Perhaps not so well (tip to Instapundit):
Intellectual ferment–even if it boils over into shouting and arguing, from time to time–is a good and wonderful thing. No administration should seek to silence such debate. But what we are seeing in the Obama Administration’s national security team is not intellectual ferment. Rather, it is the spectacle of foreign policy and national security principals failing to sing from the same songsheet thanks to sheer disorganization.
I'm undecided on Clapper, just not knowing enough to really judge.
On the negative are his unawareness of a major terror bust in Britain--news of which I'm sure would have reached him up the chain or via news so alone not a fatal error--and his incomprehensible statement that the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt was mostly secular.
On the positive, based on capabilities of course China (conventional military power, despotism, and ambitions that clash with ours and those of our allies) and Russia (lots of nukes, creeping despotism, and an uncomfortable level of nostalgia for the Soviet days) are the biggest theoretical threats. Iran and North Korea are perhaps more likely to be threats to us in the short run, but if either attacks us we would absorb the blow without falling and could--if we choose--annihilate them in response. They are more of a day-to-day threat for small to horrific (city loss) tragedies through terror, but they don't pose the same level of risk to us or our allies that Russia and China do. And I think Clapper is far more likely to be right on Libya (Khaddafi will win the civil war) than wrong, if things go on the way that they are.
I can't say I worry too much about Russia marching west through NATO, but I do worry about them acting in the gray areas between the West and Russia. China, of course, regardless of intentions right now, has military capabilities that threaten our position in the western Pacific and nations we are friendly with all around China's periphery. That's simply a fact. So how Senators could be stunned by that is perhaps more of a mystery. Clapper certainly sounded awful, and he should work on presentation--but the basics favor him and not the giants of the Senate who questioned him.
But foreign policy confusion it isn't all on Clapper now, is it? Perhaps if President Obama's team of rivals had a clear understanding of the commander's intent on particular regions or even overall view of what he wants America to achieve in the world, they would pull more in the same direction even without specific instructions that morning. But I get the feeling that absent an overall direction in foreign policy from the top (heck, we got all the apologies to the world out of the way in the first 6 months, didn't we?), people feel free to pull in their own direction. It's a theme of the administration, it seems.
