My own feeling that you can make a different ultimately brought me to Washington, a city full of people who share this belief (or delusion) despite all its history and pathologies, which inevitably confounds the effort of the best intentioned. The question has arisen again and again: In this day and age, can any one individual or any small group of individuals alter the course of history, shape great outcomes, or make a difference?
If any one individual could claim to have decisive impact it ought to be the president of the US.
For a country that is the world’s greatest democracy — and one that regularly pats itself on the back for this distinction, hawking its native political theories as avidly as it does its soap and its pop stars — it is remarkable how deficient and decaying our political system is. A particularly insidious element of this deficiency is the ignorance of the electorate about their government.
It used to be, in the bygone days of American education, that the teaching of civics was a given and that every child was expected to have a basic understanding of the workings of our government before he or she was sent out into the world.
Who determines the national interests of a disinterested nation? The many can’t, so it is left to the few.
Over time — and this is much of the story of the NSC — this group has inexorably gained power. Today it is a formidable government force, with more personnel than some cabinet-level agencies, and vastly more powerful than any of the vastly larger major bureaucracies.
The NSC instead provides a useful setting, a hub of power that draw the storyteller precisely because it is not well understood and thus offers considerable license to authors.
In fact, much of what is important in the workings of this most powerful of all the world’s committees is to be found in the details that exist beyond the view of the general public: in the importance of personal relationships; in the important role that informal meetings, even accidental ones, play in influencing outcomes; in the constraints and the limitations of process; in the political and bureaucratic subtexts that outlive presidencies.
Two classes of actors around the presidents, “barons” and “courtiers.” A baron by their definition was a “senior official in charge on an important domain within the presidential realm.” Like kings in the Middle Ages, Presidents have “courtiers” in the WH who gain influence by responding to both their personal needs and their political priorities. And these courtiers come inevitably into contact with the barons. With all such rivalries come intrigues, competition, historical animosities, and human follies that undo well-made plans.
The US does not act in a vacuum, and despite our unchallenged supremacy among nations in terms of military and economic capabilities at this moment in time, we are not invulnerable, nor are we possessed of unlimited power. In fact, we are simply the leading member of a community. Understanding the dynamics within that community also proves to be essential to understanding US options, actions, and consequences.
Even the most casual observer can see that ideology creates policy handcuffs, that leaders who act on the faith that their worldview is right invite history to offer the nuances they will not or cannot see, and that “purely pragmatic” government actions stripped of underlying philosophy can be as dangerous as those driven by any particular dogma.
The foreign policy community feels even small, even inbred. All the insider, all the members of this committee over time know the others well and recognize that they will no doubt deal with one another for their entire lives. Among them are old animosities, extremely complex relationships, friendships that have withstood the test of time, loyalties, knowledge, old school ties, and other deep linkages.
But before you begin planning your own conspiracy theory website, ask yourself: Would you really want it any other way? Would you really want such important decisions made by people with less experience, who didn’t know one another, who had not seen the cycles of recent history unfold?
The responsibility of great states is to serve and not to dominate the world.
Throughout history, victors in war had sought power in exchange for their labors. Cromwell and Marlborough were but 2 relatively recent examples from British history that had illustrated this point. But Washington, like the often-cited example of the Roman farmer-soldier Cincinnatus, chose to return to his fields and his family.
A more imperially inclined leader might have demanded adherence to his views above all others. Rather, the general listened to his advisors and their strong disagreements; weighed them, often taking much more time to do so than they would have liked; and then made solid decisions that he expected to be enforced.
Had not the greatest man in the country, the one who could have taken any path, the one to whom virtually no one would stand up, chosen the course he did, it is substantially less likely that the republic would be here today or that democracy would have taken root and spread so successfully worldwide. Thus, Washington’s great choice was not simply the choice not to be king; it was a string of decisions, including the choices to peacefully leave the offices of commander of the army and later of president, the choice to place himself beneath the law and at the will of the people, and above all, the choice to serve rather than dominate.
At both time, America’s position in the world was analogous to Washington’s position in America at the end of the Revolution. We were the unassailable, unchallenged leader among all nations.
No nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.
We had to make the same choice that Washington did, to harness our power for the greater good — and even then, we had to do as he did and resist the temptations to create a global community that was too self-serving, to rig the system too much. We had the military, political, and economic power to dominate, and instead we chose to invest in rebuilding even our enemies and then engaging them and others through a global civic architecture that surpassed anything ever before seen on the planet.
Another new feature of the postwar era was the specter of the Cold War and the likelihood that we would be engaged in a new kind of global competition, one that would forever end the notion that America existed apart from the world and could retreat to its own shores and turn off “foreign entanglements”.
The words from Truman’s first address — that the “responsibility of great states is to serve and not to dominate the world” — were drowned out by concepts like preemption and unilateralism, ideas that were more founded in raw power than they were on the philosophies of America’s founders.
As a class they are distinguished from today’s leaders in that they actually believed that philosophy was a discipline they should study and contemplate. They were not only the heirs of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Burke, but they also knew who these thinkers were. They discussed their writings and they debated the prevailing views of enlightenment Europe.
Today such debates are considered the province of smokey French TV program and irredeemable academics. In place of philosophy, which involves developing a system of belief based on questioning and reasoning, many of our modern leaders have embraced ideology, which is based on having a system of beliefs essentially stripped of the questions. Indeed, doubt and introspection are frowned on as offering the appearance of indecision.
Absent having philosophy as a driver of decisions, a greater role is given to expediency, politics, personal relationships, bureaucratic imperatives, and other factors, which, although important in a practical sense, are less likely to elevate outcomes or align them with ideas of justice or long-term national interests.
In these crucibles of crisis or slower pressure cookers of unfolding events, we repeatedly watch veneers crumble and even careerlong characteristics fall away and we discover the core nature of the key actors. For some administrations, like that of Truman, there were a number of such moments — beginning with his succeeding Roosevelt, his deciding whether to use the atomic bomb, his deciding whether to acknowledge the new state of Israel, and his embarking on the Korean War and the Cold War. For Eisenhower, it was almost certainly fending off the pressures to bring the Cold War to a head. For Kennedy, it was his 2 Cuban crises. For Johnson and Nixon it was Vietnam — and Nixon, of course, also had another test of his own devising. Ford’s was to heal the nation. Carter’s took place in Afghanistan and neighboring Iran. For Reagan, character was revealed in how he managed his confrontation with the “Evil Empire” and how he was very nearly undone by his inattention to the details of his own administration. For the first Bush, it was the Gulf War and managing the world as the Cold War wound down. For Clinton, it was searching for a post-Cold War paradigm and a crisis of personal behavior. For the second Bush, it was responding to the September 11 attacks and waging the war on terrorism.
These crises not only revealed the character of our leaders — and certainly, in each of these cases, the character of the president’s team was almost as important to determining the outcome as was the character of the leader himself — but they also helped shape public perceptions worldwide of the character and reputation of America.
America’s commitment to playing a leading role in the world was driven by the lessons of the failures to “win the peace” that followed WW1. This was an entire generation for whom those failures were still fresh in the imagination. One element of the lessons of those failures was the need for an institutional structure for the global community and an investment of political capital into the structure by the powers that mattered. But another lesson was recognizing that from the rubble and frustration of wars grows the next generation of enemies. This in turn led to a desire to rebuild Germany and Japan in ways that provided opportunities for growth within the new international system rather than incentives to ignore, deceive, or work around that system.
The stability threshold in any political system, from your local community to the emerging global system, turns on whether the majority of key players within that system — those with the power to make the system work or to disrupt it — believe that working within the system is more likely to produce a better future for themselves, their families, or the unit of society they represent than working outside the system. Even if there are some stragglers or those who resist the system, if the majority are thus invested in it, it will work, and it will resist attempts to upset it — provided the system also has effective mechanisms for dealing with such attempts and for avoiding the pitfalls of “tyranny of the majority.”
Note that even in the simpler, smaller-government days of Truman, the size of the group the president regularly came into contact with was much the same as it is today; given the demands of the president’s schedule, it would be difficult for him to have regular contact with more people than that. Consequently, in WH after WH, we see a group of perhaps a half dozen to at most a dozen or so who constitute the inner circle of advisors and decision makers. This group, which after all is much like the small group around Roosevelt that caused such consternation among members of his administration, remains the most important component of any administration’s national security process, because it is called for not by an act of Congress but by human nature. Trust and rapport are, in the day-to-day operations of any government, much more important than the formal mechanisms of governing.
The Clifford-Elsey report also shows the power of proximity — how members of the president’s personal staff regularly have influence disproportionate to their protocol rank in Washington.
Had they not witnessed the aftermath of halfway measures in the wake of WW1, the plan might have been narrower. Had they not come through a resounding victory and been so confident, the plan might not have been so sweeping or generous. Had they not seen the Soviets as such a threat, it might not have been imbued with such urgency. Had they not been so committed to America’s ongoing engagement in the world, it might not have been produced at all.
It is also an accepted fact that the foreign policy of a government depends for its acceptance by other nations upon the naval and military force that is behind it. Hence, it is submitted for the framing of our policies, it is necessary for the State Department to know how much they will cost to maintain by force in order to assign them their relative importance. Conversely, it is necessary for the Navy Department to know what policies it may be called upon to uphold by force in order to formulate plans and building programs.
Truman resisted efforts early on to turn the group into an analog for the kind of cabinet government practiced in Britain, in which the decisions of the group took precedence over the decisions of an individual. Truman also asserted that Congress did not necessarily even have the authority to demand the president take any group’s advice.
He should be a non-political confidant of the President — a trusted member of the President’s immediate official family, but he should not be identified with the immediate staff of personal advisers. He must be objective and willing to subordinate his personal views on policy to his task of coordinating the views of all responsible officials. His job is not to sell the President an idea with which he is in sympathy but rather to insure that the views of all interested departments and agencies are reflected. The executive director also must be willing to forgo publicity and personal aggrandizement.
There are many tiny threads, some invisible, all surprisingly strong, that bind modern Gullivers. As the US embarked on its new role as the world’s most powerful nation in the days after WW2, it could hardly imagine that within a few years, for all its power, it would be constrained in ways that precluded victory in 2 small corners of Asia, or hamstrung in the UN that it created, or that the flip side of containment was being bogged down worldwide in small struggles that sapped our strength, tested our will, and made us winder about the future of American power. In the same way, as the 3 presidents who presided over the new world that Truman had helped ushering into being discovered, being the “leader of the free world” did not exactly mean that they possessed unlimited power. Even at home, they found that everything from political realities to their own foibles to the groupthink and intrigues among their advisors would frustrate them just as did the tiny restraints on the comparatively giant Gulliver.
With such credentials and in such an environment, one might imagine that Eisenhower could have become the modern-day equivalent of Washington, the essential American, a man whose personal choices drove the nation that led the world. But in the modern America of political parties, of established checks and balances, of a deep belief that the system was greater than any individual, that was not the case. Eisenhower was wooed by both parties because of his appeal, much like Colin Powell in more recent times.
