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J. at Armchair Generalist gets a big hat tip for his post Reforming the National Security Council that pointed to this WaPo article on the interview of National Security Adviser, Gen. James Jones.  The new APNSA opines on the coming of a “strong” NSC process for the Obama administration:

….The result will be a “dramatically different” NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. “The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful,” he said.

….”The whole concept of what constitutes the membership of the national security community — which, historically has been, let’s face it, the Defense Department, the NSC itself and a little bit of the State Department, to the exclusion perhaps of the Energy Department, Commerce Department and Treasury, all the law enforcement agencies, the Drug Enforcement Administration, all of those things — especially in the moment we’re currently in, has got to embrace a broader membership,” he said

New NSC directorates will deal with such department-spanning 21st-century issues as cybersecurity, energy, climate change, nation-building and infrastructure. Many of the functions of the Homeland Security Council, established as a separate White House entity by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, may be subsumed into the expanded NSC, although it is still undetermined whether elements of the HSC will remain as a separate body within the White House.

Presidents rarely get the national security process they want but they usually get what they deserve by default of their own unwillingness to  police their subordinates when they stray from the blueprint laid out in their first NSC-drafted executive order – usually titled PDD-1 or NSDD-1 ( “Presidential Decision Directive”, “National Security Decision Directive”). When a Henry Kissinger, or a Zbigniew Brzezinski or a Dick Cheney “grab power” from whomever is supposed to have it, you can be certain that these coups have implicit presidential approval.

 It is unusual that such a directive has not already been issued by the Obama administration, if the WaPo article is correct. Normally, this is a new president’s first (or one of the first) executive order that the transition team prepares in case the administration begins with a national security crisis. If that has not happened yet it’s a troublesome sign but I will give the Obama administration credit for attempting to create a new structure outside conventional Cold War and statutory arrangements for the NSC. That is long overdue, as is some hard thinking about what role the NSC should play in crafting national strategy and policy.

Presidents need an NSC Adviser and staff to do three things, not all of which are compatible:

1. Be an “honest broker” and coordinator between State, Defense and the IC on behalf of the POTUS ( Scowcroft Model).

2. Critically evaluate the policy options provided to the POTUS by Cabinet bureaucracies and offer creative alternatives (Kissinger Model).

3. Act as the “enforcer” and monitor to make certain presidential policy is being implemented and identify those who are obstacles, free-lancers and bureaucratic sabotuers for reprimand or removal (Sherman Adams/H.R. Haldeman* Model).

* Adams and Haldeman were WH Chiefs of Staff who were the designated and much feared “enforcers” of their administrations. One of Reagan’s numerous APNSAs, Judge Clark, was concerned with enforcing Reagan’s ideological line in foreign policy but he is too obscure a figure and his tenure too short to serve as an effective example.

One is easy. Two are difficult but common enough. Success at three is virtually unknown.

A president who is himself a product of the establishment consensus – a George Bush, Sr. or a Dwight Eisenhower– is looking for a National Security Adviser who is an honest broker and staffs his NSC with military and foreign service officers, with a sprinkling of CIA and DIA veterans. They will expect obedience from State and the Pentagon but as their policy choices coincide with Beltway conventional wisdom, they get it most of the time anyway.

A president who comes to Washington as an “outsider” in some fashion or as a “change agent” – a Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton– will pick a National Security Adviser who will build a staff of what one national security scholar has called a “team of academic superstars” who will aid the president in taking control of American foreign policy. Clashes between the White House and the career bureaucracy will be frequent and increasingly vicious, particularly with State, though in the Bush II administration that role was played by the senior managers of the CIA.

