Advisers with no Clinton administration connection included Samantha Power, the Harvard human rights scholar who resigned from Obama’s team in March after suggesting Obama would readjust his Iraq withdrawal date after taking office; and Obama’s national security coordinator, Denis McDonough, a foreign-policy adviser to former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle and a staunch advocate of the US taking a leadership role in global warming and energy issues.
But Obama appears to have shifted his foreign-policy outlook over recent months as he has expanded his advisory team to include high-profile Democrats and Republicans.
“The more interventionist advisers, like Susan Rice and that group, those people have really dropped off as prominent pragmatists have risen,” says Douglas Foyle, an associate professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. Citing a meeting Obama held last week to showcase his foreign-policy and national security team, Mr. Foyle notes that former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar were featured prominently. “It was a striking show of the rise of the realists in the Obama camp,” he says.