At the heart of the Eisenhower organization was the Planning Board, a committee consisting of assistant secretary-level representatives from NSC agencies and chaired by Cutler. The purpose of the group was to gather the policy views of each of the key cabinet departments on critical issues. Then the board subjected those positions to what Cutler called an “acid bath,” sharply delineating them and identifying and specifying points of disagreement. The board was strictly instructed not to water down disagreements or cover them up. Instead “policy splits” were to be spelled out (often in parallel columns) so that they might be debated by the NSC and resolved by the President.
The Planning Board usually met twice a week. Its job was to push ideas up the “policy hill” to the principals of the NSC, laying out matters clearly enough that all knew exactly where the best minds at each agency stood, where the divisions were, and what the questions the president needed to resolve were.
Eisenhower was then seen to turn beet red and grab the aide by the lapels and scream at him. He was clearly furious, but when the president realized he was being observed, he instantly change his entire demeanor — his complexion returned to normal and he resumed his famous avuncular smile, waved, and drove off.
There are many similar reports about Eisenhower’s temper and his willingness to use it in close quarters. Many close to him, including Nixon and the general’s wartime chief of staff, commented on the stresses of taking the heat so that their boss could appear to be the happy grandfather that the public loved.
I was just Ike’s prat boy. Ike always had to have a prat boy, someone who’d do the dirty work for him. He always had to have someone else who could do the firing, or the reprimanding, or give any orders which he knew people would find unpleasant to carry out. Ike always has to be the nice guy.
There were a couple of lapses early in the administration. Once, a man from the DoD came out of a meeting and stated in a public setting that “this is what was decided but I didn’t agree with it.” The man quickly came to understand that his future was very short. There was a clear understanding that we weren’t going to do that and that provided a discipline of decision making.
Nixon wrote: “The President was extremely serious and seemed to be greatly concerned about what was the right course to take. After the reports were made, Harold Stassen said that he thought that decision should be to send ground troops if necessary to save Indochina and to do it on a unilateral basis if that was the only way it could be done.” His diary entry concludes with a paragraph that could just as easily have been written about President Bush’s deliberations about Iraq. It reflects a classic dilemma for American leaders as they discover that great power alone is not enough to enable them to act as they might want to elsewhere in the world: “The President himself said that he could not visualize a ground troop operation in Indochina that would be supported by the people of the US and which would not in the long run put our defense too far out of balance. He also raised the point that we simply could not go in unilaterally because that was in violation of our whole principle of collective defense against communism in all places in the world.”
I guess the way you learn to do things it to do them imperfectly.
The implication of this remark was that somehow Castro was not driven by any internal aspect of his character, but rather that he existed only relative to the US and that our reaction to him made him who he was. This is a fascinating example of the national narcissism that recurs throughout our recent history.
He was trying to stake out a position that was differentiated from that of the Eisenhower administration and to weaken them and their likely candidate, VP Nixon.
Kennedy stepped into, as it turns out, one of the classic traps of the US political system. He was trapped by ambition, party, and circumstance into a position that would ultimately trigger the greatest political division in postwar American history and would lead to a profound national introspection and questioning our credentials and capabilities as a superpower and “leader of the free world.”
In fact, it was during the Eisenhower administration that the Republicans came to be seen as the party that was willing to engage more resolutely in the overseas battle against communism, whereas earlier they had been perceived as a voice for American isolation. Kennedy felt he could not win in the current environment if the Democrats presented themselves as anything but steel-willed.
In so doing, he evoked the political corollary to the old admonition “Be careful what you wish for” — although in politics it is a little worse: “Be careful of what you call for — as you may actually have to end up doing it.”
“Mr. President, if you don’t watch it, that plan will take legs of its own.” Eisenhower snapped back, “Not while I am President!” Goodpaster responded, “Yes, Mr. President. That’s the problem. You won’t be president much longer.”
He decimated the NSC staff, all that bureaucracy that Kennedy had criticized Ike for having in his NSC staff. Bundy reduced it in size from several scores of staff aides to about 11. Soon after the Bay of Pigs, he apparently realized that he was in trouble, that his staff was too small to provide the president with the kind of support that he needed. Blurring the distinction between policy and operations played a big role in the problems that resulted. Policy and operations are best kept separate for the same reason that the military advises on policy but does not make it. They are too invested in their own success or failure, as they must be.
Kennedy was not satisfied with the plan, however. It is one thing to call for action as a candidate and quite another to be responsible for it as a president. He had pressed for a less visible and more deniable alternative: “Could not such a force be landed carefully and quietly and make its first major military efforts from the mountains — then taking shape as a Cuban force within China, not as an invasion force sent by the Yankees?” He was in the trap, writhing around looking for a comfortable position within it.
If he hadn’t gone ahead with it, everybody would have said it showed that he had no courage. Eisenhower’s people trained these people, it was Eisenhower’s plan; Eisenhower’s people all said it would succeed — and we turned it down.
That night the president cried. As well he might have. The operation had been doomed on every level. It was ill conceived. Those who had conceived it had been in the position not only of advocating, but also of providing the intelligence ro support their assertions. There had been no systematic process for vetting the assertions involved. The president and his men were inexperienced in dealing with such crises. The plan had been made by a predecessor and they feared they would be blamed for bungling it.
In the wake of the failure in the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy realized that he was hostage to the information and analysis that was provided to him by cabinet agencies. He depended on State and Defense to relay cables giving information about developments and on the CIA to give their interpretation of the intelligence they were gathering. Furthermore, Kennedy had ignored Goodpaster’s advice that the president’s daily intelligence briefing should come from a disinterested party.
Kennedy’s team was essentially civilian and had no in-house “decoder” for the information and analysis sent in from the military. Kennedy believed in the power of brilliant minds. But brilliant minds without experience were not enough. A balance was needed. The search for this balance has been reflected in the history of the national security advisor position. By far the two groups with the greatest representation in the ranks of national advisors are academics and military men.
Later Kissinger would comment to me that in Washington, the most important thing was “proximity, proximity, and proximity” — that the fact that his office was just down the hall from the president made all the difference in the world in terms of his relative influence compared with other cabinet secretaries.
During the course of the discussion the participants laid out a series of options. With attack options among the most favored, Robert Kennedy passed a note to his brother: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.”
As President Kennedy was contemplating running for reelection in 1963, he and his advisors had come to the conclusion that an increased US involvement in Vietnam was becoming an inevitability. The great foreign policy lesson of their generation was “no more Munichs.” Appeasement of an enemy could only produce disaster. And once again, the tough anticommunist rhetoric Kennedy had used in 1960 would edge him into a position that neither he nor any of his advisors could fully grasp, and which would torture many of them and the country for decades after the death of the young president.
Taylor and his colleagues were still in the throes of what can only be described as America’s postwar hubris — and their miscalculations ultimately would trigger the sequence of events that would puncture that hubris for decades to come. (Though, hubris, as it turns out, is one of the most resilient organs of the human psyche and, like the tails of certain lizards, it grows back comparatively rapidly.)
The president’s key advisors, Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy, largely embraced the mission’s findings. Here began one of the most pernicious illnesses afflicting the policy process: groupthink. Although there were divisions within the group, momentum toward consensus started to build, and the collective agreement of the principles created more momentum, and so on. Kennedy’s brilliant young technocrats were especially vulnerable to the persuasive power of their own elegant logic. It made it hard to admit the possibility, let alone the desirability, of alternatives. Instead their youthful arrogance reinforced itself.
83% of surveyed Americans said that they supported the bombing, and almost the same proportion said they supported the objective of “keeping the communists from taking over all of Southeast Asia.” This provided powerful support for the group who felt that we would inevitably win through applied strength since our power was inexhaustible and unassailable relative to our tiny enemy.
These men had been deeply influenced by the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis, especially the value of “flexible response” and “controlled escalation.” Their success in handling a nuclear showdown with Moscow had created a feeling that no nation as small and backward as North Vietnam, could stand up to the power of the US. These men were not arrogant in the sense that Senator Fulbright and others later accused them of being, but they possessed a misplace belief that American power could not be successfully challenged, no matter what the circumstances, anywhere in the world.
When I entered, George Ball was speaking. “We can’t win. The war will be long and protracted, with heavy casualties. The most we can hope for is a messy conclusion. We must measure this long-term price against the short-term loss that will result from a withdrawal.”
Producing a chart that correlated public opinion with American casualties in Korea, Ball predicted that the American public would not support a long and inconclusive war. World opinion would also turn against us. Ball said he knew that withdrawal was difficult for a President. “But almost every great captain of history at some time in his career has had to make a tactical withdrawal when conditions were unfavorable.” He compared the situation to that of a cancer patient on chemotherapy: we might keep the patient alive longer, but he would be fatally weakened in the long run.
One by one, the other senior members of the Administration lined up against Ball. McGeorge Bundy argued in his usual crisp style that Ball’s views constituted a “radical switch in policy, without any evidence it should be done.” Ball’s arguments, he asserted, went “in the face of all that we have said and done.”
“There is a greater threat of WW3 if we don’t go in than if we go in. I cannot be as pessimistic as George Ball about the situation in Vietnam.” McNamara said, “Our national honor is at stake.” In this, he was certainly correct.
They did not, in short, recognize that even the most powerful nation in the history of the world has limits. They also illustrated a vital point that would haunt generations of their successors. The greatest of all limitations on power is not political, diplomatic, or circumstantial — it is failed power. Implied power is great: the superpowers were most super with regard to the wars they did not fight. But power that fails the test of application will be long doubted. With the great failure in Vietnam, America ushered in an era of self-doubt that would bring new forms of limitations and at times paralysis.
He was sometimes seen with a starlet. Truly, if anyone during my high school years strode the world stage, it was Henry. He also had a sense of humor and made witty comments. Who could resist smart, funny, and powerful?
Like many American political campaigns, therefore, it was a cynical affair, with Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey forced to defend policies he did not much like, and Nixon promising a plan for peace he did not really have.
Nixon, Kissinger, and America in the late 1960s and early 1970s lived with the fresh memory of the era of American greatness that produced victories in Europe and Japan and presided over the rebuilding of large tracts of the planet. They aspired to similar heights and then, having scaled them, discovered that the view was not what they thought it might be. They discovered Gulliver bound to the beach in Liliput. They lived in an era in which people theorized openly on American decline. They would come to epitomize the torment of a nation coming to grips with its own limitations — much like the struggle of men of a certain age coming to realize that for all their achievements, life was not going to be as they had dreamed it, that the things that had raised them up also planted the seeds of their demise.
Why America is sitting on its ass is the same reason our ship is sitting on its ass. Crosscurrents, seismic movements, unknown things in the night. But you can’t help thinking it’s somebody’s fault.
The NSSM process was an important one for the Nixon WH, and, despite typical grumbling from the agencies for which it created more work, it produced something very unusual among WH staffs and interagency leadership groups of any period: forethought. Indeed, even today, senior policymakers look back on the Kissinger era as a halcyon time for planning ahead and anticipating change. Kissinger himself would speak with great pride of preparing contingency plans for different challenges — particularly with regard to confrontations with the Soviet Union — in which his team would put together notebooks that even included the cables to be sent in the event of certain triggering actions. In today’s world in which virtually everything is reactive to the relentless demands of the 24-hour news cycle, it looks particularly appealing. “In many situations which developed, we weren’t surprised. We were prepared and had thought our options through in advance.”
