Soft power:

President-elect Barack Obama kept Robert Gates on as Defence secretary in part because both agree on the need for better US diplomacy abroad. But Gates also runs a vast, powerful, well-funded bureaucracy, and his plans for it should be closely examined. The Pentagon’s new National Defence Strategy, which Gates describes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, provides a window into the secretary’s thinking.

Gates identifies balance as the “defining principle” of the new strategy, and it is balanced — up to a point. Some elements of Gates’s prescription for national defence offer a badly needed corrective to Donald Rumsfeld’s fixation on high-tech weapons systems. Gates is rightly sceptical about any war being easy or quick.

Gates sees the value of soft power. He recognises the need to strengthen the State Department and the US Agency for International Development.

Yet he is too willing to accept the premise that Americans will have to get involved in counterinsurgency wars wherever extremists threaten moderates or failing states. This is a prescription for an endless cycle of just the kinds of conflicts in which Osama bin Laden and his ilk hope to entangle the United States. Gates may have the responsibility to plan for such wars. It will be Obama’s responsibility to steer clear of those wars. — The Boston Globe