There’s one particular passage circulating the blogs from the New York Times’ article about Obama’s newly announced (but already known) national security team (emphasis added):

Yet all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — were selected in large part because they have embraced a sweeping shift of resources in the national security arena.

The shift, which would come partly out of the military’s huge budget, would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states.

Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.

But the adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the three have all embraced “a rebalancing of America’s national security portfolio” after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years.

If the Obama administration is able to pull off a shift towards prevention rather than (over)reaction, it will be a very big deal indeed. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have wiped out our military forces, causing thousands of military deaths and throwing good money after bad…after bad…after bad.

As Will mentioned in his excellent piece about Mumbai, our nation reacted the way the terroists hoped we would when they committed the acts of violence on September 11th. We overextended ourselves and deeply wounded our international reputation. But we’re not so far over that precipice that we can’t return to a better footing regarding national security and our interactions with the global community.