Wow did I write my longer Obama-national-security-team piece fast. Here’s what I think my most interesting graf is:

… Boot’s comments highlight a dilemma that Obama’s appointments pose to conservatives. Neither Gates nor Jones would have accepted Obama’s invitations had they been out of step with his strategic goals. With so much of the conservative approach to foreign policy having been implemented by the Bush administration to disastrous consequences, Gates’ Pentagon success — represented most significantly by the reduction in violence in Iraq under his watch — has been a rare point of GOP pride, as Sen. John McCain pointed out during the campaign. Yet now that Gates and Jones have signed on to the Obama agenda — as have many so-called foreign-policy realists who used to operate in the Republican orbit — the Obama administration has absorbed the viable strains of foreign-policy thinking that haven’t been proven inadequate by recent events or politically repudiated. Conservatives, and particularly the congressional GOP, face the difficult political choice of acquiescing to an emerging progressive foreign-policy consensus or opposing it by championing failed policies that voters in 2006 and 2008 overwhelmingly rejected.