The national security team scheduled to be announced today by President-elect Barack Obama is a serious, pragmatic group of people, and for that reason alone it provides a welcome contrast to the neoconservative radicals brought into power by President Bush.
Hillary Clinton at the State Department; Jim Jones, a retired four-star Marine general, as national security adviser; Robert Gates, a longtime mainstream Republican, remaining at the Department of Defense — they are also a far cry from the Marxist, pacifist, naive radicals that Republicans claimed would come into power with Obama.
Gates, Clinton and Jones come from very different professional backgrounds, but they share an understanding with the president-elect that diplomacy must be our primary means of engaging with the world, with military power held in reserve and used only as needed.
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