Matt Yglesias

Gates and the Pragmatists

As Josh Marshall indicates, you need to understand talk of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary in the broader context of an effort to coopt the pragmatic realist wing of the GOP (for which “Scowcroft” is a good shorthand) and bring it into Obama’s coalition. I wrote my post-election column about this last week.

But here’s the nickle version. What you don’t want to do is “move to the center” on national security issues with Gates on board as a bipartisan token of said centrism. What you want to do is redefine the center away from the neocon / liberal hawk center that dominated public debate in 2002-2005 in favor of a new progressive / realist center that’s prepared to undertake bold regional diplomacy aimed not only at extricating ourselves from Iraq, but also achieving diplomatic breakthroughs with Iran and Syria and making progress on Israel/Palestine issues. There’s some reason — Gates’ 2004 CFR Task Force Report on Iran, the Jim Baker’s call for a “diplomatic surge” in the Baker/Hamilton report, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama, pointed non-endorsements of McCain by Brent Scowcroft and Chuck Hagel, Nick Burns’ Time article on the need to talk with dictators — to believing that forging such a synthesis in a bipartisan way is possible.

But at the same time that I think there’s promise in this approach, on some level it’s just hard for me to assess. Obviously, before appointing anyone to anything you’d want to talk to them and see what they think. But of course Gates isn’t going to take my calls. Perhaps he has terribly wrongheaded views on all sorts of key subjects. But perhaps not. This is the kind of thing the Obama transition team needs to assess and unfortunately there’s not much light that those of us on the outside can really shed on the whole thing.