Meet Obama's Advisers

the council on foreign relations offers an in-depth look at obama's foreign policy, national security and economic advisers.

Obama’s diverse group of foreign policy advisers includes former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, prominent lawyer and State Department veteran Gregory B. Craig, and Africa expert Susan E. Rice. All three held top positions in Bill Clinton’s administration. Like Obama, his advisers are critical of the Bush foreign policy agenda in Iraq and Afghanistan, on Darfur, and with respect to U.S.-Latin America relations, among others.

Obama’s advisers are critical of the Bush foreign policy agenda in Iraq and Afghanistan, on Darfur, and with respect to U.S.-Latin America relations.
Gregory B. Craig, a former Clinton White House aide, served as director of policy planning under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Craig is a partner at the Washington-based Williams & Connolly law firm. Among his most prominent cases was the defense of President Clinton against his impeachment. From 1984 to 1988, Craig served as senior adviser on defense, foreign policy, and national security issues for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA).

In March 2008, Craig criticized the Bush administration for “taking sides” in various Latin American elections. As a result, he said, the United States has become increasingly unpopular in the region. He also criticized President Bush for abandoning former President Clinton’s strategy to work with Latin America “as a whole, rather than to try to take advantage of U.S. negotiating leverage and deal with the region on its trade considerations in bits and pieces.” Above all, Craig faulted the Bush administration for having “ignored” Latin America.

Anthony Lake was a national security adviser to President Clinton and is now a professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Lake served under President Clinton during several major foreign policy crises, including the conflicts in Bosnia and Somalia, among others. Lake advocated keeping a U.S. presence in Somalia even after many voices in the United States called for a withdrawal. In an interview with PBS’ Frontline, Lake said, “I still believe that if we had immediately turned tail in Somalia, there would have been other similar tragedies around the world.”

On the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region, in 2006, Lake, with Susan Rice, urged the United States to “press for a UN resolution that issues Sudan an ultimatum: accept unconditional deployment of the UN force within one week or face military consequences.” In a Washington Post op-ed, Lake and Rice argued that the United States could also intervene in Darfur without UN approval. “The United States acted without UN blessing in 1999 in Kosovo to confront a lesser humanitarian crisis (perhaps 10,000 killed) and a more formidable adversary,” they wrote.

Lake, like Obama’s other top advisers, is critical of the Iraq war. In a January 2007 Boston Globe op-ed, Lake wrote that the civilian leaders of the war effort have failed to understand that “you cannot fix another country’s politics and resolve its internal fractures primarily through military means, coupled with floundering political, economic, and social programs that create as much dependency, corruption, and resentment as progress.”

Lake has said the United States has a “fundamental strategic interest in NATO [North Alantic Treaty Organization] and an expanding NATO that can help bring stability farther and farther East in Europe.”

Susan E. Rice, a Brookings Institution senior fellow for foreign policy, global economy, and development, served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the later years of the Clinton administration.

Rice has been a critic of the war in Iraq and she said in September 2007 that the troop surge is not achieving “its intended and stated objective of giving the Iraqi political factions the space that is necessary to resolve their political differences.”

Rice has also advocated a tougher U.S. response to the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. In 2007, Rice published a position paper (PDF) calling for more stringent economic sanctions on Sudan and for Congress to authorize the use of force to end the crisis, among other recommendations. In 2005, Rice urged the United States and international groups like NATO and the African Union to “embrace an emerging international norm that recognizes the ‘responsibility to protect’ innocent civilians facing death on a mass scale and whose governments cannot or will not protect them.”

Rice also categorizes global poverty as a factor in U.S. national security. In 2006, Rice warned in The National Interest that poverty “dramatically increases the risk of civil conflict” (PDF) and “prevents poor countries from devoting sufficient resources to detect and contain deadly disease.” Rice has repeatedly said the Bush administration should devote up to 0.7 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, a target set as part of the UN’s Millenium Development Project, to overseas development assistance by 2015.

hillary clinton's advisers
john mccain's advisers

Obama's Foreign Policy Brain Trust

american prospect: What proves to be a more reliable indicator of presidential behavior is a candidate's roster of advisers. (If the press had paid better attention, the country would have seen through Bush's pitch about a humble foreign policy and realized that many of his advisers, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, were conspiracy-minded warmongers.) Obama's foreign-policy advisers come from diverse backgrounds. They are former aides to Democratic mandarins like Tom Daschle and Lee Hamilton (Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes, respectively); veterans of the Clinton administration's left flank (Tony Lake and Susan Rice); a human-rights advocate who helped write the Army's and Marine Corps' much-lauded counterinsurgency field manual (Sarah Sewall); a retired general who helped run the air war during the invasion of Iraq (Scott Gration); and a former journalist who revolutionized the study of U.S. foreign policy (Samantha Power). Yet they form a committed, intellectually coherent, and surprisingly united foreign-affairs team. (Shortly before this piece went to press, Power resigned from the campaign after making an intemperate remark to a reporter.)

They also share a formative experience with each other and with Obama. Each opposed the Iraq War at a time when doing so was derided by their colleagues, by journalists, and by the foreign-policy establishment. Each did so because they understood that the invasion and occupation ran counter to the goal of destroying al-Qaeda. And each bore the frustration of endless lectures on their lack of so-called seriousness from those who suffered from strategic myopia.

"There is a popular notion that Democrats have to try to appear like Republicans to pass some test on national security. The fact that that's still the case after Iraq is absurd," says one of Obama's closest advisers. "So you break from that orthodoxy and say 'I don't care if the Republicans attack me because I'm willing to meet with the leadership in Iran. We haven't for 25 years, and it's not gotten us anywhere.'"
Most of the members of Obama's foreign-policy team expressed frustration that they had taken a well-considered and seemingly anodyne position on Iraq and suffered for it. Obama had something similar happen to him in the spring and summer of 2007. He was attacked from the left and the right for saying three things that should not have been controversial: that if he had actionable intelligence on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan but no cooperation from the Pakistani government, he would take out the jihadists; that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and that he would be willing to meet with leaders of rogue states in his first year as president. "No one [of Obama's critics] had thought through the policy because that was the quote-unquote naïve and weak position, so they said it was a bad position to take," recalls Ben Rhodes, the adviser who writes Obama's foreign-policy speeches. "And it was a seminal moment, because Obama himself said, 'No, I'm right about this!'"

Instead of backing down, Obama asked his foreign-policy team to double down. Rhodes wrote a speech that Obama delivered at DePaul University on Oct. 2, which criticized the boundaries of acceptable discourse set by the same establishment that backed the war. "This election is about ending the Iraq War, but even more it's about moving beyond it. And we're not going to be safe in a world of unconventional threats with the same old conventional thinking that got us into Iraq," Obama said. One of his advisers, recalling the fallout from Obama's comments about pursuing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, says, "He takes policy positions that are a break from both rigid orthodoxy and the Bush administration. And everyone says it's a gaffe! That just encapsulates everything that's wrong about the foreign-policy debate in Washington and in Democratic politics."

The Obama foreign-policy team describes it as "the politics of fear," a phrase most advisers used unprompted in our conversations. "For a long time we've not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that very political fear. Obama's admonition to Democrats is much like Pope John Paul II's to the Gdansk shipyard strikers -- first, be not afraid.
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