Robert Gates is person of the year
Peter Feaver It is hard to top Scott Stanzel’s nominee, "Straw Man," as Person of the Year, so I will play it safe and second the nomination of Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. The hardest part of President Obama’s job, taking over as commander in chief in the middle of two very challenging wars, would ...
It is hard to top Scott Stanzel’s nominee, "Straw Man," as Person of the Year, so I will play it safe and second the nomination of Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. The hardest part of President Obama’s job, taking over as commander in chief in the middle of two very challenging wars, would have been much harder without the continuity provided by Secretary Gates. On a team thick with egos, he has managed to be effective in policy terms without providing much in the way of fodder for beltway gossip. President Obama deserves credit for keeping him, and Secretary Gates deserves credit for the job he has done.
By agreeing to stay on as President Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates has almost singlehandedly kept alive the increasingly frayed bipartisan tradition in American national security policy. And he has continued to be tremendously influential on policy, most recently in developing the Afghanistan counterinsurgency strategy.
Bob Gates’s transition from the Bush administration to the Obama administration was seamless. He hired a team of veteran defense moderates. He was the pivotal vote behind the Afghan surge. He was able to cut weapons systems that few of his predecessors even attempted to take on, much less eliminate. He has been hailed as a voice of reason worldwide. Not bad for a guy whom the Senate rejected in 1987 for the post of CIA Director.
Will Inboden is the executive director of the Clements Center for National Security and an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, both at the University of Texas at Austin, a distinguished scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and the author of The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink.
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