Obama's future fixed by Clinton's past?

Anne Applebaum thinks that Obama may have made 'a brilliant choice' in selecting Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State:

[I]f she is truly as ambitious as she appears to be - and there is no reason to think otherwise - then Hillary does, in fact, have some incentive to be a good secretary of state And being a good secretary of state means, by definition, that she will have to carry out President Obama's foreign policy, not her husband's or her own.

Any evidence of blatant disloyalty, not to mention any whiff of influence-peddling by her husband, would discredit her, perhaps forever. Any evidence of incompetence, not to mention any whiff of self-indulgent fantasy, would put her out of the game for good.

Now, I don't know whether Applebaum will turn out to be right or wrong about this. Not being able to foresee the future, particularly with respect to how the chosen incumbent will fare doing a critically difficult political job, I'm somewhat hesitant. But I am confident enough about the nature of the job prospectus to be willing to register my agreement with Applebaum about one thing: to do her job well Clinton will have to implement the president's foreign policy.

There are others who reason differently. Before the man has taken office, they have decided what his foreign policy is bound to be, on the basis of the team of people he's chosen to carry it out. Thus Jeremy Scahill at Comment is Free:

The main battles will not be between Obama's staff, but rather against those who actually want a change in US foreign policy, not just a staff change in the war room.
.....
The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush's time in office to the present.

Scahill quotes Obama himself as saying that the team will be implementing a 'vision' that comes from him as president. But the journalist discounts this. He already knows. How does he? Unlike Appelbaum, he engages in no argument about the likely political interactions between the key players. He knows the future because he knows the past: the team has the 'wrong' record on the Iraq war. It's a delineation of the proper boundaries of the republic of virtue masquerading as political forecasting. It's the discourse of the one and only, the eternally bad, US foreign policy resurfacing before the new president has been in office for so much as a single day.

For Scahill, incidentally, it's a mark against Susan Rice that she 'has... been hawkish on Darfur'. So it goes. Peace on earth, goodwill to all men - the people of Darfur maybe included, but maybe not.