Obama: Getting Down to the Hard Choices

Barack Obama has been President for six months now, and we are beginning to learn a few things about how he does business. The most surprising of these is that he is a vehement traditionalist, a small- c conservative, despite his opponents' best efforts to paint him as a radical. In foreign policy, this has meant a return to traditional diplomatic devices — treaties, alliances, negotiation, a global strategic vision — after the ad hoc, go-it-alone bellicosity of his predecessor. No less a high priest than Henry Kissinger recently called Obama a "chess player," which is high praise in the world of...