For those of you over 55, and those of you of any age who pay attention, the events of the first few weeks of the Obama transition may look familiar. While the unseen enemy creeping around in the shadows in the early days of the Bush presidency ultimately flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, history teaches us that some who wish us ill do not end in a flash, they start out with one.
The circumstances facing the new president are unnervingly reminiscent of those faced by a similarly young and hopeful JFK. Let's hope this time, we avoid the blunders that doomed us to two more decades of an expensive and dangerous cold war. This from Politico:
Joe Biden has warned that hostile nations would quickly "test" the young new president with a "generated crisis," and Biden seems to have been right.
But the challenge didn't come from the part of the world Obama spent the most of his campaign discussing, the broader Middle East. On the day after he won the election, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev offered an aggressive warning that he would respond to a planned NATO anti-missile shield by moving nuclear weapons to its western enclave of Kaliningrad. And the sword-rattling has continued: Tuesday, the Russian navy began joint exercises near Caracas with Venezuela's military.
Obama enters office signaling that he will continue the policies of President Bush's late second term in Iraq and Afghanistan, and key architects of those policies, starting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, will likely keep their jobs. That would leave Russia as the unexpected laboratory for Obama to shape his own foreign policy.
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