Obama bets on diplomacy

The president-elect is building a team that would use 'soft power' to prevent conflicts

WASHINGTON -- When President-elect Barack Obama introduces his national security team today, it will include two veteran Cold Warriors and a political rival who are all more hawkish than the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.

Yet all three of his choices -- Sen. 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 -- were selected in large part because they have embraced a sweeping shift of resources in the national security arena.

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.

Obama's advisers say they are already bracing themselves for the charge from the right that he is investing in social work rather than counterterrorism, even though President Bush repeatedly promised such a shift, starting in a series of speeches in late 2005.

But they also expect battles within the Democratic Party over questions like whether the $1 billion dollars in aid to rebuild Afghanistan that Obama promised during the campaign should now be spent on job-creation projects at home.

The holdover

Obama's best political cover might 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, he 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 a few months earlier 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."

A pragmatic solution

Obama's choice for national security adviser, Jones, took the critique a step further in a searing report this year about what he called the Bush administration's failed strategy in Afghanistan, where Obama has vowed to ramp up the fight as U.S. troops depart from Iraq. When the report came out, Jones, the former Marine commandant and commander of U.S. forces in Europe, was widely quoted as saying, "Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan."

Jones went on to describe why: After nearly seven years of fighting, the U.S. and its allies 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.

Several times during his presidency, Bush promised to alter that strategy, even creating a "civilian reserve corps" of nation-builders under State Department auspices, but the administration never committed serious funds or personnel to the effort. If Obama and his team can bring about that kind of shift, it could mark one of the most significant changes in national security strategy in decades and greatly enhance the powers of Clinton as secretary of state.