Obama’s foreign policy troika

last updated 8 January 2015

It looks like it’s official, said Ted Van Dyk in Crosscut. Hillary Clinton will be Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. She and Obama’s other “core foreign policy/national security appointees”—former NATO commander Gen. James Jones as national security adviser and current Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his same role—could determine “Obama’s fate as president” through their advice and job performance. Luckily, they’re all potentially “good choices.”

Obama’s already getting praise for his “brilliant co-option” of former rival Clinton, said Kimberley Strassel in The Wall Street Journal, but this “surprise pick” will come at a price. She could always “go rogue,” and there’s the Clinton drama and the inevitably “unpleasant side story” of Bill Clinton’s business dealings. She also costs Obama “one of his bigger promises—that of changing American foreign policy.”

“Obama’s change message on national security couldn’t be clearer,” said Taylor Marsh in her blog. Clinton, Gates, and Jones would “be seen as hawkish” in “20th century language,” but they have all reportedly signed on to Obama’s plans to rebalance U.S. foreign policy “away from Bush-Cheney” and toward diplomacy and “prevention instead of preemption.” Now “that would be real change.”