As my neoconservative acquaintance Jeffrey Gedmin often states, "I am over-stating for effect."  

But Brookings is making decisions about its staffing and future that signal that it is self-destructing and opting for a course of political irrelevancy -- particularly given the decision to replace outgoing Brookings Foreign Policy czar James Steinberg with Russia-specialist Carlos Pasqual.

The Brookings Institution, founded in 1916, has been one of the bulwark institutions of American progressive thought over the last century.  While the think tank is non-partisan and employs a range of thinkers who span the political spectrum -- E.J. Dionne, Stephen Bosworth, Robert Litan, Jonathan Rauch, Richard Falkenrath, Kenneth Pollack -- the institution is generally considered to be one of the most important 'center-slight left' think tanks in Washington.

Brookings' foreign policy programs used to be directed by Richard Haass, who left that spot to head policy planning at the State Department during the first Bush 43 term and now serves as President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Former Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg is leaving in December to serve as Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin.

Steinberg and Haass are both heavyweight political operators and very thoughtful about U.S. foreign policy.  Haass is closely affiliated with the Republican order and Steinberg is on the Democratic side.

But one of the disturbing realities during the build-up to the Iraq invasion is that Brookings was largely missing in action during that inside-the-beltway policy battle.  

The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings had hired former Clinton National Security Council official Kenneth Pollack to join its team -- and Pollack had become the leading Democratic proponent of the notion that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program in hand.  

A Brookings senior staffer with whom I recently spoke said that Ken Pollack, more than any other person, preempted any serious response from national security-concerned Democrats against White House assertions on Iraq WMD programs.  This source argued that Pollack's views, his employment at Brookings, combined with a new infusion of Israel-focused financial support of the Saban Center, also sidelined Brookings in the early stages of debate about the Iraq War.  Many, including me, thought Brookings was the 'natural home' and historically appropriate anchor for an "alternative policy vision" regarding the so-called war on terror and the assault then being planned against Iraq.

The only major alternative policy formulation to the Iraq War with the Brookings brand on it came about nine months after the invasion in a book, America Unbound:  The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, co-authored by Brookings scholars Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay.

My point in providing this detail about Brookings' staffing and policy activities is that Brookings does matter.  Its absence in the key debates about the Iraq War contributed to the sense that Democrats had no alternative to the Bush plan in the Middle East; indeed, it appeared that Brookings, like many leading Democratic Senators and House Members, had been co-opted into sheepish support for the war.

That battle is over, but the future of Brookings' foreign policy work is of genuine importance when it comes to the role think tanks play in helping to inform the political order about alternative or better foreign policy choices.  

Though I had criticisms of Brookings for its absence in the Iraq debate, I admire Jim Steinberg -- who was one of the very first leading national security Democrats to write in the Washington Post on May 18, 2004 that America could no longer achieve its objectives as an occupier and had to leave.

Steinberg also believed that our government was structured in such a way that it was unable to synthesize well classic military capacities and objectives with the economic dimensions of foreign policy.  Steinberg, like Haass, had broad experience and competency -- but had a vision of U.S. foreign policy and what it could achieve that clearly made them and Brookings, by default, key players in the big policy battles about America's national security course.

With Steinberg's departure, which some have said was precipitated both by a desire to "run something of his own" and because of a few serious collisions with Brookings President Strobe Talbott, a search began to replace him -- and one would have thought -- that after the general critique in D.C. that Brookings had to get back into the game, particularly on Iraq, that a person would have been selected who had the characteristics of being a major, well-connected political player, like Richard Haass and Jim Steinberg.

The candidates for the job were Brookings Senior Fellow Ivo Daalder, Brookings Senior Fellow Richard Falkenrath, Brookings Center on the U.S. & Europe Director Philip Gordon,  U.S. Institute of Peace Research Director Paul Stares, a candidate with the last name "Lutes" who I speculate is Charles Lutes of the National Defense University (but this information is not confirmed), and finally, Carlos Pasqual, who is now Coordinator of the State Department's Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization.

I had spoken with Brookings President Strobe Talbott in August about the importance of this foreign policy position at Brookings to the rest of the progressive and centrist foreign policy establishment in the country.  I had said that he needed to hire someone who would not only be respected for his or her access to top policymakers but that he or she needed to be a top-notch warrior for a "vision" of American foreign policy 20-30 years from now.  Talbott concurred and said that he had a roster of strong candidates to consider, both from within Brookings and from the outside.

When I asked if Ivo Daalder was on that list, Talbott confirmed that -- and said that he was high up, "a very strong candidate," according to Talbott.

