Shake-Ups Won’t Address U.S. Foreign Policy’s Real Problems

Last week’s dramatic recommendation for U.S. President Barack Obama to fire his entire national security team, delivered by Les Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, was eagerly disseminated among Washington’s foreign policy denizens. But while there is continued interest in determining who’s up and who’s down in the president’s inner circle, personnel changes alone would not address all of the concerns Gelb raised. Instead, his criticisms point to some fundamental problems with the U.S. national security class as a whole. The first is that U.S. policymakers who came of age during the brief unipolar moment at […]