One of the skills of a master politician like Obama is being able to project more than one possibility about himself—and being young, without much of a record of political accomplishments, makes that easier. One Obama is a visionary who reframes American foreign policy to meet the needs of a new era in which states are less important, America is less powerful, and collaborative efforts are the only way to get things done. Another Obama—the one who chose Joe Biden as his running mate, while McCain was picking Sarah Palin—respects, and wants the respect of, the Democratic foreign-policy establishment; he wouldn’t be inclined toward a wholesale refashioning of American foreign policy. Yet another Obama is a liberal who is keenly aware of the need to forestall ferociously unfair—but effective—attacks from the right, and who may feel that he has to demonstrate that he has the toughness to take military action. Nobody can tell which of these Obamas will obtain, or in what measure, if he wins, but what he does in Pakistan would be an early and unavoidable indicator—more so than what he does in Iraq, where he has left himself more room to maneuver.

Barack Obama and John McCain came into this long campaign with ideas about America’s role in the world that were more obviously different from those of the two major party candidates in the past few elections. This campaign has been an argument not about how to conduct the Cold War or the war on terror or the war in Iraq but about what American foreign policy should be after those wars have ended. Obama, who got where he is through a complicated process of self-definition, is much more nimble than McCain at dealing with changing circumstances. McCain, a third-generation military aristocrat who got where he is through pure bullheaded determination, is less adaptable. The result may be that Obama will outmaneuver McCain politically, but on foreign policy, over the course of the campaign, McCain will have left an imprint on Obama, and Obama will not have left one on McCain.

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