Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, General James L. Jones, and Robert M.

By DAVID E. SANGER


Obama’s nominees
understand the need to
balance arms and aid.


WASHINGTON - When President- elect Barack Obama introduced his national security team on December 1, it included two veteran cold warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish than that of the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.

Yet all three of his choices - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; General 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. Whether they can make the change “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 , said the three had all embraced “a rebalancing of America’s national security portfolio” after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years.

Denis McDonough, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, cast the issue slightly differently in an interview.

“This is not an experiment, but a pragmatic solution to a longacknowledged problem,”he said.“During the campaign the thensenator invested a lot of time reaching out to retired military and also younger officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to draw on lessons learned. There wasn’t a meeting that didn’t include a discussion of the need to strengthen and integrate the other tools of national power to succeed against unconventional threats. It is critical to a longterm successful and sustainable national security strategy in the 21st century.”

Mr.Obama’s advisers said they were already bracing themselves for the charge from the right that he is investing in social work, 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 billion dollars in aid to rebuild Afghanistan that Mr.Obama promised during the campaign should now be spent on job-creation projects at home.

Mr.Obama’s best political defense may come from Mr.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, Mr.
Gates began giving a series of speeches about the limits of military power in wars in which no military victory is possible.
He 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.”

Several times during his presidency, Mr.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 Mr.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 Mrs.Clinton as secretary of state.

Mrs.Clinton may find, as her predecessor Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration discovered, that building up civilian capacity is easier to advocate than execute.

Mr.Obama has pledged to make diplomacy a high priority.“Instead of shuttering consulates, we need to open them in the tough and hopeless corners of the world,” he said.

During the campaign, Mr.Obama promised to double overall American aid - to $50 billion - by 2012. In recent months he has begun to lengthen that timetable, citing the financial crisis.

One of the biggest questions, though, will be whether the money to expand this civilian capability comes out of the Pentagon budget.

Mr.Gates has noted that when Admiral Mike Mullen was chief of naval operations, “he once said he’d hand a part of his budget to the State Department ‘in a heartbeat’ assuming it was spent in the right place.”Admiral Mullen is now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he met Mr.Obama last month for their first lengthy discussion of priorities. It was not clear if he was asked to give up part of his budget.