Some presidents have a dysfunctional NSC process – a category that includes John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush – where the inmates take over the asylum and free-lancing by deputy assistant secretaries reigns supreme. Both Kennedy and Clinton strongly resisted a formal NSC decision making structure for their administration that would inhibit their ability to “pop in” to offices, chat up whomever and issue snap decisions. While this stance flowed from their desire to keep their options open and remain free of “handling” by their own staffers, it ultimately led to chaos and dangerously amateurish improvising during crisis moments.  Reagan and Bush II by contrast had formal structures in place but undermined them overtly ( Reagan in NSDD-2) or covertly ( Bush in letting his Vice-President operate a shadow mini-me NSC of his own). In Reagan’s case, this was aggravated by an unwillingness to fire anyone, no matter how much the rat-bastard deserved it, and a general distaste for confrontation.

Unless a president supports his NSC adviser down the line, the bureaucracies will do as they please to the point of making his administration’s top officials into laughingstocks. While you might not know it from the State Department’s current broken down condition, it was historically amongst the very worst offenders in this regard ( though both the Pentagon and Langley could rise to the occasion), regularly abusing the interagency process and blatantly defying presidential instructions. Give Foggy Bottom strategic planning, USAID or Public Diplomacy and they will let these nascent “competitors” wither on the vine.

The problem largely is that the State Department is filled with bright and talented but fairly insular individuals who imagine themselves more capable and informed and ultimately deserving of authority than the guy actually sitting in the Oval Office who was elected by the American people or any of his appointees. They need a strong hand at SecState and consistent follow-up by the NSC; and if given these conditions, State can perform amazing feats of diplomacy for a president. Absent that, State can create great friction for an administration.

The Obama administration is setting itself up for a very “strong” NSC process. Jones and Chief of Staff Emanuel are a potent combination and Defense, State and the CIA all have been given major political heavyweights as principals. Moreover, Jones appears to be in sync with Robert Gates as to the need for imaginative “new thinking” in national security affairs ( maybe we should send him this). However all the potential on paper in the world, at this stage of the game, means nothing.

It ultimately comes down to the President of the United States. What does he want ?

More than that, but it is a sign of changing times and the mainstreaming of blogging.

Mona Sutphen, a former diplomat, Clinton NSC aide and Rahm Emanuel’s Chief of Staff, has been named White House Deputy Chief of Staff – a powerful, albeit very “insider”, post. Until last February, Sutphen was also briefly a foreign policy blogger at The Next American Century , which was a short-lived vehicle to promote  The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise
 a book Sutphen co-authored with Nina Hachigian.

I have not read their book ( nor heard of it  before today, to be frank) but from listening to Sutphen and Hachigan opine on their infomercial video (see below) The Next American Century sounds more or less as a breezy and happy version of the themes in Thomas P. M. Barnett’s yet to be released Great Powers: America and the World After Bush that I’m reading, minus the sharp elbows thrown by Tom and the latter book’s deep dive into historical and strategic drivers for the 21st century. Otherwise, there’s a lot of big picture congruency going on – no wonder Tom’s so happy about the incoming Obama administration; it seems like it will have at least some personnel in high places who are predisposed toward his strategic views.

Be interesting if anyone out there has a copy of the Sutphen-Hachigan book to see if they cited PNM or BFA in the footnotes or index.

A final point, that Obama is moving such relatively young faces, like Mona Sutphen, to high posts is a good sign. Regardless of how my more liberal readers and fellow FP/mil/Intel/security bloggers may feel, the Democratic bench in these areas range from fair to decidely weak with a shortage of “stars” in the critical late 40’s to middle 50’s age band that normally fill the first through second tier appointive posts (of course, that deficit partly comes from liberal activist hostility toward more conservative Democrats like Sam Nunn or Lee Hamilton who are always shortlisted but never appointed). Normally, you need a talent pool at least 2-3 deep at each position to handle the burnout, transience and delay in confirmation hearings that every administration faces. The Democrats have to build up that pool instead of relying on ancient Carter and aging Boomer, Clinton retreads ( even so, look to seeing a lot of familiar GOP faces seatwarming in the first year in the bureaucracy, unless the Senate rushes through every Obama appointment in record time).

