By IRNA,
New York : 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; General James Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert 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.
Analysts familiar with Obama say 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 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.
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.
Obama’s best political cover may come from Gates, the former Central Intelligence Agency director and veteran of the cold war, who just months ago said it was hard to imagine any circumstance in which he would stay in his post at the Pentagon. Now he will do exactly that.
A year ago, to studied silence from the Bush White House, 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 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.”
Obama’s choice for national security adviser, Jones, took the critique a step further in a searing report this year on what he called the Bush administration’s failed strategy in Afghanistan, where Obama has vowed to intensify the fight as American troops depart from Iraq.
When the report came out, Jones was widely quoted as saying, “Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan,” a comment that directly contradicted the White House.
But he went on to describe why the United States and its allies were not winning: After nearly seven years of fighting, they had failed to develop a strategy that could dependably bring reconstruction projects and other assistance into areas from which the Taliban had been routed – making each victory a temporary one, reversed as soon as the forces departed.