After all, the State Department has 180 clients. So they have a lot of things to get done each day which have a necessary priority for them. So the operation of the State Department, for example, is basically answering cables. It is very hard when you are secretary of state to say, the hell with this, now let’s talk about long-range problems and work back from that.
Although their views are not universally positive on every aspect of Nixon-era policy, the degree to which there is unanimity about the quality of the process and of Kissinger’s genius for keeping the big picture in mind (and for having thought that big picture through) is remarkable.
Kissinger put an awful lot of emphasis on this process of open debate, options, analysis of outcomes, analysis of assumptions. And it was really a high art that resulted in the writing of a good policy paper.
The good policy paper laid out the issue and then provided a lot of good detailed background and technical background and political background and then it stated assumptions and stated goals so that if people quibbled about those assumptions or goals you could have a debate. But at least you knew where the rest of the paper was coming from — it was coming from a certain set of assumptions. There was always a good intelligence tab or appendix that provided all the data that the intelligence community knew. And then there were options, and under each of the options there was either a pro-con list or a list of evaluative criteria to evaluate each of the options on the same set of criteria: how would the allies react, how would the Congress react, would the Russians agree to it, how would it get us to our goals, and how close it would get us to our goals. And it was all very transparent. You could see the flow of thought.
“One thing that I thought was missing in many other administrations, although everybody tries to achieve it, is the kind of very thoughtful strategic planning we did then. In other words, an effort to look out to the long term, conceptually, at what you are trying to accomplish, not in terms of the next 6 months or the crisis at the moment, not just in a 4-year term, but what do we need to do over the next 10, 15, or 20 years and how do we get there. And this resulted in Kissinger’s ability, in my view, even when we were in the midst of a frantic crisis — which was very consuming — to be able to sit back and try to figure out what we are trying to do with this, how are we going to come out, and what should we be doing about it rather than moment-to-moment management of the crisis which everybody was involved in.”
That description fits with what Kissinger calls his basic administrative philosophy, which was not to do the things that somebody else can do. “I spent a major portion of my time on medium- and long-range issues and wrote many of my memos to the president on these subjects. For example, take the Mideast. I had said that we had as a strategic objective to drive the Russians out of the Middle East. People laughed when I said it in 1969. But our strategy was to block everything that the Soviets backed in the Middle East. This was a systematic policy. So when the [October 1973] war broke out, I did not have to ask what the strategy should be. It was instead a question of implementing something we had already thought through.”
NSSM-3 was useful within the Pentagon. It forced discussions about issues that a lot of people in the services, and the Joint Chiefs in particular, did not want to address. They didn’t even want to think about them.
Consequently, they were permanent constraints, and every US foreign policy decision made in the postwar period before the early 1990s had to be weighed in terms of potential Soviet response. In effect, they were a built-in check on the US as a superpower, much as we were a built-in check on them. This kind of balance of power produced both tension and stability. When it disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opportunity opened up for the US to act more freely and, to some degree, less thoughtfully and less cautiously, because the counterbalances to our power were less clear.
Each shows a broader geopolitical vision, a sense that no matter the size or importance of the initiative, it was a piece in a larger strategy and its connections to other issues of import were being taken into consideration. Taken together, they provide both a picture of the great aspirations of the actors, for themselves and for their country’s role in the world, and evidence of the limitations on that country.
As has often been noted, the opening to China was something that only someone with Nixon’s ironclad anticommunist credentials could even contemplate. Kennedy considered it, but concluded it would be political suicide.
Prior to the China trip there were some in the State Department who worried that we would upset our relations with Russia, which in their eyes were more important. Which is ridiculous. It helped our relations with Russia. That was one of the main reasons to deal with China — to improve our relations with Moscow.
We were more generous in our offers to Hanoi than the NYT editorials that were beating up on us for not being generous. So that’s the price you pay for secrecy.
Indeed, the fact that Kissinger understood this power was displayed in his frequent tactical resignations — threats designed to move the president’s views toward his own or away from some perceived calamity. “They were a tool he used like a weapon in his arsenal to manage the president and the bureaucracy. They needed him more than he needed them — or so they thought. He played it like a virtuoso.”
This completed the ascent of Henry Kissinger to a position of power in the US government unrivaled by any non-president in American history. He was, as far as international affairs was concerned, the PM, the driving force behind US policy, its chief architect, its chief spokesperson, its chief engineer, and its chief driver.
In their views of foreign policy, there are several areas where differences between the 2 men are apparent — their views of the Soviets, of US interests with regard to Israel, of the relative importance of values such as human rights in foreign policy, and of the appropriate use of secrecy.
Kissinger and Nixon’s actions suggested that at least to some degree, they saw the world in terms of America’s decline and the potential rise of the Soviet Union. They acted as though worried that the tides of history had turned against the US. Brzezinski and Carter saw the world in terms of the decline of the Soviet Union and the opportunity that created for the US. Brzezinski characterize the Kissinger view as being that of a “Spenglerian” declinist.
Spengler’s theory was based on the idea that the modern era in the West was much like that of ancient Greece or Rome and that, like those civilizations, we would ultimately be undone by our less enlightened, more brutal instincts.
Nevertheless, critics have claimed to detect a fatalistic defeatism in his policies, something which flowed from a belief that American civilization had passed its high point, like so many before it and had to accommodate the rising forces represented by the USSR, “Sparta to our Athens.”
Since the 1950s, Brzezinski had been devoting himself to the study of the Soviet Union and communist systems.
This is the only way to explain how an adversary with a corrupt and failing political system and a corrupt and failing economic system representing a group of peoples held together by force rather than affinity could be assessed as our equal purely because of the number of nuclear warheads they had and their capacity to deliver them.
He was also deeply ambitious. Outwardly Carter seems a quiet, self-effacing man, a man of great faith. But he is also intensely self-confident and possessed of a very high belief in both the power of his own intelligence and his ability to achieve what he sets out to do. In these characteristics, he is like most men who ultimately become president — although you get the distinct impression that he, like Nixon, falls into the category of men who were fueled in their quest for the job by a desire to achieve the highest office in the land as opposed to other, also ambitious men, such as Reagan and Clinton, who may have pursued the job also out of a compulsion to be liked by as large an audience as possible, or the Kennedys or the Bushes, who seem to have pursued the job largely because they felt they were supposed to.
Carter wrote about Brzezinski in his memoirs, “To me, Zbig was interesting. He would probe constantly for new ways to accomplish a goal, sometimes wanting to pursue a path that might be ill-advised — but always thinking. We had many arguments about history, politics, international events, and foreign policy — often disagreeing strongly and fundamentally — but we still got along well. Next to members of my family, Zbig would be my favorite seatmate on a long-distance trip; we might argue, but I would never be bored.” Brzezinski, in turn, has called Carter “shrewd, rather deliberate yet fundamentally very decent and engaging.” He admired his intelligence and yet was aware of his “occasionally surprising naivete,” admired his “dedication to principle” but expressed concern about his “excessive tactical flexibility,” admired his situation management skills but felt that they sometimes paid a price for his overstatements, appreciated his serenity but also noted the chills that came when their relationship endured “major shifts from genuine warmth to sudden distance.”
Carter join the group and was quickly impressed by him as a potential rising star. Just as it takes an almost pathological need for the job to enable someone to sustain the travails and to work the decades it might take to become president, it takes a similar level of ambition and regular application of that ambition to rise up the policy ladder. Merit alone does not bring advisors to the attention of potential patrons or potential presidents. Consequently, every single figure in this book has spent much of his or her career working the system — getting involved in networking groups, getting published, going to cocktail parties, developing connections, sending encouraging notes to those on the rise, offering to help.
“Put your money where your mouth is. If you like him and believe in him, don’t wait for developments, come out and support him.” Brzezinski made a donation to Carter’s campaign and started “more systematically” writing papers for Carter — even though at the time the Georgia governor barely showed up on the national political radar, with poll ratings down around 2%.
The nation was numb in the aftermath of both Watergate and Vietnam. While few in the street would consider or articulate questions about American decline as academics might, people knew in their gut that something was deeply wrong, that this was not the America they had been raised believing in, and that much of the blame lay inside Washington, inside the establishment — and in the Oval Office itself.
Not surprisingly there was some discomfort with the system. It was a bureaucratic first strike of the first order. The system essentially gave responsibility for the most important and sensitive issues to Zbig, and the vague definition of that constituted crisis management essentially ensured that if anything came up that was important, it could be claimed by the WH.
Carter’s team met informally more often than formally. Friday morning breakfast meetings were attended by Carter, Mondale, Vance, Brown, and Brzezinski, and later Jordan and occasionally others. As in past administrations it was in meetings like these that much of the real work — once imagined for formal NSC meetings, which were infrequent and usually done for history’s sake, for major decisions — was done.
Smaller groups obviously generate more discussion and give the President the opportunity to engage in a much more intimate view of the issues. You can’t make policy through informal procedures, but you can crystallize directions and then supervise both the implementation and coordination via the formal process.
Although the signing event increased public support for the treaties, the next several months were spent working the corridors on Capitol Hill, trying to win one Senate vote at a time to reach the total of 67 needed for ratification of the treaty.
Although all the charges ultimately proved untrue, it was Washington politics at its nastiest — and it can serve as a reminder to all present-day Americans that politics in the US has been a dirty business, going back to the lies and lie-driven scandals that swirled around Hamilton, Jefferson, and other members of Washington’s administration. Every generation says that it’s worse than ever and yearns for the civility of yesteryear. There was no civil yesteryear. “The stakes are too high for these guys to play clean — especially when they can’t win on the merits.”
Clearly, the important people, the presidents who made the appointments by and large were looking for people with political skills since 1969 — not for people with managerial skills or technical skills. it all became more of a political issue — more important to be able to fight the political battles regarding budgets and legislation and so forth. And of course, since the end of the Cold War, it is more of a political issue because it is no longer even clear what national security is.
Odom recalled that “for the next 2 years, based on the kind of analyses that we had done in PRM-10, we had to work slowly to try to bring the realities to the eyes of the President, the eyes of the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State and make them realize that we had to tackle some of those policies from very fundamentally different directions.”
In the Department of State you have the glory of the office, to fly around in a big plane and to appear at international meetings. But you don’t have the clout. The Secretary of Defense spends money while the Secretary of State begs for money. That’s a big difference.
One of the very greatest challenges to senior officials in the modern US government is that they literally find themselves going from one crisis-driven meeting to another with very little time in between to absorb what is happening, place it in context, or strategize.
He then goes on to refer to the State Department as a “sprawling Washington and worldwide bureaucracy” and says, “I rarely received innovative ideas from its staff members” whom he characterized as “mild and cautious.”
President Carter was unable to decide whether to heed the counsel of Brzezinski, who wanted to encourage the shah to suppress the revolution (or, if the shah was unable to do so, encourage a military dictatorship that could), or that of Vance’s more cautious State Department, which suggested that the administration reach out to opposition elements in order to smooth the inevitable transition to a new government.
