Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

I don't get it Tom, what do you *possibly* see Clinton bringing to the State Department???

Based on the trouble Russia is having getting its top heavy military bureaucracy to accept modernization suitable to current needs, Gates may become an advisor to Putin's crew.

It happened before. After our Revolutionary War, Russian Czars recruited advisors from both America and Britain. They had two benefits: current experience beyond the old military era, and they were outsiders who would take the blame for modernization irritations, and then go back home.

After the absentee SOS (Rice) and the ignored SOS(Powell), Clinton will bring someone who will demand a role for State. Clinton will bring some balance back to the State/DOD equation. Time to stop outsourcing our foreign policy to the generals, who don't really want it.

Tom,

What do you mean by the "Defense Industry"? Did you mean The building? Most people in the Pentagon are happy that the administration change will be less tumultuous, no?

hof1991: perhaps, but why not another figure who can bring that same level of demand without all the personal agenda? I'd prefer to have a career diplomat in the role of SOS than someone who's unbridled ambition from the beginning of her own career has suggested her highest priorities amount to nothing other than making herself the first woman president.

Agree with hof1991. The military's relationship with Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld was, in the end, far more dysfunctional than the officers care to admit (given their tendency to lean right and assume it's their best outcome politically).

Here's a strange secret: most defense corp execs (and they would admit to me privately), when surveying the McCain-Obama-Clinton field this spring, preferred her. McCain was seen as a desctructive wild card, Obama a blank, but Hillary as somebody they could work with and trust.

You put her at State and keep Gates at DoD and we will have a very solid and productive relationship in comparison to the last 8 years.

And we need that right now, desperately. Obama must work the economy, writ small and large, and yet also unwind the strategic tie-down.

What he cannot afford is bureaucratic drama.

I'm not a betting man, but if Hillary makes it through two years as SOS, I'll be dazzled!

The Clintons have never shown a propensity to be "Team Players" or to be lead . .

I guess we'll see . . .

The trick for her is realizing that this stint will define her historically.

Either she gives it up to that or she's a complete fool, but history really needs some help right now.

I still remember her participation in State Dept. venture to reach out to women in small Russian communities to help them begin small businesses. It was a bottoms up innovation that was needed because the fading male oriented bureaucracy would not venture into such things because they were 'trivial' and not part of a big national or corporate plan. I don't know why that US effort in Russia remains invisible.