The more we reflect on the confirmation hearings for the proposed promotion of Senator Hagel to the Pentagon, the more we are left with a feeling that the Senate is failing to address the central question. The same is true for Senator Kerry’s elevation to the State Department. The solons gave him a total pass. The armed services committee did a better job in exposing Senator Hagel. But neither hearing confronted the question that is at the bottom of all this sturm and drang. Where is this administration going strategically in respect of foreign policy?

We now have at Foggy Bottom a state secretary who came home from Vietnam to condemn his fellow GIs as war criminals and who, with our fighting men and women still under attack on the battlefield, met with enemy envoys at Paris and openly endorsed their demands. Now, if Senator Hagel is confirmed, we will have at the head of defense a figure who after his own turn against our GIs in the middle of the war, has dedicated his career to a similar betrayal of those we have stood with in the Middle East.

These two figures are being elevated to high office by a president who, shortly before being reelected, boasted to the Russian president, in a conversation about missile defense, that “after my election, I have more flexibility.” He didn’t mean that he would have “more flexibility” to stand up to our adversaries. He meant more flexibility to accommodate them. Mr. Medvedev promptly said he would relay the message to the former KGB agent who runs Russia, Vladimir Putin. Now Mr. Obama is seeking to elevate to the top of the war department a figure who came to agree with, say, Bill Ayers on Vietnam and has been a leading advocate of American retreat.

So where are the questions about strategy? Where precisely does this administration intend to take American in foreign policy? Supposedly Mr. Obama is working on some kind of “pivot” toward Asia. How is he going to lead an American advance into Asia with secretaries at State and Defense who spent the formative years of their careers plumping for a retreat from Indochina? After all, the People’s Republic of China whose 122mm rockets were shelling our GIs in Vietnam is run by the same Communist Party that is today building aircraft carriers and testing our red lines in the seas of Asia.

These columns do not gainsay the fact that President Obama won the election. That is no small thing. It is an enormous thing, even if the number of persons voting for him plunged from 2008. On foreign policy, though, it’s starting to look like Mr. Obama is, to use his own wonderful phrase, getting way, way out ahead of his skis. For our part — we’re but one modest, online newspaper — we have a hard time seeing Mr. Hagel as defense secretary. What, though, is Mr. Obama doing? It strikes us that before the Senate votes him anything, let alone confirms a defense secretary, it would be logical to get a handle on where the administration intends to go on foreign policy.