He looked around the room and lamented that there was not a single Iranian expert in the room. He, too, was worried. My private was quite different: Thank God! If you include area experts in a high-level policy meeting, you’ll discover that they’re in love with the people from their area. They know a great many details about their area, but they are hopelessly inept at reaching sound recommendations for US policy. They’re the last people to ask what is the right thing to do. You should listen to area experts before you go to the policymaking meeting. Sort out what they have to say about realities, facts, etc. You really need to listen to them. They can tell you useful things. But you don’t want them telling you what to do. So, the Carter NSC staff had a good process.
After the Soviet invasion, the NSC weighed many other options, and the president ultimately enacted a number of policies that were not politically popular. These included a grain embargo, which was not embraced by farmers in the key state of Iowa, home to important party caucuses during the presidential primary season of 1980.
Perhaps it was another example of how the modern media had changed the rules on a politician in midstream with Ted Koppel’s Nightline drumbeat of “Hostage Crisis — Day 106, 107, 108…” reminding people in new ways of the futility of the administration’s efforts or, yet again, of the limitations on US power.
Carter was hands-on. Reagan was hands-off. Carter was a micromanager. Reagan didn’t want to be bothered with details. Carter was interested in too many issues, drawn in too many directions. Reagan was focused on a few core concerns. Carter was an intellectual possessed of a powerful mind. Reagan was intuitive. Carter was a workaholic. Reagan liked his naps and leaving the office early.
The Reagan presidency is primarily seen as important because he is credited with having played a central role in ending the Cold War. Furthermore, today, his administration is also seen as the modern-day wellspring of the conservative political and policy views that make it the spiritual antecedent of the administration of Bush II.
Just as Carter’s image of being an honest and honorable man was the antidote to the perceived problems of the Nixon era, Reagan’s apparent clarity and his message of strength and hope were the antidote to the perceived weakness and bleakness of the Carter era. In virtually every election of the modern era, the people opt for the more optimistic candidate and of all these, Reagan was the apotheosis.
One of the early efforts to “engage on a moral plane” was a decision to try to induce America’s European allies not to cooperate in the construction of a pipeline that would deliver Soviet natural gas to Western European customers. Like subsequent initiatives, the president’s rhetoric was seen as inflammatory by many Europeans, who could hardly be expected to embrace a policy that would actually undercut their own interests. Tensions with some of the Europeans grew and remained high as the US came to be seen as a narcissistic bully state that sought confrontation and viewed Europeans primarily as pawns in a great global game.
His tiffs with Allen were one thing, but running up against Clark was different. Clark was wired into the inner circle and was gradually coming to be seen as the administration’s foreign policy grown-up — an impressive rise for someone who didn’t know the basic vocabulary of the job a year earlier. It is also a rise that reiterates the vitally important point about the role of the national security advisor — that the advisor’s relationship with the president is by far the most important tool he has and his most important qualification.
This is not an experiment to try at home — and it boggles the mind somewhat that it took place — but it proves conclusively that there is no more important source of power in the executive branch than that afforded by a genuine connection with and the respect of the commander-in-chief.
Haig had doctrine and his promised role as the leader of the foreign policy team on his side. Clark had his relationship with Reagan and made one argument that is the most powerful weapon in the advisor’s arsenal — that he represented the president’s views and that they would prevail.
Haig had a hard time getting out of the mindset of the Nixon administration, which was much more of a dog-eat-dog administration, whereas Reagan liked a collegial administration.
Clearly, they couldn’t even speak civility to one another. Shultz is a pretty tough guy and I also think he was a guy who was pretty used to getting his way. And he was very disciplined and I think Weinberger was pretty undisciplined. If Shultz went to a meeting he expected everyone to know the subject. He expected to be able to discuss it in rational terms. And my guess is that Weinberger didn’t always know the subject — wasn’t always prepared to debate it — had no reasoned, rational, calm position.
What brought down communism was the intellectual bankruptcy of the philosophy, the corruption of the Soviet government, the sclerotic Soviet leadership, and the accumulated costs of waging the Cold War for 50 years. During most of that period, Ronald Reagan was hosting TV shows and doing commercials.
The fact that there was precious little evidence of Soviet activity on the island and that the entire exercise was an absurdity more closely linked to the Marx Brothers than to Karl Marx was papered over. Reagan was hired to make America feel better about itself, and here we had managed a neat, tidy little war with a victory and, within a few years, its own Clint Eastwood movie to memorialize it.
Shultz was a very smart man, but started with every little knowledge of arms control. He was very determined to master the subject and interested in it, and it did not take long before he was doing battle at NSC meetings on the subject.
Perle and Weinberger knew it was highly unlikely that the Soviets would accept the plan, particularly as it called for the trade-off of actual missiles for missiles that had not yet been installed, but it was written to appeal to both Reagan’s interest in nuclear abolition and his desire for compromise among competing agencies. The Defense proposal provided for the illusion of a compromise.
While McFarlane had doubts about the feasibility of such a system, he viewed the proposed antimissile shield as a powerful bargaining chip that would force the Soviets to agree to make significant cuts in their ICBM forces. He wasn’t sure if any antimissile system would ever emerge from the lab, but he believed that leveraging American technological prowess would allow the US to exchange an untested research program for tangible reductions in actual, deployed offensive weaponry.
Whether anyone in the room had perspective enough to recognize that the communist threat in Central America was significantly overstated and was seized upon because it offered a low-risk environment to talk tough, take action, and yet avoid confrontations with really dangerous enemies or really complex foreign policy situations is another issue. As in Grenada, fighting communists in Central America can be seen in retrospect as a kind of therapy program for American egos wounded in Southeast Asia to win their confidence back by beating up on rag-tag resistance groups who, while dangerous to people in their path, were not appreciably worse than the right-wing regimes we were supporting and certainly never really posed a major threat to any US interests.
For those who worked in the system, it was a powerful message about the dangers of an operational NSC and, more important, about the dangers of an NSC operating without adult supervision. Given that the council staff lacks the congressional oversight of other executive branch agencies, it requires attentive management from the one power center to which it is accountable, the president. However, Reagan’s detached chairman-of-the-board-type presidency — often touted by supporters of the president as a desirable alternative to the micromanagement of the Carter years — opened the door to the communications and oversight breakdowns that produced Iran-Contra.
Of course, the costs of the experiments, failures, missteps, and political battles of the Reagan years were high. America had been bogged down in costly misadventures and there had also been a staggeringly high toll on the members of the administration themselves.
Both presidents were popular despite the problems within their foreign policy apparatus — less so overseas, perhaps. But at home, the American people place an especially high premium on how these processes made them feel rather than how well they function in policy terms.
In the recent history of US foreign policy, there has been no president, nor any president’s team who, when confronted with profound international change and challenges, responded with such a thoughtful and well-manage foreign policy operation as George H.W. Bush.
It also points to a hidden danger in a 2-party system: When one party dominates the executive for any extended period, the foreign policy skills of the other party atrophy and, even if they have a good team, they struggle to get up to speed once back in power.
The group also laughed a lot together. This might seem like a trivial observation, but in interviewing members of the senior teams for virtually every modern administration, it’s a recurring theme. Successful administrations, like successful baseball teams, are loose, relaxed. NSCs and their staffs work harder than virtually any other professional group I know of, often with 12- or 14-hour days, often 6 or 7 days a week. In such an environment, humor is a critical ally.
One of the things I saw from the Nixon-Kissinger days is that there was a lot of resentment that all the policy seemed to come down from above. I thought that you ought to give everybody in Defense, in State, and so on, the sense they were participating. So you ought to have studies done. You ought to have prescriptions. So whether their ideas were accepted or not, they felt like they had an honest hearing and that would give the whole process enthusiasm and help their productivity.
After the briefest pause, he adds, “I’ve got to say, they were a real disappointment.” He attributes the general inability of government bureaucracies to do long-range planning as the source of his disappointment with the review papers.
I’m still trying to figure out how you really do thoughtful work which is closely enough integrated with the day-to-day operation that people say, Yes, this gives us a kind of a road map and yet it’s divorced from today’s crisis.
Did Reagan’s defense budget end the Cold War? I don’t think so. I think what they did is put pressure on them. But the Soviet system had its own problems. They had 3 aging or senile leaders in a row. The system was faltering. They needed to reinvigorate before the Reagan era. Gorbachev came in not to end the Soviet Union but to invigorate and modernize it. And he started that by trying to increase productivity, which led to a huge boost in the economy. But in the process he started to dismantle the system which made it all work and didn’t realize it.
This is a nice guy who wrote this memo. But it could never happen. They were all just part of the culture — the Cold War culture — and they simply couldn’t conceive that this was all going to change.
He admitted that the Soviets could produce a good ballistic missile but not a good syringe. “How can we be called a superpower when we can’t produce a good syringe?”
Even during the end of the Carter years, we had people doing all these demographic health studies, and by every measure you could see that this Soviet system was a system in crisis. You could see that the contradictions were growing, whether by design or inadvertently.
We should work on the domestic side to strengthen the image of America’s foreign policy as driven by clear objectives. We could not meet Gorbachev head on if we did not appear confident about our purposes and agenda.
For all the care that goes into planning foreign policy and for all the serious statements from foreign policy practitioners that make it sound as though they are dealing in the hard and fast rules and realities of a science, the processes by which any administration copes with and attempts to shape the flow of world events is much more like an art form. And if it is like any art form more than another, it is like jazz. The key players work together as a single unit, collaborating closely — the more intuitively the better, responding to new motifs and surprising changes with improvised counterthemes and working and hoping that the elements resolve themselves satisfactorily in the end.
And so, in July, I sent a memo to President Bush and asked him for authority to set up under the deputies committee a very small, very secret task force to begin contingency planning for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Kanter drew a distinction between this process and the one they inherited, noting that “during the 2nd Reagan administration, all matters concerning arms control became matters of high theology. And being burned at the stake was too good for people who got it wrong on these matters of faith.”
Initially, Scowcroft could not imagine that the Soviets would allow East Germany to leave the Warsaw Pact, let alone be permitted to join a West Germany that still maintained its membership in NATO.
One of the key issues when the collapse came was that there were those in the administration who wanted not only the dissolution of the Soviet Union but the dissolution of Russia so they would never be a threat to us again. Defense reportedly advanced this view. But one of the principal conclusions of the small task force had been that our highest priority should the Soviet Union collapse is the maintenance of a strong central government in Moscow so as to maintain control over the nuclear weapons. We were able to sue those conclusions to be able to quickly dispose of any thought of trying to make trouble in Russia.
From the time of the invasion until the end of the war it was just an emotional roller coaster. You had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs saying there would be 50K body bags, and you didn’t have the kind of support you wanted. Enormous anxiety and critical energy was spent by the time the war ended. At the time, I was worried about the issues of nukes. I was very worried about the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I was very worried about the brain drain of Soviet scientists. I wanted us to come up with a much bigger program than we did. In the end we came up with something, but one of the things we need to consider is the simple question of how many big issues can anyone handle and for how long?
