whither our foreign policy?, part deux

In case you missed SecDef Robert Gates’s wonderful speech delivered at Oxford last week, I recommend that you read it. Here’s a highlight:

To manage diverse challenges in the years ahead, we – America and Europe together – will need strength and solidarity such as we have demonstrated in the past. Our policies and responses must show a mixture of resolve and restraint – the proverbial arrows and olive branches of Truman’s eagle. To be firm but not fall into a pattern of rhetoric or actions that create self-fulfilling prophecies; to heed the lessons of both 1914 and 1938 but not be trapped by them.

We need to be careful about the commitments we make, but we must be willing to keep commitments once made.

Yes, that sounds about right. Deliciously, when the New York Times reported on Gates’s speech yesterday, underscoring how the West understands that the Russians have legitimate interests, etc., etc., and how we in the West should in general avoid extremes of both force (as in WWI) and restraint (as in WWII), the article ended with this short paragraph [e.a.]:

Mr. Gates spoke here after a separate meeting in London on Friday with the Czech defense minister. The two signed a declaration of strategic defense cooperation and a status of forces agreement for stationing American personnel in the Czech Republic as part of a missile defense radar site, a plan that has outraged Russia.

Now, that is speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Long live SecDef Gates, and may he have a worthy successor!

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