Obama's national security team is looking more like a debate squad, and with good reason: that's Obama's philosophy.
It's not hard to see where Obama would think talking our enemies' ears off will make them stop hating (and thus trying to kill) us. That's what law school is all about. But why am I seeing Woodrow Wilson when I read this:
The shift 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. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Mr. Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops. Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. 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,” one of his senior advisers said recently.
The adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said 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.
And so, the pendulum swings strongly to diplomacy, forgetting that talking endlessly merely gives our enemies time to prepare for battle (or, at least, build a nuclear weapon or two).
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