Adrian Hamilton: Hillary would be Obama's first mistake

For those who hoped that Barack Obama would change the world and America's role in it, the reports of his likely candidates for the top foreign policy jobs must come as an awful disappointment. Robert Gates continuing as Defense Secretary, General James Jones as National Security Adviser and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State – these are not names to conjure up the promise of change or renewal.

Nor, to be fair, are they meant to be. Liberal revolution is not the game that this President-elect is pursuing, particularly in foreign affairs. That was always the mistake made by Obama's many supporters in the world at large. Instead the pattern that has emerged in all his appointments so far, from his own staff to the economic postings this week, has been of weight and effectiveness over youth and novelty. And in its own way it has been impressive.

Where Jimmy Carter hobbled himself by appointing too many fresh faces from outside the Washington circle who simply failed ever to get their plans implemented and Bill Clinton threw away his early opportunities by taking too long to make his choices in the months between election and taking over, Barack Obama has moved with admirable speed and determination.

All the jobs announced so far have been given to people of considerable experience within the political system, some from the old Bush administration days, many from the Clinton era and a few (surprisingly few, in fact) from the President-elect's days in Chicago. And, as important as experience, has been their ability to work across party and sectional lines.

Much has been made of Obama's reading up of Abraham Lincoln's formation of a cabinet of all the talents, including his opponents. Much has also been made of his interest in the first hundred days of the first presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt. But I suspect that the lesson he learnt from these historic examples was of the need for a president to get things moving immediately on taking office and to use weight and purpose from whatever sources are there to do it. Nor for him the gesture politics of Gordon Brown's efforts to recruit widely on finally becoming Prime Minister. Obama wants doers and pragmatists, not idealists.

In that sense his appointments to foreign affairs are very much of a piece with his allocations of the economic, health and judicial posts. Gates, although a Bush appointment at Defence, is held on both sides of the House to be centrist and competent, a man who has restored the Pentagon's standing after the wild years of Donald Rumsfeld. General Jones, a former marine who was not afraid to air his differences with George Bush, is a former head of Nato and therefore held able to get the Europeans back together with Washington.

It is the appointment of Hillary Clinton, generally expected within the next week (it would be a huge blow to Obama's prestige now if it did not go through) that is at once the most dramatic and the most worrying. The political attraction of getting the former first lady on board are obvious. In one stroke Obama would be seen to be finally healing the divisions of the primary race and gain the approval of the Clinton loyalists who have never warmed to him, even if most seem to have finally voted for him. Her qualifications for the job are indisputable. She's extremely clever, knows the world well and is well known by much of the world. Even aside from the iconography, Obama does appear to believe genuinely that she has the qualities he admires and that they can work together.

And yet the Obama camp, and the US at large, tends to exaggerate the extent to which a new face as such, however well known and admired, is all the world wants to wipe away the memory of George Bush and make America admired and loved again. It will certainly help. But the problem of Bush and Dick Cheney's Manichean policy of confrontation and intervention is not going to be erased by a change of personalities or even a withdrawal from confrontation. It is going to need a whole new approach to the Middle East and the way Washington defines its role in the new world of resurgent Islam, growing regionalisation of politics and waning American prestige and economic clout. Circumstances have changed and the balance of power altered out of all recognition since Bush came to power and Clinton left it.

The trouble with Hillary is that she comes with all the baggage of that Clinton era – the reach to express US predominance in the post-Cold War, the reshaping of Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, the re-ordering of alliances in Asia in favour of India against Pakistan and China against its neighbours and the attempt to reach a Middle East peace balanced in favour of Israel. None of them really worked and none of them are relevant to today's conditions. And yet not only is Hillary Clinton still locked in the Clinton past and the backward-looking Clinton advisers such as Dennis Ross on the Middle East and Madeleine Albright on Europe and Russia but also Obama himself who leaned their way once the primaries were over.

The only element that Hillary Clinton added in her time as New York Senator was a progressively more and more openly pro-Zionist stance, while the major swerve in Obama's foreign policy statements during the presidential election was to become more overt in his support of the Israeli government. That is the way American politics work, of course. Obama is nothing if he is not a politician who knows (as FDR did) the penalties of pulling against public opinion, be it on Georgia, Iran, Afghanistan or Jerusalem.

That does not mean the Obama presidency won't see change. Obama means to undo the harm of Bush and for that he is prepared to talk to Iran and step back from intervention. He also has, I think, that most valuable of all qualities in a leader: judgement. When it comes to individual decisions, his instinct are, like John F Kennedy's, sane and sympathetic. If he has no over-arching vision of the world, that may be no bad thing after the experience of his predecessor. It will be out of the particular that his general view of the world will develop. Only, if that is the case, he's choosing the wrong Secretary of State to help him.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

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