Senator Barack Obama acheived a historic milestone tonight and is now the President-Elect of the United States. He was as gracious in his victory speech as Senator John McCain was earlier in making his concession. A positive tone that has been absent for too long in recent election cycles.

I voted for Senator McCain. I am not a supporter of President-Elect Obama but I hope that Republicans and conservatives will start their period of loyal opposition by modeling the respect for the new president that President Bush was seldom accorded. There will time enough for rough political battles in the future without sinking into partisan rancor now. The other side ran the better race and our immediate priority should be to get our own house in order. There are  reasons the GOP just was clobbered that cannot be waved away that go beyond media bias or the political skills of Barack Obama.

Congratulations to those Obama supporters and Democrats in the ZP readership, it’s your night tonight as well.

Other Reactions UPDATED! :

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A brief sojurn into grubby electoral politics: 

Recall from years ago, the enormous amount of press received by GOP strategist Karl Rove as George W. Bush’s political “Brain” ? A similar role with Barack Obama is played by Illinois Democratic political consultant David Axelrod, except that Axelrod keeps a far lower profile than Rove did and Axelrod has inifinitely better relationships with the working press, notably with the nominally Republican Chicago Tribune where Axelrod was formerly a political reporter and columnist.  Axelrod is also tightly connected to Chicago’s all-powerful Democratic Party boss, Mayor Richard M. Daley, another longtime Axelrod client; and to Exelon/Com. Ed. , the politically powerful Illinois utility that contracts with Axelrod’s public relations firm and whose employees have been among the largest financial donors in Illinois to the Obama campaign.

What kind of campaign can we expect from Axelrod in the general election? Overtly positive themes and public posturing  complemented by covertly delievered and mercilessly negative “stiletto” attacks against key people around John McCain that are not directly traceable to Axelrod. The model for this strategy is the previous Obama senatorial campaign in Illinois, where Obama’s two most formidible, centimillionaire, rivals, Democrat Blair Hull and Republican Jack Ryan were personally destroyed in the primaries when salacious details from their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked to the media, which then pressured for their full release, notably in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. Thus, ultimately permitting Obama to run against an out-of-state, clown candidate, religious conservative firebrand Alan Keyes, in the general election.

 Negative political advertising is reliably effective, something known since the days of Murray Chotiner running Richard Nixon’s California races, but the information age imposes “blowback” costs when it is used too openly by a candidate. Axelrod’s long courtship of the media will permit similar “fingerprint free” attacks against the GOP to work unless McCain’s campaign is smart enough to start doing social network analysis of key media people crossreferenced with Obama Campaign functionaries and Axelrod associates.

It’s also noteworthy of how little escapes Axelrod’s attention. The conservative intellectual and writer, Dr. Stanley Kurtz, has been digging into the UIC archives on Senator Obama’s extensive political relationship with Dr. William Ayers, the 60’s radical and unrepentant ex-Weatherman terrorist, now a professor of Education at UIC where he is a leading advocate of politicizing teacher certification programs along Leftist lines (Ayers is the son of the late, prominent Chicago business leader, Thomas Ayers, former chairman/CEO of Commonwealth Edison and board member at he Chicago Tribune). Kurtz was invited to be a guest last night on Dr. Milt Rosenberg’s highbrow Extension720 WGN-AM radio show and discuss his research and Rosenberg’s switchboard and email system was instantly flooded and essentially shut down by an orchestrated wave of Obama supporters ( here is the Obama Campaign action alert).  While something of a local legend, Rosenberg’s radio show is, in the national media scheme of things, a fairly obscure program. Sort of a conservative NPR, except a lot smarter and writ small.

I would expect the ante be upped against Obama critics to include nuisance suits and worse  if the fall campaign tightens.

