The First 100 Days and Threats in the Age of Obama

It is premature for me, given the nature of my chapter, to make a hard and fast judgment yet about where I went right or wrong. I will say that the Obama administration does seem to be taking “moral legitimacy” seriously, as they understand it from their political perspective. Many of President Obama’s gestures in foreign policy, agree or disagree with them, have been designed to recalibrate the global opinion of America’s moral standing as a world leader without costing too much in terms of concessions or cash.

Changing Bush administration policy on Gitmo, “harsh interrogations” and “no negotiations” with adversarial states is an intentional signal that the Obama administration has a different diplomatic posture. On the other hand, the Obama administration has refused to formally sign onto infinitely expensive, utopian, schemes such as Gordon Brown’s “global new deal”. Unlike the Clinton White House in its early days, the administration has also cleverly avoided trying to hand its conservative opponents an outrageous “bright red line” issue like “Gays in the Military” or “Whitewater”, around which Republican activists could galvanize public support and media attention.

What surprised and pleased me is the degree to which the Obama administration has lined up their national security positions behind the leadership of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, embracing the “military reform” and “COIN” factions as their own. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is trying to step up the role of the State Department in shaping policy; this is a long term necessity but State isn’t up to the task without a major cultural and organizational overhaul. If Clinton does not invest the effort early, she will be a “road show Secretary” without the supporting cast to be a success. The NSC, by contrast, is being reorganized to maximize presidential control, perhaps to the point of going overboard with micromanagement, if the Somali pirate incident is a representative example. The only senior figure in the administration who seems both out of political step and out of her depth is the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.

What worries me, naturally, is the political economy aspect and the profound centralization of power over the economy being ushered in by Obama,  that is accumulating in the hands of very few people as the response to the economic crisis. The inevitable ripple effect, if such a concentration of power were to become the new status quo, would be one of stasis and stagnation. A globalized economy is too complex an “ecosystem” for top-down, ad hoc, hierarchical management to be an efficient or adaptive response. A re-focus on the fundamentals of new growth and not just legacy dinosaurs is in order.

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