Why Obama Sees Hillary As "A Big Potential Asset At State" (Emptywheel)

[kpete]

Soft Power
By: emptywheel Monday December 1, 2008 6:42 am

A long overdue shift in emphasis in our foreign policy, emphasizing the State Department and soft power over DOD and military power

That appears to be the plan:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/us/politics/01policy.html?_r=2&hp
Yet all three of his choices — Senator 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 — have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.

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.

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See, especially, this nadezhda comment.

Both Gates and Zinni represent the adults who have moved beyond the fighting-the-Cold-War mentality that has dominated so much of the service thinking and acquisition programs. They acknowledge the tension between (1) the need to expand the skill set of the military — with a much greater emphasis on the whole bundle of non-conventional missions (COIN, peacemaking/keeping, stability ops, what used to be called MOOW or missions other than war or in Iraq post-combat operations for which there was no plan) — while (2) how, due to Rummy’s power grabs and the vacuum of resources anywhere else in the USGov, every new urgent task seems to fall on the military because they’re the only ones prepared to take on new jobs. Zinni, in both The Mission and his own memoirs, highlighted that as a core problem — how to transform the capabilities (and mentalities) of the military to meet new challenges while reducing the over-militarization of our foreign policy. Though he prided himself in the quality of his personal performance as a proconsul, he was decidedly worried about the fact that he felt it necessary to play the role of a proconsul.

Similarly, Gates has, unusually for a Sec’y Defense, begun to speak regularly on the need to beef up State’s budgets, capacities and roles — what’s become the new mantra in the foreign policy think tank community of the 3Ds, increasing capacity and improving balance between defense, diplomacy and development. Interagency jointness will become increasingly necessary for DoD for both budgetary and effectiveness reasons. But without significant expansion of capacity outside DoD it will remain little more than talk, because DoD can’t do jointness if there’s no capacity in other agencies or departments for DoD to rely on or hand off responsibilities to. And DoD won’t stop taking on tasks that need to be done if nobody else steps up, just because the org chart says it’s somebody else’s job.

I see a huge opportunity for Hillary, partnering with someone like Gates at DoD, to start to rectify that imbalance and put diplomacy and development back on the map. Gates has already started to make the case publicly. And she’s got the star power and credibility to sell a restructuring and expansion program to the Congressional committees and Congress more generally.

She’s not reknown for her organizational or management talents — either in theory or practice — and her personal attention is going to be consumed mostly with repositioning the US relationships abroad. So she’d need an extremely good senior person assigned to the Chief Operating Officer (and reform program leader) position. But it’s a big opportunity for Obama to set a new direction for national security that includes more than the traditional defense obsessions, and one of the reasons why I have assumed Obama sees her as a big potential asset at State.

more here:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2008/11/24/about-that-hillary-as-secretary-of-state-thing/#comment-116120
and:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2008/12/01/soft-power/

[Muttocracy]

1. I like it being called "smart power" rather than "soft power" :)

[LostinVA]

2. Good article -- thanks for posting

A bit more "iron fist in a velvet glove" and parleying rather than clubbing everyone else over the head.