If he could, President Donald Trump might roll up his sleeves and single-handedly manage U.S. foreign and military policy. He would be the only man in the room for the coming negotiations with Russia and NATO. He would personally select targets for lethal strikes in places like Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. He might even spend his afternoons piloting each of the unmanned drones and choosing the right moment to pull the trigger. But he can’t. It’s too much work for one man. Instead, he’ll likely pursue his overseas agenda through the administrative instrument over which the White House has the most direct control — the National Security Council, or NSC, and the national security adviser. John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, emphasized the raw power of the NSC in a four-page staffing memo that he sent to President-elect Obama in 2008. “The White House really has two chiefs of staff,” Podesta wrote: the actual chief of staff and the national security adviser, who runs the NSC on the president’s behalf. The memo was among the hacked Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks in the run-up to the election. Evidence of the NSC’s vast, opaque powers runs through postwar presidential history. As President Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger cemented his access to the Oval Office and outmaneuvered his rival, Secretary of State William Rogers, eventually taking Rogers’s job. Under President George W. Bush, the National Security Council was discussing the possibility of invading Iraq as early as July 2001, at the suggestion of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It seems unlikely that a President Trump would invest anyone with the kind of trust held by Kissinger or Rumsfeld. Trump burned through a number of high-level campaign staff during the months leading up to the election, and the only consistent members of his inner circle are his immediate family. One worry among the national security community is that Trump may wind up being, in effect, his own national security adviser. Paul B. Stares, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies the NSC, characterized Trump as “someone who likes to be in total control, believes he knows more than his subordinates, encourages competition and tension among them.” In an email, Stares said these qualities are “antithetical to all the virtues we look for at the pinnacle of the national security decision-making process. So the question is: Is he going to change? Or are we going to see a very different NSC process?” “The president is the key person,” said David Rothkopf, the CEO and editor of Foreign Policy and the author of a book on the history of the NSC. “Trump has no experience dealing with the various agencies in question, nor with the White House apparatus. He has essentially no experience with anybody in the national security community. There’s going to be a kind of battle — Who’s going to teach him national security? Who’s going to show him the right way to run a meeting, how to delegate, how to use the NSC, how to use the agencies? If his professor is Trump himself, who doesn’t know anything, that’s one thing. If it’s [former Defense Intelligence Agency director and Trump adviser] Michael Flynn, a deranged maniac, that’s something else.” Formally known as the “assistant to the president for national security affairs,” the national security adviser heads up the NSC, one of the federal government’s most powerful and least transparent entities. The council was created in 1947 as part of the far-reaching National Security Act. Its original purpose was to coordinate the Department of State and the Department of Defense in their efforts to husband American power around the globe. Today, the NSC has evolved into the federal government’s foreign policy spinal cord, the most direct bureaucratic means presidents can impress their will directly onto the rest of the government, with a minimum of external oversight. “If it [the NSC] doesn’t work, it is like congestive heart failure,” said David C. Miller Jr., a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, in a congressional hearing this September. He called the national security adviser “the most important presidential appointment not subject to Senate confirmation.” The hub of the NSC is the NSC Principals Committee, a kind of super cabinet. Its nerve center is the Situation Room in the West Wing basement. Twelve of the 13 people depicted in the famous White House photo taken in the Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden operation were connected to the NSC. By law, the Principals Committee includes the president, vice president, and secretaries of defense, state, and, since 2007, energy. The committee’s exact composition varies from meeting to meeting, to be decided by the president and senior White House staff. Within the broad strokes of the original 1947 law, as updated over the years and then amended by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, NSC quite literally makes its own rules, and those rules are set by the president.



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A few weeks after inauguration, the new NSC will issue A few weeks after inauguration, the new NSC will issue its first memo , signed by President Trump. The memo will define who is part of the Principals Committee and the Deputies Committee, which is made up of the principals’ seconds-in-command. Even the names of the memos bear the fingerprints of the president. For Kennedy, they were “National Security Action Memorandums.” For Reagan, they were “National Security Decision Directives.” Obama called them “Presidential Policy Directives.” According to the Federation of American Scientists, Obama has issued 43 of them over eight years. Twenty-two have been made public in whole or part; the other 21 remain secret. The NSC is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, although Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., proposed a bill that would have changed that earlier this year. It has a tiny stub of a website and a small budget: $12.6 million under the Executive Office of the President. It has no headquarters of its own, operating out of the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building. Unlike the secretaries of defense and state, the director of the CIA, and many other heads of key agencies, the national security adviser and NSC senior staff are not subject to Senate confirmation. During Obama’s term, Capitol Hill became more partisan, which led to even more power concentrating within the NSC, with the president’s most trusted allies obtaining proximity and influence inside the White House. Meanwhile, more experienced figures, who may not have been the president’s first choices but could survive Senate confirmation, were shipped off to the agencies. After controversy over John O. Brennan’s role in the Bush-era torture program forced him to withdraw his name from consideration for CIA director in 2008, he obtained arguably more influence inside the White House as assistant to the president for homeland security, a role that expanded under Obama to be a dual-hatted NSC role that also served as a deputy to the national security adviser and a full member of the Principals Committee. Working in a basement office a few steps away from the Oval Office, Brennan wound up with better access to the president than Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, and his director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, both of whom departed during the administration’s second year. “There have been some complaints that Mr. Brennan has exercised an influence on intelligence activities that more properly belongs to the director of national intelligence,” noted a 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service.



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