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By Jim Hoagland
Published on Sunday, Nov 09, 2008
WASHINGTON: Blunt and pugnacious will soon give way to elegant and stealthy. Say goodbye to the Bush era in foreign policy, and hello to the Obama moment.
Prepare for bluster about enemies to become nuance about not-yet-friends; for ideology to cede to empirical practice; for co-opting to overtake confronting as a first resort. And prepare to be surprised by things coming together unexpectedly as well as falling apart.
The new ways in which the White House will address the world after Jan. 20 have been forecast by the campaign themes developed for two years by Barack Obama. But more important, the changes are already present in the quiet presidential transition effort that has been under way in earnest for a month.
The president-elect has been given little credit for his back-channeling prowess — which could show how good he is at it. He prepares carefully, keeps his own counsel to an extraordinary degree and then acts without the impulsiveness of George W. Bush, the post-decision agonizing of Bill Clinton or the consistent vacillation of Jimmy Carter. Examples:
• Late last spring, Obama settled on Joe Biden as his most important counselor on foreign affairs. The two conferred quietly in the shadows of the extended primary campaign, forging the confident relationship that led to Biden becoming vice president-elect and having a major voice in Obama's future foreign policy.
• There has been a greater meeting of minds on Iraq and Afghanistan between Obama and Gen. David Petraeus than either has publicized, and it has been deepened by continuing indirect contacts since they met in Baghdad in July. It came as no surprise to key Obama aides when Pentagon officials said one day after the election that Petraeus had decided to accelerate the withdrawal of a combat brigade from Iraq by six weeks.
• Both the Obama and McCain campaigns have had transition teams actively working at the Treasury Department for about a month. This is in addition to the involvement in the administration's current decisions by Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
(It also may not hurt Geithner's chances to become Treasury secretary that he is 47, the same age as the president-elect; Obama's arrival at the White House heralds an implicit generational transformation in politics that has been overshadowed by the publicity about the national transformation in race relations.)
Obama has made no secret that Iraq and Afghanistan form his two most urgent priorities in foreign policy. Iran is third on the list, according to one knowledgeable aide, while climate change and the Middle East peace process rank as important but too difficult or diffuse to address effectively right away.
But Iraq also shows how subtly the president-elect can shift ground. Several times in the past two months — including in his first debate with John McCain — Obama spoke of ''reducing'' combat troops in Iraq rather than ''withdrawing'' all of them, as he had insisted on in the primary season. And in the campaign's closing weeks, he increasingly portrayed the need to wind down the Iraq war as a budgetary and resource issue rather than a moral one.
That shift gives him — and Petraeus, as head of Central Command — greater flexibility to tailor withdrawals and move toward making Iraq a garrison staging area for Afghanistan, as circumstances permit. Obama seems to be looking for room to avoid an unrealistically tight 16-month withdrawal schedule.
So while the formal transition process at the Pentagon is not as advanced as at Treasury and the White House, important conceptual groundwork is already being laid there. And it helps that the Defense Policy Board, which is developing detailed transition scenarios on five basic issues, is chaired by John Hamre, deputy defense secretary under Clinton and a plausible successor to Bob Gates.
The Great Mentioning game that grips Washington after every presidential election is in full swing, with Jim Steinberg being mentioned repeatedly for national security adviser, John Kerry supposedly having first call on secretary of state, and Richard Danzig, Greg Craig and Susan Rice, among others, sure to land top jobs.
Samantha Power, forced to resign over a campaign gaffe, will be rehabilitated politically. Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar will be the Republicans in the Cabinet, and in the most uplifting rumor of all, Colin Powell becomes secretary of education.
Given Obama's skill at keeping prying newsies out of his business during the campaign, you should take these reports seriously. After all, it is possible they may even turn out to be true.
Hoagland is a Washington Post columnist. He can be e-mailed at jimhoagland@washpost.com.
WASHINGTON: Blunt and pugnacious will soon give way to elegant and stealthy. Say goodbye to the Bush era in foreign policy, and hello to the Obama moment.
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Posted 09:49 AM, 11/09/2008
Obama is a typical radical left winger and will staff the white house with like thinking left wingers.Nothing will change his far left philosophy of politics.
