12/18/00 4:10 p.m.
The Powell Pick
Our next secretary of state: the case for optimism.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

t's rarely wise to hire someone who can't be fired. President-elect George W. Bush may have violated this rule by naming Colin Powell as his secretary of state. But the rule was broken long before this weekend. After the last year of speculation about Powell's role in a Bush administration, not hiring him would have played like firing him. For better or worse, Bush had to pick Powell.

We think for better. Powell instantly brings more heft to an administration that needs it. The standard conservative complaints about him — that he favors legal abortion and racial preferences — argued against making him president or vice-president, but not against his new appointment.

Critics of Powell's foreign-policy views, including many conservatives, say that he is overcautious about the use of force overseas. He was a relative dove in the first Bush administration during the run-up to the Gulf War, and (like many others) he opposed continuing that war until Saddam Hussein's regime fell.

Liberals and neoconservatives add that Powell's view of the national interest is too narrow, leaving little room for the promotion of American values. It's true that foreign-policy "realism" can become morally vacuous, and Powell is not immune from this tendency. (On Saturday, his paean to liberal democracy included the observation that the world "has seen that communism did not work, fascism did not work, Nazism did not work." As assaults on human dignity, they worked pretty well.)

But in general, the criticism seems out of date given the way the foreign-policy debate has changed over the last decade. Liberals have become far more comfortable with the use, or at least show, of force — maybe too comfortable. In these circumstances, a little caution could be a good thing.

Tom Ridge, Peacenik
Bush is said to be closing in on naming his secretary of defense, and former Senator Dan Coats, Republican of Indiana, looks like the frontrunner. If Bush does pick him, count it as the first minor transition victory for conservatives, who will be pleased that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge didn't get the job. What's wrong with Ridge? One more time, in the words of Gary Bauer: "He was very much a peacenik-type of congressman during the Reagan years," Bauer told the Associated Press over the weekend. "He voted in favor of a nuclear freeze, against the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, against the strategic defense initiative."