Obama Picking Hawks

One of the paradoxes of the Obama administration so far is the picking of 'hawks' for his three key foreign policy positions: State, NSC, and Defense. How could a liberal President do this?

Well, for one thing, it's easier to make moves toward peace from a position of strength. (Think Nixon going to China.) Also, what is now clear is how much the 'hawks' he has chosen are also reformers, who have been criticizing the use of military power as our sole foreign policy tool and who have recommended a return to the substantial use of 'soft power', including diplomacy and foreign aid. Finally, he preempts criticism from the right by having foreign policy hawks whom conservatives will find difficult to criticize for their dovish views.

Read the following excerpt from an article in the New York Times this morning:

When President-elect Barack Obama introduces his national security team on Monday, it will include 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; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. 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....

A year ago, to studied silence from the Bush White House, Mr. Gates began giving a series of speeches about the limits of military power in wars in which no military victory is possible. He made popular the statistic, quoted by Mr. Obama, that the United States has more members of military marching bands than foreign service officers.

He also denounced “the gutting of America’s ability to engage, assist and communicate with other parts of the world — the ‘soft power’ which had been so important throughout the cold war.” He blamed both the Clinton and Bush administrations and said later in an interview that “it is almost like we forgot everything we learned in Vietnam.”