"Where there is no vision," the Hebrew Bible tells us, "the people perish." There's no use pretending: if there's one thing the Obama administration most definitely has not got and has never had, it's a foreign policy vision.
In Search of Truly Wise (White) Men -- Only Those 84 or Older Need Apply
All of this evokes a sense of unease, even consternation bordering on panic, in circles where members of the foreign policy elite congregate. Absent visionary leadership in Washington, they have persuaded themselves, we're all going down. So the world's sole superpower and self-anointed global leader needs to get game -- and fast.
Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently weighed in with a proposal for fixing the problem: clean house. Obama has surrounded himself with fumbling incompetents, Gelb charges. Get rid of them and bring in the visionaries.
Writing at the Daily Beast, Gelb urges the president to fire his entire national security team and replace them with "strong and strategic people of proven foreign policy experience." Translation: the sort of people who sip sherry and nibble on brie in the august precincts of the Council of Foreign Relations. In addition to offering his own slate of nominees, including several veterans of the storied George W. Bush administration, Gelb suggests that Obama consult regularly with Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and James Baker. These distinguished war-horses range in age from 84 to 91. By implication, only white males born prior to World War II are eligible for induction into the ranks of the Truly Wise Men.
Anyway, Gelb emphasizes, Obama needs to get on with it. With the planet awash in challenges that "imperil our very survival," there is simply no time to waste.
At best, Gelb's got it half right. When it comes to foreign policy, this president has indeed demonstrated a knack for surrounding himself with lackluster lieutenants. That statement applies equally to national security adviser Susan Rice (and her predecessor), to Secretary of State Kerry (and his predecessor), and to outgoing Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel. Ashton Carter, the technocrat slated to replace Hagel as defense secretary, comes from the same mold.
They are all "seasoned" -- in Washington, a euphemism for bland, conventional, and utterly unimaginative -- charter members of the Rogers-Christopher school of American statecraft. (That may require some unpacking, so pretend you're on Jeopardy. Alex Trebek: "Two eminently forgettable and completely forgotten twentieth-century secretaries of state." You, hitting the buzzer: "Who were William Rogers and Warren Christopher?" "Correct!")
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