I see Robert Gates as Obama’s most enlightened appointment. Here is why:
In conflict management and resolution, whether the conflicts be wars or disagreements over defense policy or education reform, the relationship between the person who brings the conflict to an end and their opposition is often more important than their relationship to their own constituency.
Possibly the most extreme historical example of this is Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein (the political arm of the Irish Republican Army) and the de facto leader of the IRA. Among other violent acts Gerry Adams helped organize the “Bloody Friday” response bombings to the “Bloody Sunday” protester shootings made famous in U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday. Despite his radical views (from the British perspective) on the necessity of violence he ended up being the one to successfully sell the peace to the IRA and their constituents. Paradoxically this man of war succeeded in creating a lasting peace and it was his credibility with the IRA, not with the British Government, that allowed him to do that.
I see this principle running through many of Obama’s appointments, most of all evidenced by his appointment of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. I think this principle will allow Gates, a very credible seemingly non-partisan pragmatist (see his recent piece in Foreign Affairs titled “A Balanced Strategy”), to be successful in selling Obama’s foreign policy agenda to a conservative defense apparatus. How will conservatives buck the very guy they themselves chose?
This principle certainly has its limits. Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld would have been terrible choices. You must agree on a certain level (Gerry Adams wanted peace at a base level after all) as Obama and Gates do on the need to close Guantanamo Bay and the central location of the war on terror, Afghanistan.
That said though you may still be asking, “why appease conservatives with someone they like when we have 80% approval ratings and more political capital than we have seen since Kennedy?” As I mentioned in a previous piece (see Bush, Business School, and Bad Decisions) the Presidents role is a managerial one. Obama gets to give orders from 10,000 feet but how they are carried out depends on the people he is delegating too. If his appointments have credibility in their own organizations as Robert Gates certainly does they will be more successful in carrying out his foreign policy agenda.
I am too hopeful to choose a bad pick. I’ll wait until January 21st for that.
-- Ottavio Siani
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