More G-2 on Robert Gates

If you’re looking for reasons not to be glum about Robert Gates, Michael Barone offers a few.  Barone pictures Gates as someone with a great deal of sensitivity, and perhaps hostility, toward congressional meddling in foreign policy since its failure to confirm him as CIA Director years ago.  I was especially interested in this take on Nicaragua:

“By the end of 1984, I concluded that we were kidding ourselves if we thought the contras might win. I wrote [CIA Director William] Casey on December 14, and began by saying, ‘The contras can’t overthrow the Sandinista regime.’ I continued that we were muddling along in Nicaragua with a halfhearted policy because of the lack of agreement within the administration and with Congress on our real objectives. I urged moving to an overt policy including withdrawal of diplomatic recognition; providing open military assistance and funds for a government-in-exile; imposing economic sanctions, perhaps including a quarantine; and using air strikes to destroy Nicaragua’s military buildup”“no invasion but no more Soviet/Cuban military deliveries. I concluded, ‘Relying on and supporting the contras as our only action may actually hasten the ultimate, unfortunate outcome.'”

If Gates were to support a similar policy with North Korea, sans air strikes, I’d become a fan.  Unfortunately, I think that’s unlikely in the extreme during the last two years of this administration.  Another of Gates’s beliefs is that beneath the politics, different administrations are remarkably consistent with their predecessors.  On North Korea, that’s regrettably difficult to deny.