To know candidates, know their advisers

By J. Patrick Coolican

Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2007 | 7:14 a.m.

When voters take their measure of presidential contenders, they should also consider who is whispering in the candidates' ears. Here's why:

Then-Gov. George W. Bush proclaimed a foreign policy of strength but humility during his 2000 campaign for president. In particular, he expressed distaste for the kind of "nation-building" usually required of long-term military interventions, such as America's campaign in Bosnia.

At that very moment, however, Paul Wolfowitz was briefing the foreign policy novice on matters international.

And in Wolfowitz's advice were no doubt the seeds of the aggressive, unilateralist Bush policies that would follow the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Wolfowitz had been saying and writing for years, such as in a 1992 Pentagon planning document, that America should maintain such a massive military advantage as to dissuade potential rivals; that we should preemptively strike, unilaterally if necessary, at hostile rogue states with weapons of mass destruction; and that we should become a kind of benevolent empire. And Wolfowitz was a member of the Project for the New American Century, which counseled war with Iraq in a 1998 letter to then President Clinton.

With this history in mind and the Jan. 19 Nevada Democratic caucus approaching, here are the foreign policy experts advising the three leading candidates.

All three, presented alphabetically, have sterling resumes filled with high-level policy posts, articles and books published, and the best schools. But their subtle differences could define America's future in the world.

Derek Chollet

Those who believe former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards has drifted dangerously leftward can take some comfort in the thoroughly moderate outlook and background of a chief foreign policy aide from 2002 to 2004 who continues to advise him.

Chollet, a senior fellow at The Center for a New American Security, began his career as a research assistant to former Secretary of State James Baker, one of the great practitioners of the "realist school" of foreign policy, which preaches that America should be primarily focused on its strategic interests abroad, not human rights or the internal politics of allies or adversaries. (Bush is seen as having broken with that Republican tradition in his evangelical fervor for democracy in the Middle East.)

Chollet then served as a speechwriter for Richard Holbrooke when he was ambassador the United Nations.

That experience, marked most significantly by the Dayton Peace Accords ending the war in Bosnia, clearly shaped Chollet's view of the world and America's ability to influence events.

"It came out of this potential huge failure," he said of years of American inaction. But the Clinton administration then "captured a huge success with military force that was married to a diplomatic effort. It was a bold assertion of American leadership that brought allies to our side and commitment to bring peace to Bosnia. The fact that Clinton turned that around is a huge accomplishment."

For Democrats in Washington, this accomplishment took on a kind of first-order significance, one that led to a doctrine of using American power for humanitarian ends.

That in turn made many centrists and liberals more willing to accept one premise of the war in Iraq - bringing liberal democracy to the heart of the Middle East and hoping it would spread outward.

Chollet advised Edwards to vote to authorize the war in 2002. In a Sun interview, he framed the decision on his reading of intelligence estimates. "I had read most of the intel during the Clinton years and believed what I read. I read about chemical weapons and nuclear ambitions. To me the key was not the threat of force but the steps you took beforehand. Why were we doing this in March 2003 or December 2003? That was my question. In hindsight, we were wrong.

Edwards apologized for his war vote in 2005 in a celebrated Washington Post opinion piece.

Chollet said the candidate has an impressive ability to collect, analyze and retain information.

Lee Feinstein

Hillary Clinton's advisers, including her chief national security adviser, Lee Feinstein, are seen as the most hawkish of the lot. Feinstein, with some justification, bristled at the premise of the discussion in a Sun interview.

"Sen. Clinton is a very experienced person who's been in the Senate for seven years. She's sat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and she has a long track record. She's very much somebody who makes her own decisions," he said. Moreover, Feinstein added, her advisers represent the broad range of opinion in the Democratic Party.

Feinstein is just one among a blue-chip roster of Clinton supporters in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, including Holbrooke and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Feinstein and several other Clinton advisers favored disarming Saddam Hussein, and Clinton voted to give authorization to Bush to do so.

They've been frequent critics of the execution of the war, however.

Feinstein, who at the time was acting director of the Washington program of the Council on Foreign Relations, co-wrote an essay in 2004 that posited there is "a collective 'duty to prevent' nations run by rulers without internal checks on their power from acquiring or using (weapons of mass destruction)."

Feinstein's writing and thinking have also addressed muscular prevention of and responses to humanitarian crises, however. In January, he published "Darfur and Beyond: What Is Needed to Prevent Mass Atrocities."

Samantha Power

If this election has a star adviser, as Condoleezza Rice was for Bush in 2000, it is Samantha Power.

She sits on the faculty of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, won a national magazine award for her New Yorker magazine reporting from Sudan, and her book "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" won the Pulitzer Prize.

Her traveling and reporting from war zones has shaped her view of the world.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has centered his foreign policy, she said, on Franklin Roosevelt's "freedom from fear."

"I've seen a ton of fear, and humiliation. Whether it's in Zimbabwe, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan. Fear in the eyes, fear in the streets. Our international system is weirdly not oriented to building that kind of security (from fear)."

Power said Obama is interested in a foreign policy agenda that believes in promoting democracy abroad, but is cognizant that's not enough. There have to be legal institutions so people don't fear arbitrary state violence, as well as hospitals and sustainable agriculture so people don't fear starvation and sickness.

Iraq had elections, she noted, but people there, intimidated by religious violence, voted for sectarian slates.

Power, like Chollet and Feinstein, also said the first step of the next president will be restoring American credibility, which means ending "aggressive interrogation techniques," as the administration calls them, as well as shutting down the prison at Guantanamo Bay.