The central players run, even in easy times, from meeting to meeting and seldom have a moment to catch their breath or consider the connections between events. Particularly in the modern era, in which events transpire with great rapidity and news flows are so overwhelming — and in which threats are changing and proliferating — combating this kind of overload needs to be a new procedural and structural priority of those managing the foreign policy process.
The last time I was here was the end of an era. And I’m quite convinced that we were harvesting decisions that had been taken 50 years before. And that the amazing thing about being here in ’89 or ’90 or ’91 was that you would look back and you would say, Oh yeah, if we hadn’t done that in ’46 or ’47 — and I mean things like creating NATO or the decision to actually insist on a democratic Germany, when most of Europe simply wanted to split it up into as many of them as there could possibly be — you had the sense you were ending an era. And an era that had begun in times that must have seemed awfully chaotic and different, difficult, but somehow they found a way of putting in place institutions that then lasted for 50-year period and got to end it. I even had the sense that it was like looking at the negative of an old photograph. You knew that these issues had been around for a long time.
The significant adjuvant component to the end of the Soviet Union was not SDI but the newly wired world, one connected by emerging technologies and instantaneous communications. It became both increasingly difficult for closed societies to remain closed to global influences and increasingly obvious to them that they could not compete. Markets thrive on information, and managers in closed society simply didn’t have access to the information they needed to remain competitive even within their own rusting, centralized economies. To connect to the more dynamic economies of the West, glasnot was critical.
Recognizing that “we could no longer do business as usual with the Chinese,” as Baker writes, a response to Tiananmen Square had to be crafted that would acknowledge American revulsion at the killings without undermining the productive relationship that had produced economic and security benefits for both parties.
Although Baker writes that he would have preferred to go on the mission himself but the need for secrecy made such a trip impossible, Solomon stated that “Baker dropped China like a hot potato right after Tiananmen.”
But, given the rapidly changing geopolitical realities confronting the US, the collective desire of America’s senior leadership not to add another crisis to their already too-full agenda can be well understood. Furthermore, as Clinton would soon learn, simply jawboning the Chinese leadership was not the most effective way to promote change in that society. China, too, was feeling the need to reinvent itself to adapt to the emerging realities of the information era and consequently would be facing pressures to change that would be far more powerful than any speech a senior US official could offer.
That search for a balance produced one of several great and tragic ironies of US policy in the Middle East during the Reagan era. One of these was our rather indiscriminate support of the mujahideen who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. So committed were we to pushing the Soviets out that we ended up supporting both the Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden. Similarly, because of our desire to weaken Iran, we supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during its war with Iran despite its horrific tactics, which included the use of poison gas.
Combined with Kuwait, Iraq now held 20% of the world oil reserves and would control 40% if they invaded Saudi Arabia. Add to this a million-man military, and the region faced a considerable threat, according to Cheney, a threat assessment backed by other NSC principals.
The image of Scowcroft, who during the 2nd Bush administration came to be ostracized because of his concerns about the administration’s Iraq policy trying to urge Cheney, a key architect of the 2003 invasion, to be more forthcoming with effective military plans for the 1st Gulf War presents an irony that cannot be ignored.
The problem with too many of the policy planning notions in government at that they tend to occur at the beginning of administrations. What is important is policy planning every month you are in office. Constantly challenging what you do. During the Gulf crisis of 1990-91, every Saturday morning, Brent and I, or Brent, Bob Gates, and I, used to gather in Brent’s office. And Brent would be lying down on his couch, and he’s basically say, Ok, what do we do now? What do we do next? What aren’t we thinking about? And we just institutionalized it. Every Saturday morning, the 2 or 3 of us would spend time taking a step back, saying okay, here’s my list. Here’s everything we’re working on. What are we comfortable with? What could happen that we’re not thinking of? And we just tried to do that, to stay one step ahead of events.
Not every player on the team had equal patience with the process of marshaling and maintaining international support. Dick Cheney “just didn’t have much time for the international bureaucratic process, the diplomatic process.” And in this respect, looking at his stance in the run-up to the 2nd Gulf War, he has not changed his position when it comes to the UN or coalitions.
The administration had little interest in occupying Iraq and ousting Hussein with American forces, as then SecDef Cheney noted in a Feb 1992 interview:
If we’d gone to Baghdad and got rid of Saddam Hussein, we’d have had to put a lot of forces in and run him to ground some place. Then you’ve got to put a new government in his place and then you’re faced with the question of what kind of government you are going to establish in Iraq? Is it going to be a Kurdish government or a Shia government or a Sunni government? How many forces are you going to leave there to keep it propped up, how many casualties are you going to take through the course of this operation?
In the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, President Bush’s popularity reached an unprecedented high, with an approval rating exceeding 90%. But the American people have a very short memory when it comes to foreign policy. They are willing to celebrate a victory, they are willing to protest a defeat, they are willing to mobilize in the face of a threat, but the rest of the time, they would prefer it if their foreign policy were invisible and they could focus on domestic issues.
Clinton criticized Bush’s post-Tiananmen stance with China as too soft. He condemned the Bush administration for its inaction in Bosnia, where ethnic killing had left the streets running red with blood. And he would express concern at violence and unrest in other parts of the world, such as Somalia and Haiti, that had not been blessed with oil to make them of interest to the US.
Bob Gates says that the reason the political scientists at Texas A&M don’t let him into their classrooms even though he is president of the university is “because I basically tell the kids to throw out their org charts and their textbooks, because I say the thing you really have to understand about Washington DC is that at the top level, how things work depends on personality.”
I want to remind everyone that it’s not organizations that get things done. It’s not fancy charts or plans. The only thing that gets everything done is people. And so the only thing that counts is the people you select for the jobs you have.
Huntington, too, lamented the oversimplification of his thesis by large audiences that knew the book’s title but little else about it. He once wryly commented, however, that if having your thesis boiled down to a bumper sticker is what it takes to sell a lot of books, then perhaps it is worth the frustrations.
What the success of each indicates is that there was a significant hunger in the US to make sense of the new era.
Should we emulate Japan? Japanese goods were thriving in our market, but our goods were not in theirs. It is hard to remember now that for several years before that election, through much of the late Reagan and Bush periods, articles were being written about how American companies should model themselves after Japanese, have open offices, perhaps even dress in uniforms and sing unifying company songs each morning.
Indeed, Clinton’s decision to focus on the enemy in the election and the American people’s decision to elect him, a man with no foreign policy experience at all, over one of the most accomplished foreign policy presidents in recent history, suggest that the one consensus that had been reached within the US was that, at least at the outset, the difference between the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods would be defined by a shift of our focus nationally and internationally to prosperity and growth as engines of personal advancement, social harmony, justice, and peacekeeping.
Clinton wrote that the NEC was conceived to “operate in much the same way the NSC did, bringing all the relevant agencies together to formulate and implement policy.”
According to another source, doubts about the new NEC were bluntly expressed: Why do you need this? We already have too many agencies — aren’t we supposed to be cutting back? Won’t there be too much focus on production and not enough on public expenditure? Won’t it complicate the process? Shouldn’t the president defer more to the people he picks for the cabinet?
As Freudian psychotherapists would say, “There are no jokes.” When planning for a high-level job in government, one excellent rule to follow is that a good place to begin is a high-level job in the transition. Once again, proximity is everything.
Furthermore, another thing that was important was that we had an agreement among each other to observe a mantra, which was that if the choice was between chaos and conspiracy, choose the chaos as the reason for something that really upsets you. By and large it was always chaos, but it put us in the frame of mind of not disintegrating into conspiracy theories about what everyone else was doing.
In that phone call, Clinton demonstrated the true nature of power in the inner circles of the US government. It is not so much derived from statuses or congressional appropriations or executive orders as it is in a transaction between the president and the recipient of power. In fact, every top official, but especially those in the WH who do not have institutional interests and resources to back them up, is engaged in a kind of partnership, a symbiosis with the president in which the 2 together occupy the position in question.
He started out with a broken promises or a perceived broken promise on Haiti. Similarly, with Bosnia: very tough statements during the campaign and a lot of difficulty making good on them during the first several months of the administration. Same with China, where he had been very tough on Bush for being too close to the Chinese and then we had to pull back.
I think this is a pattern of American foreign policy throughout the Cold War and even now: the rhetoric that succeeds is the rhetoric of the shining city on the hill, morality, evil versus good, etc., whereas the realities call for pragmatism. Every president gets trapped in the difference. And some presidents are like Johnson, who, in order to sell policies that are failing in Vietnam, wrap themselves all the more in the rhetoric and sink themselves even farther as the gap between the goal — the rhetorical moral goal — and the reality of what you can do grows.
Only a few, he notes, such as Eisenhower, have had the personal stature to resist the pressures from within their parties to over-promise.
In 1950, if Truman had not crossed the 58th parallel, which turned into a disaster at a time when some critics were saying that he was practically a Soviet agent, their only explanation for his inaction would have been that he was soft on communism. He never could have proved that crossing into North Korea would be a mistake.
Now, why are these examples all about Democrats? Because Republicans are somewhat inoculated from this. They are thought to be tougher. If they don’t take an action — as with Eisenhower when he didn’t rescue the French in 1954 in Indochina — then people trust their reasons not to have done it. But at the same time, when Republicans make war, all hell breaks loose because people instinctively think that they are predisposed to fight. So, if you are a hawk, vote for the Democrats and convince them to go to war. If you are a dove, vote for the Republicans and convince them to make peace. The reason they can act politically is that they don’t generally do those things.
Clinton gets a bit of a pass on Haiti, Bosnia, even more on Kosovo, because he was a Democrat taking action. And if a Democrat says we need to send the troops, then people are more likely to say yes because he must have had good reasons since he was probably reluctant.
While I recognize that these may be gross generalizations, I do think that there is more of a “democratic” view about things within the center left and that there is more of an expectation that people have a right to express their views. It may be a fault, but I believe it is a reflection of our recognition of the complexity of the world. Every Democrat I’ve worked for or studied has been accused of being indecisive.
That process was criticized as being unruly and undisciplined in the early Clinton years by some who were unaccustomed to it or uncomfortable with it. Most notable among these was Colin Powell, who, after having attended a number of meetings with senior Clinton principals on the early challenges facing the administration, complained that the discussions were like college seminars.
We all showed up in the Sit Room. And in my days with Reagan and Bush, you walk in, everybody knew where you were supposed to sit and you sat there. And there was an agenda and you followed the agenda. At this meeting, Clinton was late — that told me something at the beginning. We all went into the Sit Room. Everybody grabbed whatever chair was there. And when Clinton came in - the president — there was no chair. And that was Clinton’s style — it never changed. Well, it changed a bit — it changed when he realized it wasn’t working.
Some loved the more informal meeting culture of the Clinton administration, the late nights and the pizza deliveries, the Saturday sessions in blue jeans, the casual air, the preponderance of young staffers, many from the campaign, many who had never worked in a WH before. It was like democracy in action. It was a diverse group and a smart one, and it was full of energy.
Virtually all assume that their predecessors were wasteful. Many attempt to cut the NSC. And virtually all then watch it ballon back up to the size they cut it from and usually more.
