Talleyrand, alas, did not get his wish with the American president’s new appointments. No matter. The guiding force of the second Obama administration is Mr. Lugar. If this were any other country, we’d say that Obama-Biden-Kerry-Hagel have mounted a palace coup of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It’s not the first time—we said it for the first GW Bush administration, which looked to many people like a restoration of the senior branches of the Ford administration, apart from Powell the apostate. 

Events will determine what this team does and how it does it. But for now it’s worth noticing that the old Americans so many of us became accustomed to in foreign policy—the bold brash bullying people like McNamara, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Baker, Holbrooke—are gone. They created as many problems as they solved, or tried to solve, to be sure. But the world got used to this type. It knew what to expect from it and how to handle it.

Obama and his team are not quiet in the literal sense; they are, on balance, more loquacious than loud. But they are a deliberative lot; self-appointed wise men; cautious often for the sake of being cautious; accustomed to deference; and only half-eloquent. Their egos are no smaller than those of their predecessors. But by their ostensible humility, thoughtfulness and unity, they will sow a great deal of confusion among us. Expect mischief.

The newspapers are full of office pools for the next Obama administration. Talleyrand’s own preference is to take the president at his word to (re-)unite the country under a veil of bipartisanship. Insiders will say these are far-fetched. But for the three power ministries, he prefers the following: State: Richard Lugar; Defense: Colin Powell; Treasury: Robert Zoellick.

Mr. Andrew Sullivan has declared “a Cold Civil War” in America. He makes a persuasive case that the battle lines of this red versus blue war approximate the ones of the original Civil War. It is worth pointing out that the Cold War has also been described as a global civil war that few could escape. How new or unique is Mr. Sullivan’s war? America has always hosted a Kulturkampf of varying character and dimensions; there has never been a single American worldview; and its adversarial, almost Manichean, tradition is second to none. Its ideological map has always resembled its geographic one: the line of the frontier; with us or against us; New versus Old; slave versus free; cowboys versus Indians; and so on. The protagonists almost always proclaim themselves to be under existential threat from the antagonists; the country is never big enough for both of them. Still, the country and its constitution have survived.

So, Talleyrand thinks it’s too soon to tell whether this latest battle is another skirmish or a real war. His mind is attracted to other parallels: the invasion of Baghdad in 2003 bore no better resemblance than to the capture of Mexico City in 1847: from the slipshod planning to the extended supply lines during the initial march to the capital, to the sheer luck of the thing. A campaign of “regime change” resulted in occupation and conquest. U.S. Grant, who saw his first real combat in the Mexican War, later said that the U.S. Civil War was God’s punishment for that earlier adventure, one he regarded as unnecessary and immoral. Many people have suggested that a reckoning has yet to come for Iraq. Perhaps there are more Civil Wars in store…