Daalder is someone who is a warrior-type in U.S. policy matters.  Like Haass and Steinberg, he is the type of person one just knows is going to be a national security advisor, Secretary of State, or CIA Director some day.  While he and I don't agree on everything, we agree on a lot.  He, for instance, signed a Project for a New American Century letter calling for an increase in the size of our military services by 25,000 people a year for the next several years.  My view is that such blind increases in funding and provision of new personnel is wrong-headed until we have a serious review of what is broken in the American military and why our huge force has been unable to generate the "security deliverables" Americans expect with the resources at hand.  We also need a discussion of whether America's commitments abroad are sound or not -- and then have a discussion about how to shape our military resources to accomplish designated 21st century missions.

But that aside, there simply is no doubt that Ivo Daalder stands out on the above list as the person with the greatest combination of foreign policy experience, writing, vision and tenacity.  Just to be transparent, I don't know Daalder well -- and he and I don't agree on all fronts -- but I have stacked up enough experience to know which personalities in my field are worthy of attention, even battle sometimes, and which are not.

From my view, Paul Stares probably comes in second.  Phil Gordon, Richard Falkenrath, and Charles Lutes (if I am correct that this is the right "Lutes") each have great strengths but still need to evolve a bit more before they get designated as foreign policy yokozuna appropriate for this level of work.

Carlos Pasqual -- while clearly an accomplished Russia expert and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine whom Talbott got to know when Talbott was Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State -- would probably come at the bottom of my list.  He has very few publications.  His experience, while broad diplomatically, is one of serving more as a functionary than an "ideas architect" like Daalder, Stares, Steinberg, and Haass.

But Strobe Talbott has selected Carlos Pasqual as the next Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Studies at Brookings.  There has been zero news about this decision in either the blogosphere or the main stream media.  Zero. But people should be angry about this -- because Brookings and its foreign policy work do have impact and consequence.  Brookings should not be allowed to quietly emasculate itself on these major foreign policy matters because the institution is deeply embedded in the country's policymaking architecture.  Talbott should be recruiting a major foreign policy wizard for this job -- someone whose experience and conceptualization orally and in writing can mesmerize the policy establishment.  

While this personnel decision -- that has so shocked and irritated me -- is clearly an inside-the-beltway type matter, people should know that progressive foreign policy efforts are being gut-punched by this choice.  

The fact of Washington is that some institutions matter more than others; some people have great impact than others; some policy ideas make their way forward better than others.  While I believe that new ideas, new people, and new institutions can, in fact, subversively upend old thinking and old political structures, Brookings is still vastly powerful.  We should not applaud a personnel choice that so undermines our collective interests.

I don't know Carlos Pasqual, though I have met him once briefly and have heard that he is a pleasant and smart guy.  

But the Director of Brookings' foreign policy programs is made for enlightened warriors who are going to help shape the nation's foreign policy debate.  This takes not just knowledge -- but also the ability to move and inspire others.  

I know that someone like Daalder has that ability.  There are others who do as well -- like Ambassador Wendy Sherman who currently works as a partner in Madeleine Albright's firm.  Though she and I have divergent views in many areas, the current Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky has a lot of these characteristics.  

I could probably scribble out a long list of Republicans and Democrats who have vision, organizational competence, and the ability to inspire and move debates -- but Carlos Pasqual is not among them.

Because I believe so strongly that Brookings should have strong leadership and be contenders in the great debates on foreign policy today, I very much hope that my gut negative reaction to the Carlos Pasqual decision proves to be wrong.  I would gladly eat these words -- and retract them -- if Pasqual proves to be better than I suspect at this moment.

But it appears to me that Brookings is purposely moving to make itself irrelevant in the complicated battles that are about to break out in both parties.  It is forfeiting the leadership role it has played for decades in shaping the discourse on U.S. foreign policy.  

To some degree, the Center for American Progress is quickly emerging as the Democratic anchor of foreign policy thinking in Washington.  Other think tanks and groups -- like the New America Foundation (where I work), CSIS, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the German Marshall Fund, the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, the Century Foundation, and others -- are also doing important and interesting work.  

However, a muted Brookings or a foreign policy program there that decides that its best strategy now is to keep its head low seriously harms the progressive foreign policy debate in this country.

I like Strobe Talbott -- and hope that he and his other leadership colleagues at Brookings take my critique in a friendly way and see it as constructive counsel -- but I could not simply let this very important personnel choice go by without a single public comment among foreign policy writers and thinkers.

We should all give Carlos Pasqual the chance to succeed and prove my (and your?) misgivings wrong, but the burden is now on Brookings to show that it still is an institution that matters.