The difficulties were that the decisions we made were the wrong one in many cases in the first 2 years. We tried to do Bosnia without having to use force. We tried to do Haiti without having to use force. We were wrong about the use of force in Somalia. So it took 2 years to figure out what our new approach to problems like these would be. Essentially, we had as a central question to define the role of the use of force in the post-Cold War era.
Baker and Bush 41 felt the Europeans could solve Bosnia.
We had Colin Powell saying we could only use force if we were willing to commit a couple hundred thousand troops. And I sat through meetings in the WH when Colin Powell would say we can’t do anything in Bosnia with less than 200K troops.
Later the model was cloned in other initiatives: The president or his top aides would appoint a “czar” to manage a particular issue, that person would develop a team, and the entire group would report back to the NSC or, in some cases, to the secretary of state and the president, and advance the administration’s agenda with regard to those issues aggressively.
There are 2 kinds of failures that took place in this situation. One was a failure of planning, a failure to understand the situation and thus to plan action that would maximize the likelihood of success. The second, however, is a failure to accept that in such circumstances unfortunate outcomes not only are possible but also happen frequently. Because it is impossible to make war risk free, we should not enter war or combat situations unless we are absolutely clear about the downside and willing to proceed in any event until our goals are achieved. This was an inexperienced president, uncertain of his goals, who failed to manage or accept responsibility for a situation for which he, as commander-in-chief, was ultimately solely responsible. Important elements of the mess in Somalia did not occur on the ground in Mogadishu. They occurred in Washington.
On Somalia, the problem was a failure to see that the situation was not going well. The reason there were no principals meeting on Somalia before that was that everybody thought it was going well. We were on track to hand over the process to the UN.
The one thing that all can agree on is that the process in the early days of the Clinton administration was flawed. It revealed the inexperience of a team forced by the Somalia crisis into the costly on-the-job training our political system requires for incoming administrations from a party that has been out of office for a long period. That this was a new era and that all the old Cold War playbooks could no longer be relied upon complicated matters further.
Later, it would haunt the Bush administration, in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is difficult to mobilize the American people in support of expense or high-risk overseas military operations, and it takes an act of political courage for a president to go against public opinion to undertake an operation of this type. But once such operation has been launched, if it is not quickly successful, public opposition not only becomes a huge political concern for the president, it also manifest itself in the actions of Congress. The House in particular, with its 2-year election cycles and the general weak will of the institution when it comes to international measures, is quick to force the US to cut and run or dramatically reduce resources committed to any individual area. Combining these political realties with the post-Vietnam desire to keep our eye squarely on the exit strategy (one element of the Powell doctrine to ensure that we avoid future Vietnams) leads to further problems: Not only does the US seldom undertake initiatives that are sufficiently farsighted in their planning to be successful, but also our adversaries know that the one thing that is certain after we arrive at a distant locale is that we will soon be eager to leave.
The team was coalescing and coming to understand this new dynamic in which the absence of the Soviet adversary essentially opened the door to US involvement everywhere and, in the eyes of some, made it more essential than ever. Clinton is reported to have said, “Sometimes, I really miss the Cold War.”
They also believed, rightly, that it would harm US credibility to name the crime and then do nothing to stop it.
The president took enormous political punishment for supporting initiatives that were politically unpopular in places that did not top the US slit of obvious national interests. Yet, in Rwanda, there was inaction, and the worst non-disease-related humanitarian catastrophe of the Clinton years went unresponded to by a team that was probably the best qualified and most inclined in US history to handle it.
One of the great countervailing biases in the bureaucratic system that manages US policy is toward inaction. Policy proposals are run through a gauntlet of agency reviews that say not enough money, not enough people, not enough time, too much risk, insufficient national interest, lurking political risk — and that offer analogy after analogy of similar situations gone wrong.
Clearly, if there is one area where the collaboration of all civilized peoples ought to be a given, it is in the stopping of the worst of human crimes, genocide. It is a measure of the nature of US leadership, and it will be a test of that leadership, in this world in which we are the uncontested first among all nations, to see whether we can overcome our bureaucratic biases toward inaction to lead in those circumstances when the act of leadership is the sole measure of our humanity and of the moral caliber of our society.
The $4B in aid the US promised to Aristide’s Haiti could have broken a 200-year-old cycle of pain for that country — if we had been committed enough to ensure its wise use over time and if we had been willing to take a tough enough stance with Aristide. Unfortunately, every early on Aristide determined that the US president had invested so much political in him that we needed them more than they needed us. He took advantage of that, and we allowed ourselves to be taken advantage of. It was another lesson, learned the hard way.
If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record that we have ever known.
It was also because, in case after case, the new best tools in the foreign policy toolbox were economic. Economic tools were critical to stabilizing the former Soviet Union. Economic tools were the ones that could save failing states from failure or at least could help combat unrest and create opportunity and thus political support for those associated with that opportunity. Economic rivals were becoming a greater concern to the American people than military rivals. Economic goals were seen as vitally important national priorities.
For years economic issues were disdained by the makers of “high policy,” seen as “low policy,” “vulgar,” “commercial,” and unable to compete with the intricacies of arms control or the nuance of high diplomacy for the attentions of the exalted leaders in the field. Yet, as Clinton’s economic policymakers would remind their colleagues, the focus on military affairs as the centerpiece of our foreign policy was a comparatively new phenomenon. From the days of George Washington until those of Woodrow Wilson, it was commonly understood that our international interests were economic interests and that the reason for keeping sea lanes open or even for acquiring or defending territories was primarily to support our commercial needs as a growing society.
Summers’s career was meteoric thanks both to his extraordinary intelligence and to his ability to work as hard as was necessary to get a good result. Some saw him as arrogant. Indeed, the WSJ once wrote, “Larry Summers is to humility what Madonna is to chastity.” But Summers was, like Madonna, a star — although in his case, of the wonkocracy that ruled Washington in those days, which excused many of his idiosyncrasies.
It also exposes some weaknesses in the US foreign policy-making system. One of these was the starkly inadequate intelligence provided by the CIA before and during the crisis. I overheard Larry Summers lambasting a representative from the agency about the uselessness of the product the Treasury received from the agency and pointing out to her that there was a whole industry on Wall Street with a financial incentive to track this information better and to do a better job of it, and that they were doing just that.
It might have been called How the Treasury Department Supplanted the State Department in US Foreign Policy. Another senior Treasury official speculated on the reasons for this dominance and concluded:
It was because we were, simply, smarter. And then when other people tried to get involved in our business, we would explain it to them and then hear them read their talking points and then say, yeah, that’s naive and stupid for 7 reasons. We actually have things pretty well under control. What fraction was it because we actually had a kind of intellectual dominance over things in our area that other people weren’t able to achieve relative to us in their area?
That the position of some of those allies was based on sympathy for the Serb notion that there was no place for a Muslim state in Europe and that over a quarter million people would die and another 2.5M would be driven from their homes was not considered sufficient motivation for a break with the US policy developed during the 1st Bush administration — despite Clinton’s publicly stated frustrations with that policy.
In a notable change in his modus operandi, Lake moved away from his role as an honest broker and purveyor of interagency viewpoints and attempted to secure the president’s support directly for his Bosnia initiative.
With this high-level backing, Lake was able to overcome State Department and Pentagon objections, and at a principal committee meeting on August 1, he asked that each agency submit recommendations on Bosnia policy within 3 days, ensuring that his already-crafted approach to Bosnia would be supplemented, not replaced, by his State and Defense Department counterparts.
Tony’s trip had no effect on the subsequent shuttle and Dayton. The trip was consistent with his ambivalence about his relation to power. If Kissinger had been there, he would have done the whole thing, including the shuttle and Dayton. But Tony wasn’t going to put himself in such a high-risk position. At the same time, he wanted to be associated with it, so he structured a safe position. He would launch the process and then take as much credit as he could if it succeeded, and say it was someone else’s if it failed.
Nations see conflicts differently. The second day of the war, the Hungarian ambassador came in to me and said Hungary twice before in this century had joined alliances and then gone to war almost immediately. And both times Hungary lost and was dismembered. The PM asks that you not allow this happen this time. The US was under no risk of dismemberment or losing; we didn’t even consider it a war, in America. So there were huge gaps in perceptions that needed to be addressed effectively, and they needed to be addressed at all levels.
Clark believed that one of the lessons learned from Vietnam and recent US history had been that for peace talks to succeed, there had to be a clear incentive for the opponent to come to the negotiating table, which meant sending an unmistakable message that they had more to lose by continuing to fight than they did from talking.
He had such an analytical and strong mind that he would proceed with the 11 reasons why what we were about to do was crazy, which was 7 more reasons than I had even thought of myself. And I would come back and rebut his arguments. He wanted to be satisfied that all the downsides had been thought through and that he had sufficient answers. For him it was like checking the bots on the car one more time. When you check a tire and you do all the bolts, it was like going back around each bolt and tightening them each one more turn.
As the years went by, the thrust of the debate about what the central organizing principles of the foreign policy should be also changed. Tony Lake had originally proposed the idea of “enlargement” as a kind of post-Cold War flip side to containment. Enlargement would be the promotion of our core ideas about democracy and free markets to the rest of the world in an effort to consolidate the Cold War victory and ensure greater integration, prosperity, and enthusiasm for America and American ideals. Later, as globalization and the information age were understood to be core elements of the post-Cold War reality, the focus evolved to be more responsive to those realities. And then, in the later years of the Clinton administration, as a new generation of threats seemed to emerge, it became clearer and clearer that it would not be possible, as we had once hoped, to put security concerns behind us completely.
There is a problem convincing people that there is a threat. There is disbelief and resistance. Most people don’t understand. They thought both Tenet and I were exaggerating the whole al Qaeda threat.
If an agency sent somebody of low rank, I wouldn’t let them in the room. Or I wouldn’t let them sit at the table or I wouldn’t let them say anything. They would have to sit along the back wall and be quiet as an observer. Because if their agency couldn’t send somebody of appropriate rank, then they weren’t going to be represented. And I would cancel meetings, because the right people didn’t show up. I would call and chew people out. And I would have Sandy Berger or Tony Lake call and chew our their bosses. You had to have high-level attendance at these things or they weren’t worth doing.
You’re telling me it won’t work. The real reason is that you don’t want to do it.
From Washington through the early Wilson years, most Americans believed that the only reason to be involved in the daunting complexities and intrigues associated with foreigners was trade.
But, as we have all discovered yet again, security always trumps economics.
A war against terrorism was already being fought, and many of the early skirmishes were being won by an America that didn’t truly understand the stakes or the potential scope or impact of the new security threat.
Thank god we’re a great country. We can stand a lot of this nonsense. But let’s not test it too closely.
All presidents are tested, and in those tests political rhetoric is stripped away and the true nature of our leaders is revealed. Similarly, within the inner circle of all presidencies, those same circles result in the elevation of some, the diminution of others, and the emergence of a few who become America’s voice.
During the 1s term of his presidency, Bush 43 and his team adopted a course that eschewed international institutions, selectively sidestepped our allies, and applied American power with faint regard for the 60 years of history that had gone into shaping the global system that we, as a nation, had played the central role in designing.
