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Barack Obama with Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton in Chicago on Monday. Behind them are Homeland Security Secretary-designate Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Vice President-elect Joe Biden. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/The Associated Press)As President-elect Barack Obama introduced his national security team on Monday, it included two veteran cold warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish than that of the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.Yet all three of his choices-Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; General James Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert Gates, the current and future defense secretary-have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.The shift 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. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops. Whether they can make the change-one that 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.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.Denis McDonough, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, cast the issue slightly differently in an interview on Sunday."This is not an experiment, but a pragmatic solution to a long-acknowledged problem," he said."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. 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."...
By David E. Sanger
As in the days of Noah...
