President-elect Barack Obama was rightly praised last week for his choice of a national security team. That bastion of the liberal establishment, the New York Times, applauded "Mr Obama, who has limited foreign experience, [for] showing that he wants advisers with real authority who will not be afraid to disagree with him – two traits disastrously lacking in President Bush's team".

Unfortunately for the Times, that is the same Bush team it praised in 2000 as comprising "seasoned, thoughtful practitioners who will bring international stature and extensive knowledge to the Bush administration and will help compensate for Mr Bush's own inexperience."

That is not the only continuity between then and now. For what Obama's choices show is that there will be more stability than change in US foreign policy when he becomes commander-in-chief next January.

The similarity in the make-up of Team Bush in 2000 and Team Obama in 2008 is striking. For Bush, experience came through Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defence, who had held the post in the Ford administration. Colin Powell as secretary of state brought the authority of a former chairman of the joint chiefs and an Eisenhower-like popularity across the political spectrum. Condoleezza Rice came to the job of national security adviser as the dazzling protégée of Brent Scowcroft, who had done the same job for presidents Ford and George HW Bush. And a heartbeat away from the president was Dick Cheney, another former defence secretary. It was an impressive incoming team by any standard.

For Obama, the Rumsfeldian experience comes in the form of Robert Gates, the incumbent secretary of defence, who retains office to serve his eighth president. James Jones, the incoming national security adviser, plays the Eisenhower/Powell role of every politician's favourite soldier. Joe Biden brings years of expertise from the senate foreign relations committee. And the bright young face is once again a Rice, although no relation to Condoleezza; Susan Rice is Obama's closest foreign policy adviser and gets a seat at the cabinet table as US ambassador to the United Nations.

The joker in the Obama pack is, of course, Hillary Clinton – although even here there is continuity of a kind, as George W Bush was known to consult former president Bill Clinton frequently about foreign policy questions, particularly after 11 September 2001.

The real continuity between Bush and Obama, however, comes with the approach that US foreign policy has taken since 2006. In January of that year, Condoleezza Rice spoke at Georgetown University to outline a change in policy direction that put an emphasis on international co-operation to reconstruct failed states. Gates took up that theme.

"In recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and development have become more blurred," he said in July 2006. He has followed it up with a series of high-profile speeches on the same theme.

General Jones has been even more blunt. "Make no mistake," he said last year, "Nato is not winning in Afghan­istan." His critique of why again highlights that the failure of reconstruction makes every military victory a temporary one.

Gates is fond of quoting the statistic that the US has more members of military marching bands than foreign service officers. That is a point that Obama repeated consistently throughout the campaign. It also explains why Hillary Clinton was attracted to the post of secretary of state. The Pentagon has in Gates a secretary who believes a significant portion of the defence department budget should be diverted to Clinton and the state department. He recognises that this is "blasphemy" for many in what Eisen­hower half a century ago termed the "military industrial complex." But only an enlarged state department can foster the kind of multilateral reconstruction necessary in fragile places around the world.

"Obama and his team didn't invent this approach," sums up another New York Times voice, David Brooks, "but if they can put it into action, that would be continuity we can believe in."

Professor Richard Aldous is Head of History and Archives at UCD