I’ve gone back through in my own head — as we have been going through historical times that are also turbulent — and I look back and I think how it must have looked when in 1946 the communists showed considerable electoral strength in Italy and France, and when you had civil wars in Greece and Turkey, and the blockade of Berlin, and the Czech coup in ’48, and in ’49 the Soviet Union explodes a nuclear weapon 5 years ahead of schedule, and the Chinese communists win. This doesn’t look so great, from ground level, at that point. And they came up with a series of solutions — NATO was an invention to rearm Germany without sending France skyward. The Marshall Plan was a response to the failed one-and-a-half year reconstruction effort in Germany, because Germans were still starving and Europe was still in disarray. And so when I look at the current period, I recognized that there isn’t any such thing as a grand architectural design.
But Rice noted that these efforts can only really be assessed over time: “When you look at it 30 years from now or 40 years from now, people will look back and either say these were disastrous responses or really creative responses — over the next several years, I think we are going to have to make those responses work.”
Being African American has, according to those who know her well, had a measurable impact on her foreign policy views — particularly in the area of her emphasis on the importance of democracy and basic freedoms. That focus, in turn, have her a sense of sympathy and direction in her studies that began with special attention to the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc, countries where political emancipation was America’s objective.
Of the 16 national security advisors who preceded Rice, many of the most influential have come from 1 of 2 groups: social outsiders who relied on exceptional intelligence and ambition to fight their way to the center of power, and traditional, eastern blue-bloods who inherited entree into the inner circles of American power. Some of the better national security advisors, in terms of intellect, education, and capabilities, were from the blue-blood group, such as McGeorge Bundy and Anthony Lake. But many of the most influential have been from the other group, perhaps because it has taken more for them to prove themselves academically, then professionally, then within the very competitive world of the policy and political communities. Virtually all attended first-tier universities as the first rung on the ladder up, but it was not an easy path for any of them.
America’s role in this new era is to lead the spread of democracy and freedom worldwide — both because it is right and because it advances our national interests by producing a safer, more stable world that is likely to be more sympathetic to American views. The strategy does not so much follow in the empire-building tradition of former great powers, but rather builds on a prominent tradition in the American past, that of missionaries, proselytizing quasi-sacred elements of our way of life.
Now this doesn’t mean that you think Saudi Arabia is going to be a Jeffersonian democracy in the next 10 years. As a matter of fact, the US was not a Jeffersonian democracy for quite a long time in its history. What it does mean is that you use the presidency to make clear that without a fundamental shift in the political values in the Middle East, you’re never going to get stability. Sometimes I talk to my French colleagues, and they essentially believe that the Arab world will never be democratic. And I say to them, you know that the status quo is not sustainable in the Middle East and they say, yes. It seems to me that there are 2 poles: one is the kind of extremist Osama bin Laden pole, and the other is the development of more pluralistic, ultimately democratic society. Why would you not opt to work on that one even if you think the chances are slim? So I think this question of how values play in American foreign policy is extremely important.
This is a clear break from any of the deist founders of the republic, who, while speaking of God, often did so in the Enlightenment-era sense of a great power or “nature,” and who were acutely aware of the pain resultant from circumstances in which government and religion were too tightly intertwined. Indeed, such pain was one of the reasons America was settled and the nation came into being in the first place.
He was a man more or less adrift until approximately when he turned 40, at which time he discovered that the answers he had been seeking were a clear set of rules that left little room for interpretation and unmistakable guidelines for action. By contrast, Carter and Clinton were religious in the more analytical, sometimes even tortured, Augustinian tradition. For people like them, religion is a pillar and a guidepost in a constant struggle with life’s complexities and countervailing trends. But for Bush, religion seems to be a simplifying force, dividing the choices into right and wrong, black and white, with shades of gray being seen almost as the work of darker forces — temptation away from clarity. This sense of moral absolutes has clearly informed the administration’s foreign policy and largely defines the core tension within the foreign policy establishment between the “traditionalists” and the “transformationalists.” Traditionalism is shorthand for traditional internationalists, people who see foreign policy as a way to manage our relations within a diverse global community, moving in the direction of our ideals, but recognizing the limitations on us and the need to balance the optimal with the practically possible. Transformationalists might decry such views as moral relativism or as implying a willingness to subjugate our national interests to the wishes of the larger community of nations; in any event, their view is that we need to make the world more like us.
The conviction among them is that it is our moral duty and our strategic need to change the world to fit our vision of it. Ironically — and ominously — that same belief is shared, to very different ends, by the jihadists and extremists that the president has identified as our enemies in the world.
The problem with absolutist beliefs is that they can get you into traps in which the ends justify the means. It can be dangerous to believe that one’s motives are so noble that therefore anything we do becomes OK because we are doing it for a good cause. For example, we advocate the export of democracy, and yet we find ourselves embracing a number of leaders who are anything but democratic in order to advance other policies or even the spread of democracy elsewhere. You cannot argue for absolutes and then practice pragmatism without opening yourself up to criticism. It’s a neat paradox — the less moral ambiguity you have in your worldview, the more you can justify in your life.
Now I am not sure that either Carter in his own way despite his studiousness and despite the fact that he would go through memoranda at great length that some of the larger picture might not escape him. And the larger picture may escape this president in that he, too, seems inclined to make moral judgments and to impose those judgments on the policy.
One core idea in Strauss’w work was a denunciation of the spirit of moral tolerance that, he argued, had come to dominate intellectual life in Europe and the US. He described what he called “the crisis of liberalism — a crisis due to the fact that liberalism has abandoned its absolutist bias and is trying to become entirely relativistic.” The problem with relativism and with liberalism was that they can degenerate into the easygoing belief that all points of view are equal (hence, none really worth passionate argument, deep analysis, or stalwart defense) and then into the strident belief that anyone who argues for the superiority of a distinctive moral insight, way of life, or human type is somehow elitist or anti-democratic — and hence immoral. Strauss spoke of the need for an elite group of advisors, as in Plato’s Republic, who could impress upon a political leader and upon the masses the need for virtue and for strong moral judgments about good and evil.
To suggest that the neocons somehow place allegiance to another country above their own smacks of the “John Kennedy will report to the Vatican” slurs of the 1960 election campaign and is vehemently condemned by the members of this group with whom I have spoken.
And the neocons tend to support the right-wing view on Israel for a variety of reasons, but the one at the top of their list has at least as much to do with the secular religion of democracy — Israel being the only democracy yet to take root in the Middle East — and with US strategic interests than with traditional religious orientation.
It is particularly revealing about the character of the country that the collective national response to the confusion and division of the Vietnam era seems to have been a strong impulse toward moral absolutism. The simple positives of Jimmy Carter’s “government as good as its people” and Ronald Reagan’s “city on the hill” fighting off an “evil empire” were an antidote to doubts and confusion and the greater fogs of that particular war and era. However, it is also ironic that the group that challenged the policies in Vietnam and the actions associated with Watergate were liberals, who at the time were seen to be standing for certain absolute goods in the face of the corrupting views of Kissingerian “realism,” pragmatism gone too far. Somehow, those same liberals who had taken a stand for moral absolutes were branded moral relativists.
America in the late 1970s was something of a lost soul, seeking comfort from simple truths in the way that a wayward drinker might find his path back to health by embracing a 12-step program of rediscovering relition. The president himself went through just such a personal transformation when, at about age 40, he found his personal bearings. Thereafter, he has found his life oriented by a few simple principles of faith. As president, he has introduced a similarly faith-based approach to US foreign policy that offers America as the instrument of God’s will advancing His gifts of freedom and democracy to the less fortunate of the world.
As Colin Powell commented, “Each president is different. Bush 43 is like 41 in that he is ready to act, but for 41 it was a more deliberate process whereas 43 is guided more by a powerful inertial navigation system than by intellect. He knows what he wants to do, and what he wants to hear is how to get it done.”
If you believe you are pursuing absolute good, then it is a sin to depart from it.
She also made clear that this president wanted the departments to take the lead and that in their view the NSC staff under Berger had gotten too big, too bloated, and too powerful.
In fact, Rice began by cutting the NSC staff by about a third, only to discover later, as her predecessors had, that the demands of the job would force her to regrow it. 4 years later she had a staff 50% larger than the one she started with.
There are 2 models for being national security advisor: staffing the president or running the institution. The trick is doing them both.
“The guys in this administration are old hands, experienced players, and you can’t leave them to their own devices, or they will eat your lunch.”
Rice acknowledged the challenges when she said, “I mean, I’m by far the baby in this group,” but asserted that the group runs well, ”more as a council than as their specific agencies.”
One is that JCS had a lot less of a voice in this administration. The Pentagon in previous administrations really had 2 voices. Not in this administration. It was just Rumsfeld. Second of all, the VP’s office has become the equivalent of a separate institution or bureaucracy. When I was in the WH in 41, the VP’s office had 1 or at most 2 people doing foreign policy. They were basically there to advise the VP. In this administration, the VP has his own mini-NSC staff.
Experienced at managing bureaucracies, Powell quickly addressed the needs of his team, from putting the Internet on every desk in the building to bringing with him a sense of gravitas and political weight that State staff thought would make them a more relevant player.
But it’s 90% the State Department’s responsibility. One of the things we had tried to do during the 1s term of the Bush 43 presidency is tell everyone here that if we don’t change the way we do business, then we’re going to go out of business. There will still be a building here and people will still come to work, but it will be like any other irrelevant bureaucracy.
One former senior State Department official said of the Powell era, “I think the State Department is today as well led and managed, and certainly as well funded as it has ever been, but it appears less relevant to the policy process than it has in decades. It is hard to pinpoint many major State Department-led initiatives in recent years.”
The critique that Powell did not fight more vigorously for his views against Rumsfeld and Cheney became a popular one during the Iraq war.
A lot of people look at Colin Powell and they see the Colin Powell G.I. Joe doll, action figure. And they want to dress him up in their own clothes. And so people against the war think Colin Powell is against the war. People that would have quit think Colin Powell should have quit. He’s the projection of everyone from the center right to the far left of the ideological spectrum. There’s a lot of people who identify with him. They think, I’m smart and he’s smart. I’m honorable and he’s honorable.
He told the story about the time Harry Truman decided to recognize Israel and Marshall came back from the meeting and somebody said to him, Shouldn’t you resign, the president went against you. Just like Colin Powell. He said no. I gave him my best advice. I gave him my best analysis. And he made the decision. That’s his job.
I have been told that Kissinger described Rumsfeld as the “most ruthless man” he had met while in government. It is a view that is disputed by virtually no one and, Washington being what it is, in many cases it is said with considerable admiration. Virtually all who know him acknowledge that he is exceptionally intelligent, hardworking, and skillful. But his unique relationship with the VP and the exceptional network that binds their offices and the rest of the administration has set the center of gravity of this new administration wherever these 2 men are standing together.
Rumsfeld had made it clear from his very first day on the job that the national command authority ran from the president to him with no stops in between. But he seems to have been tolerant of the VP’s office’s involvement in his department’s affairs.
People on the NSC staff believe that the SecDef has 4 points of entry into the WH. He can go to Condi for the easy stuff; he can go to WH Chief of Staff Andy Card for the stuff that’s a little tougher; to Cheney, if it’s really difficult; and then, for the ace in the hole, direct contact with the president if necessary. You just can’t run a system like that and expect it to work.
