Barack Obama’s new foreign policy trio hardly live up to his promise of change. His team is more conservative by reputation than many Democrats wanted and is full of familiar faces. In picking Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, in keeping Robert Gates as Secretary of Defence, and in supporting them with General James Jones as National Security Adviser, Obama has picked a lineup of big names whose known positions appear much closer to those of the Bush Administration than many Obama followers hoped.

Those who wanted an overt and dramatic rejection of Bush policy are furious.

Up to a point they are right to describe the team that way. On the campaign trail Clinton was more hawkish than Obama, for instance, on how to approach Iran. Gates, of course, actually has been part of the Bush Administration, overseeing the past year of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jones, who has distinguished himself in the past year by his warning that the Afghan war was going wrong, is hardly part of the antiwar brigade.

Yet it is wrong to call them hawks from what we know of their own views. What they seem to represent is a continuation of the last year or so, in which President Bush adopted policies that were more conciliatory, less combative and actively sought the help of other countries.

If you put that together with the change of tone and manner of presenting America in the world that Obama intends to bring about (as my colleague Catherine Philp describes today), then you have a team that will look very different from the Bush team of the Iraq invasion, even though it does not, in practice, represent a big shift from the past year.

The greater worry should be not that the team has too strong a flavour but that on the key problems that will confront them and Obama, they have so far said little. We have to hope that he puts together policy on this front as quickly as he has in economics, where his team has all but taken over decision making from the Bush squad.

The President-elect does not have the luxury of prioritising foreign policy problems, argues Anthony Cordesman, of the CSIS think-tank in Washington. “To prioritise them is to neglect some of them,” he adds. Even before unexpected events – and there are plenty of governments and terrorists interested in testing the new President – there are at least half a dozen serious challenges confronting the new team.

There are two wars, Iraq at the moment better, Afghanistan worse. There is the adjoining mess of Pakistan and its feud with India over Kashmir. There are the nuclear threats of Iran and North Korea. There are the demands of the Middle East and the need to get the tone right with Russia. Perhaps the hardest question for the team is how much power to cede to China in the search for solutions – and money. Chinese cash and even troops are now raised as the answer to the needs of the International Monetary Fund, African crises, Afghanistan and Iraq.

None of the new team – nor Obama – will want to pull out of Afghanistan quickly. If critics choose to see that as hawkish, well, there it is. Iraq is harder, if new turmoil challenges the exit timetable. But here Obama has moved close to Clinton and Gates, in saying that the US will withdraw only as conditions allow.

The three best tests of how conservative the new administration will be are Iran, Russia and the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock. On the first two the Obama team favours an assertive style of diplomacy – not far from the last year of Bush. Israel is the big unknown, given the inconsistency of remarks made by Obama, although he and Clinton want more energetic intervention.

A difference in tone, then. But in policies, not a million miles from the chastened and cautious Bush Administration of the past year.

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