Joe Klein praises President Obama for his decision “to think carefully” before sending new troops to Afghanistan. Who wouldn’t?

Thinking before acting is always advisable, and Klein congratulates Obama for this only to imply that Obama’s predecessor was incapable of doing the same.

Let’s not forget, a slow and methodical process can also become a liability. On Afghanistan,  Klein thinks that Obama is best off taking his time before deciding on a surge of troops. While postponing action may allow the the president to get more information, it could also come with a price tag. It might signal to others that this president is a procrastinator. It might create an opportunity for those trying to sabotage American plans. The many virtues of deciding slowly have to be weighed against the possible costs on a case by case basis.

Klein claims the following:

It is becoming an Obama signature that he doesn’t deal with foreign policy issues in isolation–he doesn’t just look into Putin’s (or Musharraf’s, or Karzai’s) eyes and decide whether he can trust them. He sees the problems in context: what happens in Afghanistan has an impact on what happens in Pakistan, in Iran, with Russia and India, and vice versa.

First, on foreign policy there is not yet an Obama “signature” worthy of discussion. The batch of foreign policy decisions the new president has made is too small to paint a coherent picture. And besides, this approach to assessment risks conflating process with outcome. Suppose Obama does see world-affairs in “context” more than his predecessor (which I don’t think is so) – if he is mistaken about the context, he may very well be in worse shape than someone who sees things in isolation, but accurately.

Klein should know better than most about this great show of thoughtfulness. He made a career of chronicling Bill Clinton, whose habitual “thoughtfulness” often yielded foreign policy folly we’d not want to see again.