Irrelevant: The Richard Allen-Anthony Lake model. Here neither the NSC adviser nor his staff has control of the policy process or much real influence with the president. Each power bureaucracy goes its own way seeking its own preferred solutions. Disloyalty to the president’s stated policy objectives goes unpunished, thus encouraging further free-lancing. The Pentagon and State feel free to contradict each other in the press and will even leak against the president himself. Problems are admired and policy decisions go unmade for months, even years. There are no upsides to this model except that overall American foreign policy gets so stuck in neutral that no grand mistakes are committed because no one has enough power to steer the ship to change course.

Rice, a Bush loyalist, was really more of an enforcer during her tenure as APNSA but one who allowed the DoD – Vice-Presidential staff to become the dominant voice. Presumably, of course, that reflects the preferences of her boss, President Bush but Rothkopf raises questions of whether Rice was so close to Bush in terms of perspective that she lost the ability to discern how moves were being made by the players.

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