We would characterize Rumsfeld as Secretary Strangelove when I was still working at the NSC. And one of the problems was that he didn’t realize that when you are out of office for 8 years the world has changed. The approach has changed but he had not.
My analysis of Rumsfeld is that back in the Ford days, he was too smart, too successful, too young, and now he is too old; that his early success and clear competence and intelligence led to a sense of self-confidence, not to say arrogance. So my assessment of Rumsfeld was that he was too self-confident, that he wasn’t mastering his briefs, but he thought he knew everything. He thought he understood the world but the world wasn’t the way it was 20 years ago. And Rumsfeld would never come to meetings prepared. He’d come not having read any of his briefing papers and so would extemporize, which was frustrating for everyone else.
They would come to meetings in 1 or 2 postures. Either they would say that they couldn’t decide because they didn’t know what the secretary wanted or they would decide and then come back later and say they had changed their minds. So in either case it was worthless. There was no process. There was no internal process within DoD, and Rumsfeld clearly felt absolutely no compunction undercutting his subordinates and making them look like absolute fools.
The chain of command runs from Rumsfeld to Cheney to Bush: that Rumsfeld says to Cheney, Cheney then says to Bush what he should do.
Visiting foreign leaders very often hold private meetings with Cheney in addition to sessions with Powell or other cabinet members. Many past VPs would primarily get their opportunity to be in the presence of other heads of state when attending their funerals.
Given that Cheney has repeatedly denied any aspirations to the Presidency following the Bush administration, he is seen by the President as loyal and without any of the potential conflicts of interests that often serve as a wedge between Presidents and their number twos as in the recent case of the divide that grew between Gore and Clinton as Gore increasingly sought to distance himself from Clinton during the run-ups to the 2000 elections.
I don’t think people who were in the room felt they were being pressured. Unless people can’t stand having their presumptions and assertions challenged by people saying, “What’s the basis for this?” Because he was and is a very acute and careful student of intelligence. He asked a lot of questions. He’s a quiet man. I would not say he is intimidating but intellectually formidable.
You know, the big mystery to me is Dick Cheney. He instinctively started from the conservative base, but if you made a compelling rational argument, he was not an ideologue. My sense is that now, for whatever reason, he has become an ideologue — and I don’t know whether it is because he is an extraordinarily powerful VP, more powerful than any in our history, and nobody talks to him and says, “Dick, you’re full of shit” — or whether he’s only now able to let his true feelings come out, or whether there was some kind of shift.
He has never had much patience for multilateral processes. He has always been vigorously supportive of maintaining a strong presidency and presidential prerogatives and has long been committed to fighting against the erosion of presidential authority by Congress and other contenders.
The traditionalists believe in operating in the traditions of the 20th-century US foreign policy — that one proceeds in foreign policy in conjunction with, or reaching out to our friends, allies, and international organizations. The transformationalists argue that 9/11 showed that the world environment was deteriorating rapidly and we had to be bold. Friends and allies would only hold us back. We know what has to be done and we have the power to do it. What has to be done is to transform the Middle East into a collection of democracies. That will bring peace and stability, and when that has been done, we will be applauded by the world.
Finally, there was the matter of Cheney’s personality. One former top Bush administration official said, “I have always felt his relentless pessimism was unsustainable. After a while people want more than fear, they want a positive vision and that was not his strong suit.”
So too were her abilities as a thoughtful listener and tireless worker. In fact, the skill sets that may have hurt her somewhat as National Security Advisor — those that made her too much the President’s “staffer” and not enough the manager of the policy process — have given her considerable lift as Secretary of State. She is now seen as speaking for the President and as a conduit to the President in ways that Powell was not, especially during the last year when tensions were running highest between State and others in the administration. Further, diplomatic and capable of real warmth, humor, and charisma in high-level international meetings, she is seen as the un-Cheney.
But, diplomacy is only one of many tools the US has at its disposal when it comes to international relations. The State Department, no matter how strong or how well led, is virtually never in a position to mobilize Defense, Treasury, the US Trade Representative, or any other agency. The NSC needs to be the place where all the President’s options come together, and the national security advisor needs to be seen as and to be an independent voice, providing the President with interdependent perspectives.
The impulses to move fast, to view critics as enemies, and to believe that the worthiness of their ends justified their means whatever they might be, produced further problems whether they were the ill-considered decisions to use the NSA to wiretap phone calls in the US or the not terribly well-considered efforts to restructure the national security establishment itself.
Furthermore, the chemistry of the group and the personalities of the individuals within it play a far greater role in determining the NSC’s true function than does any preconceived aspect of the structure. Indeed, the structure of the actual “committee in charge of running the world” — that is, the ad hoc group the president relies on, rather than the formal NSC itself — is based on a constantly changing series of transactions between the president and its members in which he offers or withdraws access, trust, influence, and power.
The equivalent of 12 World Trade Centers full of children die every day for lack of clean water, food, or easily available medications.
We must also address the rise of a class of new powers — China, India, Brazil, and the other economic giants of tomorrow — each with its own domestic and regional aspirations, each posing great complications. And we must cope with the fact that to remain vital, alliances and multilateral institutions must evolve and adapt to new circumstances.
Despite his misgivings, not only did Napier take the job, he participated in some of the most brutal elements of the conquest of India. In fact, no matter how caustic his critique of English aggression on the subcontinent, there can be no more scathing indictment of the undertaking than his own surpassing hypocrisy. He was both the best critic and the best example of the problem.
We are fighting many of the same places as did our British cousins a few generations ago, bedeviled by similar problems, self-justified because we are advancing our ideals, which we brand as universal, and playing much the same role in the world that they did (even without an actual empire of our own). We are, as they were, drawn to these conflicts because of our economic interests.
We are entering a period of transition in which we can see trends and understand the greater integrative forces at work. But transitional period are extremely dangerous because they are volatile; it is hard to separate short-term from long-term concerns, and therefore it is hard to prioritize. A deep human bias projects past experience onto new situations. So we end up fighting the previous war.
But a surprise was in store. The majority of the countries cited by experts as being likely friends in the years ahead — both near and longer term — were also to be found on the list of likely rivals.
In short, these experts felt that we are entering an age of “friendemies,” in which the line between ally and adversary is blurred, in which those on whom we will have to depend are also in some circumstances those with whom we are managing tensions, in which drawing lines around countries and seeking to contain their expansion is impossible, and in which foreign policy will involve using all the tools available to build ties where possible and use them to counterbalance, to lever, to resist the forces leading to conflict or pushing nations apart.
Perhaps coping with such ambiguities and nuances come more easily to other, more mature societies. We like things to be simple. The media like it simple. We package it and frame it simple. In this impulse, we are like young adults for whom all is straightforward and extreme, and we are now called upon to enter the kind of maturity that comes naturally to people as they age and taken on broader responsibilities. We have to recognize that learning to deal with nuance is a sign of greater intellectual sophistication, not vacillation.
Turnover in the US Congress is lower than that found int he Supreme Soviet of the USSR. In the 2004 elections it was estimated that perhaps 25 House seats were actually up for grab.
Understanding the mechanisms of the foreign policy processes within the US government is comparatively easy. Indeed, for the most part they have served us rather well. But they contain certain biases and tendencies. In particular, advisory systems are liable to fall into the trap of seeking consensus among advisors. Such an approach virtually guarantees that the proposal with the broadest approach will win — and in some cases, it will win over what is the best proposal. “Honest broker” systems provide presidents with good choices and objective analyses of their pros and cons to help presidents make informed decisions. Unpopular choices must not be eliminated, as they may often have merits that outweigh their unpopularity.
Everything becomes a story thanks to global coverage by TV news networks and the Internet. There is a dedicated news-gathering force that is organized around the idea of seeking the reaction of the president and the WH to all such events. The fact that the events are visible makes them political; reactions and non-reactions alike have political consequences.
The most common US diplomatic reaction, initiative, or tool is the presentation of ideas or thoughts through the media. What the State Department once did through cables and demarches and emissaries, today is conducted by the WH media team and the NSC through the media. This has consumed an enormous amount of staff resources.
The result is that the general state of mind within this critical institution is one of constant, frenzied reaction. Planning seems not only a luxury, but almost a dereliction of duty given the pressures of the moment.
Sandy Berger articulated this distinction with a reference to Iraq: “I’ve always said containment is aesthetically displeasing but strategically sufficient. You wake up in the morning and Saddam Hussein is still there and it would be far preferable if he weren’t. As for ‘getting Saddam,’ most Americans would recognize that the option would be emotionally gratifying but the costs of it would be greater than our national interest.”
Indeed, we have given birth to a culture of exceptionalism, of thinking that our very “apartness” from the world is part of what makes us good. Exceptionalism has led us to think that other parts of the world do not matter much.
Still, we approach every alliance or overseas engagement with a focus on its limitations, on constraining our obligations, on limiting its duration, on figuring out our exit strategy — we act much like a fox, not because of our cleverness but because of our tendency to want to essentially dart out of our burrow to capture our prey and then as quickly as possible return to the comforts of our confining but secure home.
The concept of the nation-state is built around the ideas of boundaries, but the idea of boundaries is becoming less and less meaningful.
But a break with those traditions occurred during the first year of the 21st century. The US appeared to revert to the old, discredited idea that because we had power we could impose it if we saw doing so be in our national interest — regardless of the views of the community we were a part of and regardless of our preferences or even our acknowledgment of its existence. It was argued that we did so in response to a threat that was so great that it warranted our unilateral action. But such a threat did not exist. It was, as it turned out, either misperceived or manufactured to justify our actions. They chose to see what they wanted to see in the evidence of that threat and that they manipulated public perceptions of that threat to justify their actions. *** There are greater dangers. As Zbig said, terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. Terrorists are a symptom of the failure of the societies from which they come to offer them opportunities or the lives they seek within those societies. They are a sign that the stability threshold of those societies — the moment when citizens feel they benefit more from working within the system than they would from opposing it — has yet to be passed. To eliminate terrorists, we need to present a better alternative.
Paul Wolfowitz and his associates have written papers about understanding, identifying, and eliminating threats to future US supremacy in the world. They seem to have made the mistake of assuming that such threats would come in the form of the rise of rivals with measurable advantage economically or militarily, that is, traditional sources of power. What they have failed to acknowledge is that although we have, despite our great current advantages, some vulnerability in those areas to challenges from rising powers, our greatest vulnerability by far is linked to the legitimacy of our leadership. No nation is in a better position to undercut our legitimacy, and thus our ability to lead, than we are. Worse, it could pass to a different or set of values that seems to the global majority to promise more justice, more equity, more security than do American values.
We have been very lucky. The world has been very lucky. Many of them do not simply study international affairs as a profession but are consumed by it. The best of them view the world as a puzzle that they are constantly working at, constantly trying to decipher. For them, the facts change with every morning’s newspaper, and they are always trying to think many moves ahead, like good chess players.
Most have sought to do the best they could. Most have been moral. Most have valued American ideals. Yet the vast majority have, from time to time, erred — sometimes egregiously — for different reasons, in differing circumstances.