I'm grateful for the opportunity to discuss my book as part of the TPM Café Book Club. The Limits of Power first appeared in bookstores in August. (The paperback comes out in May 2009). A month later the economy began to tank, in some respects vindicating the book's basic message: it's past time for Americans to get their house in order. The solution to the predicament we face - which is cultural and political as much as economic and military -- lies here at home, not in Central Asia or the Persian Gulf. A refusal to face that fundamental fact will exacerbate already-existing tendencies toward debt and dependency.

How far the new president will take us toward such a reorientation of priorities ranks as one of the major questions of the day. On the campaign trail, Barak Obama famously promised to "change the way Washington works." His election reflected - and greatly reinforced -- widespread expectations that he would do just that. An imperial president having made a hash of things, Americans now looked to a president-as-messiah to set things right again.

Whether Obama will satisfy those expectations remains to be seen. The very early signals are mixed at best.

On the one hand, the president seems to have quietly consigned the pernicious concept of a "war on terror" to the ash heap of history. He has ordered that the prison at Guanatanamo be closed. By all indications, he appears intent on fulfilling his commitment to end the U. S. combat role in Iraq, albeit on a timetable likely to be more generous than the promised sixteen months. When it comes to dealing with adversaries like Iran, he is signaling a new flexibility. These are all to the good.

On the other hand, President Obama has assembled a senior national security team of figures who, if seasoned and accomplished, seem unlikely to depart very far from the conventions of post-1945 U. S. national security policy. If you're intent is to "change the way Washington works," you don't install retired generals (James Jones), retired admirals (Dennis Blair), and career CIA officials (Robert Gates) at the top of the national security hierarchy. Whatever their virtues, which are no doubt considerable, these men do not qualify as out-of-the-box thinkers. As for Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, what we can say is this: "smart power" is a slogan not a world view; if Clinton is intent on engineering a major shift in basic policy, she'll need to do better than that.

How the administration proceeds on Afghanistan is likely to provide the best near-term indicator of whether change or continuity will constitute the dominant national security theme of the Obama presidency. The president's apparent determination to follow through on his proposal to send additional U. S. troops to that benighted country is not a promising sign. What's most urgently needed in Afghanistan is not more troops but a new policy based on realistic and affordable objectives.

Obama's fundamental challenge is to prevent near-term requirements from overwhelming long-term imperatives. If the economic crisis continues to worsen, as seems likely, the nation will insist that Dr. Obama prescribe the fastest-acting pain reliever available, without regard to cost and side effects. Yet the truth is that what Americans need above all is to clean up their act: save more, consume less, pay off their creditors, and learn to live within their means - all of which would necessarily mean jettisoning bloated conceptions of the United States exercising "global leadership" as the "sole superpower." Will the physician have the gumption to deliver that message and stick to it? Stay tuned.