It isn’t often that left, right and center agree about the Obama White House. But the firing of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel this week produced a near-unanimous reaction: President Obama’s foreign policy team is dysfunctional and in need of a stronger tonic than the exit of a low-profile cabinet member with a light policy footprint.

Both Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and The New York Times editorial page agreed that, in the words of the Times, Hagel “was not the core of the Obama administration’s military problem. That lies with the president and a national security policy that has too often been incoherent and shifting at a time of mounting international challenges” and “tightly controlled… by a small group of aides.”


McCain, for his part, told a radio interviewer that his friend Hagel “was never really brought into that real tight circle inside the White House that makes all the decisions which has put us into the incredible debacle that we’re in today throughout the world.”

As Obama’s foreign policy continues to grasp for clear wins abroad — with ISIL still fighting, Iran still stubborn and Vladimir Putin still defiant — the critique of a tight-knit and micromanaging White House national security team is quickly gaining currency in Washington.

And while some say that dumping Hagel was intended, in part, to cool the criticism of Obama’s foreign policy machinations, the immediate effect has been to draw more attention to the way life-and-death decisions are made in the White House Situation Room — and why they’re not working out better in trouble spots like from Syria to Ukraine.

Some close observers say the responsibility is borne by a few key officials, including national security advisor Susan Rice and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, who have further centralized decision-making, cut midlevel officials out of the policy process and convened endless meetings before making decisions. The White House did not make Rice available for comment.

Critics point to failures large and small, from the White House’s tone-deaf celebration of the controversial Bowe Bergdahl as a heroic figure to a military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria that lacks strategic coherence and which has been bogged down in sideshows like the battle for the strategically trivial town of Kobani.

“The NSC process has gotten worse” since Rice took over the national security council in June of 2013, says a former administration official who had foreign policy-related duties.

A senior administration official rejected such complaints. “This is the same NSC process that’s been running throughout this administration, which very much wants everybody’s voices at the table,” the official said.

But, this person conceded, midlevel officials in places like the defense and state departments have recently been upset after their policy positions were overruled in national security meetings they did not attend — and have unfairly blamed Rice because she led the meetings. The official cited policy towards Ukraine and Egypt as two examples.

“You have frustration among the deputies,” admitted this official, who claims that many of the deputies were, in fact, overruled by their own superiors, not Rice. “There have been some things where they were out of lockstep with their bosses up the chain. They feel like, wow, the White House is really turning it around. But on a lot of these issues the problem was within their building — not with the White House.”

The official also urged perspective, noting that past presidencies had seen far bigger feuds within their foreign policy teams.

Indeed, the current NSC advisor may not even be the most embattled woman named Rice to hold the job.

As George W. Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice struggled to manage the open hostility between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In October of 2003, the Washington Post declared Rice’s NSC “dysfunctional.”

A former Obama White House aide, who worked under a different national security advisor, argued that complaints about micromanagement and a closely held process are not even unique to Susan Rice’s tenure in this administration. Her predecessor, Tom Donilon, was known to closely control the national security process. “It was micromanagement that drove me crazy,” declared Obama’s first Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, in a speech earlier this month. Gates departed before Rice assumed her current role.

The same official added that relations between the White House and Pentagon in particular are often strained during times of military action. That may be particularly true now, given that Obama limited the size and scope of the military’s response to ISIL — for instance by ruling out the prospect of “boots on the ground.”

“I think this is a somewhat natural tension when you have a Pentagon that is being constrained,” said this former official. “I think when the Pentagon is running the show, they feel very happy.”

Compounding the current friction, said the first source, is McDonough, a longtime foreign policy staffer who was Obama’s deputy national security advisor before assuming his current job. McDonough has deeply immersed himself in some key foreign policy issues, including ISIL and the Ebola outbreak, creating friction with Rice and confusion about lines of authority in the West Wing. “I love Denis but I’m at my wits’ end here,” said the source. “Denis’s response to every problem is to do more meetings, have more phone calls. He ends up micromanaging everything.”

An administration official said it’s only natural for a chief of staff to hold meetings on pressing issues. “Denis is the kind of guy who, when there’s something hot, he’s going to have meetings on it as well. When there’s something like ebola or ISIL going on he might call a meeting on it. But it’s to bring the whole White House apparatus to bear” — not just the national security team.

Left unsaid by these sources is what responsibility might be borne by the one figure who has presided over the foreign policy process from the start of this administration: Obama himself.