Obama Without Definition. As I was thinking about Obama's nomination of Hillary as Secretary of State, I realized that the Obama administration can not be defined so far. Let me use Hillary as Secretary of State as an example. In a lot of ways, Hillary doesn't fit in foreign policy. Unlike Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, Hillary doesn't manifest the uber sobriety and clipped diplomacy speak of the usual Secretary of State. But I don't think anyone can say how Hillary's open and public personality is going to project in terms of foreign policy, negotiations, handling various crises, and the like.

Both Obama and Hillary are hard to slot on any kind of liberal idealist/ realist/ neo-conservative foreign policy continuum. But what does that mean in practice? Do President and Secretary of State have some guiding liberal ideas that they're willing to use various kinds of foreign policy tools to achieve? Perhaps. But they might also have foreign policy goals that can be formulated in terms of all three foreign policy ideologies and would act in a way that was dependent on her goals? There's also a chance that Obama and Hillary view much of foreign policy as reactive and want to be able to draw from liberal, realist, and neo-con resources in flexible ways depending on the crisis at hand.

I'm fine with Obama being able to do two or three things at once in foreign policy. But it's hard to see a definite shape at this point.