Bolton Leaves the National Security Council in Ruins

Heather Hurlburt published a piece on the state of the National Security Council in Foreign Policy.

At the Pentagon, Schulman and two former Pentagon colleagues have highlighted process changes and lapses that add up to a significant decline in civilian oversight. Retired intelligence officials worry that the community is demoralized, leading to “rote production” of intelligence in the near term and a loss of talent in the long term. Meanwhile, there’s more leakage between the functions normally reserved for intelligence agencies and those carried out by policy agencies.

For example, as Trump’s team debated whether or not to strike Iran, news reports indicated that CIA Director Gina Haspel had explicitly “favored” a strike—a surprising departure from the expectation that intelligence officials bring information but do not make policy. And in the other direction, the Financial Times reported that State Department Iran envoy Brian Hook used his official phone number and email in an attempt to bribe a Persian Gulf ship’s captain—something that would normally be approved at fairly senior levels and then left for intelligence operatives to implement. The State Department itself has suffered through a major loss of the senior talent that knew how to work the interagency process and promote the department’s interests—as well as how to conduct the actual business of diplomacy.

The decay of norms, the rise of unaccountable fiefdoms, the discounting of civilian oversight, the loss of senior talent, and the collapse of recruitment for new talent—none of those issues is solved by a president with a different process or, for that matter, a different ideology.

But, likewise, nostalgia for prior processes is not the answer, either. The Obama administration’s NSC process had plenty of bipartisan critics for its length and complexity. The movement of power from the agencies to the White House, for that matter, accelerated under President Barack Obama but had been underway for decades.