UPDATE:

It appears that the Obama-Ayers-Annenberg story, which I expect will soon feature the infamous pic of Ayers trampling a U.S. flag in an alley, is making it on to the MSM radar. Michael Barone does a superb job as political anthropologist here, explaining the ” Chicago Way” to Americans in more normal communities:

Obama Needs to Explain His Ties to William Ayers

….Ayers was one of the original grantees of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform organization in the 1990s, and was cochairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one the two operational arms of the CAC. Obama, then not yet a state senator, became chairman of the CAC in 1995. Later in that year, the first organizing meeting for Obama’s state Senate campaign was held in Ayers’s apartment. Ayers later wrote a memoir, and an article about him appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers is quoted as saying. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Ayers was a terrorist in the late 1960s and 1970s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

You might wonder what Obama was doing working with a character like this. And you might wonder how an unrepentant terrorist got a huge grant and cooperation from the Chicago public school system. You might wonder-if you don’t know Chicago. For this is a city with a civic culture in which politicians, in the words of a story often told by former congressman, federal judge, and Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva, “don’t want nobody nobody sent.” That’s what Mikva remembers being told when he went to a Democratic ward headquarters to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and it rings true. And it’s a civic culture in which there’s nobody better to send you than your parents.

Read the rest here.

Seldom has a public figure of obvious intelligence and education running for president left so scanty a political trail of breadcrumbs to follow. His geniality and ability to connect on a personal level is such that even Illinois archconservative GOP legislators and lobbyists found him to have been, despite his politics, a reasonable person with whom they could deal, at least on occasion.

Obama has a disconcerting number of hard-core, ex-revolutionaries and shady Machine fixers  not only in his past but his immediate present ( you’d think the Democratic Party would have enough raw talent that the Obama campaign would not have to scrape and make use of Communist wingnuts) but seldom has Obama himself ever uttered a controversial word or committed a suspect deed. His voting record, thin as it may be, troubles me:

SENATE:

Voted against free trade zone with Central America (2005)

Voted against letting the IC spy on foreign suspects without a court order (2007)

Consistently voted for timetables for troop withdrawals on several funding bills (2007)

Voted against the confirmation of the superbly qualified Samuel Alito and John Roberts ( 2005, 2006 – I suppose if President Obama nominates the superbly qualified Lawrence Tribe to SCOTUS then all the Senate Republicans should vote “No”.)

ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE:

Voted against allowing homeowners to argue self-defense who used firearms against local ordinances (2004)

Voted to limit handgun purchases to one per month ( 2000)

Voted against making street gang “hit men” eligible for the death penalty (2001)

In Obama’s defense, while in the Illinois legislature he voted to allow at least former police officers and military personnel to have “conceal and carry” rights which cannot be said of all Democrats in a state where the all-powerful Mayor Richard Daley is near to insane on the issue of gun control. Nor is his brief stint in the Senate any less substantive than John F. Kennedy’s “gentleman’s C” record who served a longer time before running for President than did Senator Obama.That said, Obama is still disturbingly close to our first, modern vaporware, candidate. 

What hill would this man die on, figuratively speaking in terms of political issues?  Whom or what can Barack Obama not abide?  We all saw the video of a young Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK by this time in 1992 and heard about innumerable Arkansas characters but Obama in contrast has remained a relative cipher. Does Obama have any longtime friends? Keep in touch with Harvard classmates? Anybody? Where are his Indonesian schoolyard chums popping up on CNN ? If the MSM can find John McCain’s  75 year old North Vietnamese jailer from the Hanoi Hilton they could at least find someone who hung out with Obama somewhere, sometime and heard him express an unguarded opinon. Fred Thompson was runing for all of five minutes and every chick he ever had dated had been interviewed by the Post or the NYT before the New Hampshire primaries opened. It’s weird.

I have readers who are Right, Center and Left.  If I’m missing something here or if you care to sound off in Barack’s defense please do so but I’d really like to know what this man holds as non-negotiable principles.