Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

Chris Bowers of Open Left was on Hardball tonight to discuss Barack Obama’s national security team. Bowers is one of only a handful of prominent progressive bloggers who are concerned (and willing to express their concern) by the rightward tilt of the just announced national security team.

The only unqualified bright spot of today’s foreign policy team announcements is Susan Rice as UN ambassador. Obama has elevated the UN ambassador’s office to the cabinet level so that Rice will have direct access to the President without having to go through the State Department. In her brief remarks today, Susan Rice mentioned the eradication of genocide as one of Obama’s foreign policy priorities. That is very encouraging. Still, the UN ambassador is at best sitting on the far end of the cabinet table, if at all present in Washington.

General Jim Jones as National Security Advisor certainly brings power to the position – but it remains to be seen which direction he drifts and how much control he can exert over Defense and State. My guess is that General Jones is likely to be a National Security Advisor in the mold of Brent Scowcroft. I guess if you are going to tilt right, a Scowcroft type is much better than a Kissinger (or a Condi Rice). However, unlike Scowcroft, Jones does not have the relationship with Obama that Scowcroft had with George H.W. Bush. Obama and Jones will have to develop a relationship fast if they hope to keep Defense and State, especially State, from going off the reservation.

It is also worth noting that Scowcroft’s deputy at the NSC is now Obama’s Secretary of Defense. Maybe we need the foreign policy team of the father to pull out of the mess in Iraq caused by the son.

All in all, it still looks like a foreign policy team a Republican administration would put together – specifically, it looks like a George H.W. Bush foreign policy team.

Where is the token lefty in the top three?

UPDATE: I don’t want to make progressive bloggers’ heads explode, but I should mention that General Jim Jones is on the Board of Directors of Chevron. Chevron is apparently that evil multinational that props up the Burmese junta. We are told by the Daily Kos front page posters that we should boycott Chevron. But, that was then, this is now. Politics indeed makes strange bedfellows.

The Associated Press is reporting that Barack Obama will announce Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State this Monday. ABC News reports that the entire national security team will be announced Monday. ABC News reports on the makeup of the team:

Pending Senate confirmation, the President-elect’s national security team will include: Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who will serve as Secretary of State in his administration; Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano who will be Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; attorney Eric Holder, Attorney General; Retired Marine General Jim Jones, National Security Adviser; retired Adm. Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence; Susan Rice, Ambassador to the United Nations; and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who will stay on in that role for at least a year.

With Jim Jones, Hillary Clinton and Bob Gates in the three most important national security positions, Barack Obama has a foreign policy team that any Republican would approve of. Barack Obama is keeping George W Bush’s Defense Secretary, appointing as his National Security Advisor someone who campaigned with John McCain, and is putting someone at the State Department who has publicly threatened to obliterate Iran. The progressive Left has discovered a new mantra for explaining this apparent shift to the right on foreign policy: it is not the people who Obama appoints that matters, it is the policy that he executes. I hope those making that argument are right. But, it seems to me that if you surround yourself with a team of advisors who are all hawkish, you are liable to get hawkish advice. In the face of such hawkish advice, it seems silly to ignore all of it and chart a foreign policy course that is independent of all the advice you are getting from your advisors.

Let us hope that, in spite of who is manning the fort, Obama somehow manages to take US foreign policy in a direction away from the ditch George W Bush has put us in. Back in May, Obama said this of Clinton’s bluster on Iran:

"It’s not the language we need right now, and I think it’s language reflective of George Bush," Obama told NBC’s "Meet the Press."

Let us hope that our new Secretary of State will heed her President’s advice. Still, I am not encouraged. If Obama’s foreign policy team is some brilliant head fake to give him political cover to break new ground, he sure fooled me.

[Via Politico]

Elizabeth Drew in the New York Review of Books writes about the so called "offer" that Hillary Clinton is now ready to accept:

Obama’s meetings with Hillary Clinton and John McCain about playing important roles in his presidency indicated his imagination and his shrewdness, although sources close to Obama say he did not offer her the job of secretary of state when they met. He had said during the campaign that he wanted various views in his government, and in turning to his own former competitors, Obama was at the same time magnanimous and seeking to keep them close. Both were in a position to cause him difficulty in the Senate—Clinton, in particular, had kept her constituency intact (through HillPAC) and was planning her own Senate agenda, including her own health care program, no matter what Obama proposed. But Clinton lacks the seniority, and therefore a committee position from which to get her proposals taken up by the Senate. (She tried to get a special subcommittee appointed, but Edward M. Kennedy, who has his own health care plan and is chairman of the committee with jurisdiction over the issue, blocked her, offering her later a role concerning health insurance.) McCain had indicated that he wanted to help Obama in the Senate, and by taking him up on it, Obama has both flattered and coopted him.

Mrs. Clinton’s and her closest advisers’ turning a suggestion by the President-elect that she might, among other things, head the State Department into an "offer" and reports that she was agonizing over whether to accept it, did not please officials in Chicago, some of whom hoped that issues over disclosure of Bill Clinton’s post-presidential record might block the appointment. But the former president’s camp blocked that by promising to cooperate with requests for information and to accept limits on his activities, including clearance of speaking engagements abroad. Statements by the Hilary camp on November 21 saying that "she’s ready" for the position but then backtracking, saying that some matters were "under discussion," typified the whole mess, the only snag thus far in an otherwise unusually smooth transition involving impressive choices—an object lesson to Obama (which he had reason to know already) that getting involved with the Clintons is rarely uncomplicated.

The drama has only just begun. If Hillary Clinton has successfully cornered the President-elect into offering her the Secretary of State position, one can only imagine how many of these fun and entertaining dramas we will read and hear about during her tenure at Foggy Bottom.