On Monday, John Bolton begins work as the United States’ 27th national security adviser. He will head the National Security Council, a body which formed for the first time only in 1947 as President Harry Truman sought to better coordinate defense, foreign affairs, economic policy, and intelligence as, in the wake of World War II, the United States assumed its place as a truly global power.
After President Trump announced Bolton’s appointment, many former officials and journalists expressed concerns about the policy positions Bolton had previously taken on issues such as the United Nations, Iran, Iraq, and Russia. The adage “personnel is policy” is true, but much of the hand-wringing about Bolton’s appointment misunderstands what the NSC is, or at least what it is meant to be. The 1947 National Security Act charged the NSC with three tasks:
- advise the president with respect to the integration of national security tools to a greater whole;
- assess objectives, commitments, and risks; and
- make recommendations based on the common interests of the various agencies involved in national security.
Simply put, the NSC was never meant to be a policy-making body. It was instead supposed to coordinate agencies. Bolton’s greatest accomplishment could be returning the body to its roots rather than using it as a platform for personal policy priorities. There are a lot of departments, agencies, and offices of national security in the federal government, but only the NSC exists solely to support the president’s national security decision-making, and only the NSC can take a truly interagency approach to that task.
It is anathema to many in Washington, but a key to NSC success will be to shrink it. In 1991, the NSC had 40 men and women among its staff; by the Obama administration, that number had increased tenfold. The NSC became not simply a body to coordinate policy and strategy, but rather just one more bureaucracy whose seats were awarded as political patronage. And as it drifted into a policy-making body on its own, its role as a trusted coordinator fell by the wayside. During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the willingness of NSC staffers to utilize an 8,000-mile screwdriver and second guess commanders in the field first in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then in Libya and Syria, meant that the NSC was not adding value. Instead, with the growth of its size, reach, and activity, the NSC was actually undermining the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency and preventing officers and soldiers in the field from doing the jobs they had been tasked and trained to do.
Luke Strange, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has penned a thoughtful essay about NSC reform that should be a must-read for anyone, regardless of which side of the aisle they sit. After all, in the hyperpolarized atmosphere in which the United States now finds itself, the need for NSC reform is one of the few areas on which foreign policy and national security professionals across the political spectrum can agree.
With China, Russia, and Iran resurgent, the United States faces a renewed period of competition on both the regional and global levels, and the National Security Council needs to be up to the task. A disciplined, effective process that is grounded in the NSC’s statutory framework and the lessons of its history can give the president a chance to make good decisions.
Here, Bolton should focus on how he can remake the NSC to maximize its value not only to Trump but to those who succeed him. Rather than treating the NSC as a superagency for national security matters, Bolton should return the NSC to what it should be: a tool to help presidents make decisions and then coordinate the policies which result. The national security adviser in particular should be an agent of the president. To the extent that he becomes an advocate for a particular approach, he becomes just another player at the table, rather than a coordinator acting on behalf of the president.
While it is natural human behavior for executives to want to pull decision-making into as close a circle as possible, the national security adviser shouldn’t close him or, in the future, herself off from necessary information. When he or she does, it contributes to a breakdown in trust among his advisers, which in turn increases infighting and factionalism. A better approach is to include the relevant players — whom the president has appointed or hired — in the process by implicating them in decisions and holding them accountable for results. Certainly, in this day and age the risk of leaks is high. But if the president and his national security adviser take a no-nonsense approach and fire those even suspected of leaking, officials who want to trade on such information for the sake of ego or sense of power will soon think twice.
Trump’s administration has been more chaotic than most, and the National Security Council has suffered disproportionately. Trump now has had three national security advisers (not counting one acting national security adviser after Michael Flynn’s resignation), a number surpassed only by Ronald Reagan (who by this point in his administration was just starting his second). If Trump wants to implement his agenda, such as it may be, and steer the United States through a world more dangerous than perhaps any time in a half century, it is essential that he utilize the NSC for what it was supposed to be. As Strange concludes, it is better to fall back on statutory foundations, best practices of prior administrations, and restrict the NSC to doing only those things that only it can do.
Bolton offers a fresh start to what has over the past quarter century become a national security bureaucracy run amok. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Trump’s policies, it is essential to right the NSC back on its rails.
(Full disclosure: Bolton was a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, albeit someone with whom I did not work closely.)
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
