From Tom Dispatch
By John Feffers

As Barack Obama assembles his foreign policy team, he appears to be drawing from two primary sources: the Clinton faithful and Republican renegades. These old dogs might be up for some new tricks, but one risk of relying on such “experience” could be the triumph of conventional thinking in Washington — when the world expects, and the times demand, fundamental change.

These foreign policy mandarins will certainly counsel a tempering of the worst excesses of the Bush administration legacy — on torture, global warming, and adherence to international treaties. By asking what the elder Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft would do, the Obama administration will at least restore a modicum of realism to the hard-edged fantasy world of the George W. Bush years. At least, we’ll be back in the realm of the geopolitical chessboard after eight years of Grand Theft Auto.

But if we withdraw troops from Iraq only to send them to Afghanistan, approve free-trade agreements with only minor tweaks, and address global warming with quarter-measures, we will also find ourselves slouching toward what I’ve termed a Goldilocks apocalypse. Not too cold and not too hot might please the palate, but in the end we’ll end up in the belly of the bear.

Consider the risks of the policy status quo in the case of just one nation: North Korea. For the last seven years, the Bush administration wavered between two options in its policy planning for a country that the President famously labeled a member of his “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address. During George W. Bush’s first term, the ascendant hardliners in his administration rejected President Bill Clinton’s efforts to negotiate with that country, favoring instead pushing North Korea until its regime collapsed — which, of course, it didn’t. In his second term, the State Department got the upper hand with a plan to end North Korea’s nuclear program through multi-party negotiations.

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