Office. His rival Hillary Clinton criticized his foreign policy suggestions as simplistic and even dangerous.

Yet over and over again, Obama has overcome obstacles with what seems to be an inner talent for realpolitik that could impress even the likes of Bismarck. Unlike Bismarck though, Obama seems determined to shape the future of the U.S. not through war, but through diplomacy.

So his foreign policy team at first seems to be an odd bunch for Obama to choose to enact his plans. His former rival, the one who chided him on the trail for being inexperienced and naïve, and perhaps lost her bid for the presidency because of her hawkishness on Iraq, is now his Secretary of State. He’s retaining the Defense Secretary of the current administration, the one he so often harshly criticized at rallies. And his national security adviser is a retired general who has worked for both parties.

At first, peaceniks like me had our hackles raised by these choices.

We’d campaigned against Hillary Clinton primarily because of her foreign policy differences with Obama, and as Yglesias noted, there were indeed substantive differences. And keeping Bush’s defense secretary? We’d rather have Sarah Palin in charge of energy policy.

But yet the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. The bloated defense budget (57% of discretionary spending!) has been begging for cuts for a while now. Barney Frank has been one of the few willing to say it out loud, and Bill Richardson had proposals when he was still running for president. But as noted in the New York Times earlier this week, Obama’s hawkish national security team has actually quietly embraced plans to shift emphasis to diplomacy.

Robert Gates, former CIA chief and Bush’s replacement for widely hated Donald Rumsfeld, has spoken out publicly about the need for diplomacy to counterbalance military power. General James L. Jones, Obama’s choice for national security adviser, has issued vocal critiques of American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it’s quite easy to picture Hillary Clinton’s preference for military action over diplomacy fading when she’s the one in charge of the diplomacy.

These three will provide bipartisan consensus for Obama’s foreign policy, and protect him from the same old argument that he’s simply naïve and leaving America vulnerable to attack. It’s far too early to say if he’ll actually propose cutting the defense budget to shift funds to the State department, or if that will prove too difficult even with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but the more I consider his foreign policy team, the more I realize that once again, Barack Obama is one step ahead of me.

Gates, Jones, and especially Clinton are hardly weak and easily controlled. They’ve all got years of experience and opinions that won’t simply fade into the background in the face of a pretty speech from Obama or even a dead fish from Rahm Emanuel. Yet there are clear signs that they, like Obama, are pragmatists, not ideologues, and that’s something we can appreciate after years of ideologically-driven foreign policy that does not bend in the face of overwhelming evidence. And for Obama to choose them is a sign not that he’s shifting his policy, but that he has faith in his own ability to set that policy and have people adhere to it.

If Obama can pull off a massive priority shift in foreign policy without handing hawkish Republicans weapons to use on the campaign trail, this is the kind of team he’ll need to do it. And if he does, he’ll prove that he’s a far cannier, more skilled politician than any of us thought possible.

But it won’t be the first time he’s blown our expectations out of the water. So really, will we be surprised?