Keeping His Enemies Closer, Obama Steals a Trick from Nixon’s Book
A very interesting piece in the Washington Post reports that the Obama Administration will expand and restructure the National Security Council to make it the main circuit cable for all its national security deliberations.
[National Security Advisor James] Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the “back channels” that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president’s office to unilaterally influence and make policy out of view of the others.
“We’re not always going to agree on everything,” Jones said, and “so it’s my job to make sure that minority opinion is represented” to the president. “But if at the end of the day he turns to me and says, ‘Well, what do you think, Jones?,’ I’m going to tell him what I think.”
The new structure, to be outlined in a presidential directive and a detailed implementation document by Jones, will expand the NSC’s reach far beyond the range of traditional foreign policy issues and turn it into a much more elastic body, with Cabinet and departmental seats at the table — historically occupied only by the secretaries of defense and state — determined on an issue-by-issue basis. Jones said the directive will probably be completed this week. [Washington Post, Karen De Young]
What the article leaves conspicuously unmentioned is the apparent diminution this would means for the new Secretary of State, who is also the new President’s former bitter rival. It brings to mind the example of William Rogers, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State, who was supplanted by Henry Kissinger as the President’s consigliore on all of the biggest foreign policy coups and crises of the day. Does that mean that Mrs. Clinton can look forward to four years of overseeing passport operations, consular minutiae, fisheries treaties, and funerals in Old Europe? If so, the effective marginalizing of Mrs. Clinton in a gilded cage at Foggy Bottom could rank as one of the most brilliant Machiavellian maneuvers in U.S. presidential history.
Whether that’s necessarily a good thing for the direction of our policy is less clear. While I tend to trust the instincts of James Jones more than those who follow in Mrs. Clinton’s baggage train, I wonder how well Jones will mesh with outspoken Obama svengali Samantha Power. Power holds some bizarre and impolitic views, but her emphasis on the prevention of genocide and her membership in the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea are both promising signs.