Condoleezza Rice's Lean Shape for the Future
Wally Keeler
Reorganization Will Emphasize Defense, Global Economics
By Karen DeYoung and Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 10, 2001; Page A01
The Bush administration has substantially restructured the National Security
Council during its first three weeks in office, providing an early
indication of how the new White House plans to handle foreign policy and
promote its strategic priorities.
Armed with memos and staffing lists drafted last fall, national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice cut the NSC staff by a third and reorganized it to
emphasize defense strategy, including national missile defense, and
international economics. In a White House first, Rice has expanded her
regular meetings with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to include Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill.
The consolidation of offices once dealing separately with Europe, Russia and
the Balkans has reflected not only a smaller-is-better view, but also Bush's
desire to decrease U.S. involvement in the Balkans and signal to Russia
"that this administration is not going to treat Russia as a special case,"
said one Russia expert.
Other notable changes have been the elimination of divisions handling
international environmental and health issues, and of the NSC's
communications and legislative offices.
Bush still has not issued the traditional presidential directive formally
spelling out his national security structure -- a document his two immediate
predecessors signed their first day in office. But the reorganization of the
NSC reveals how Rice envisions her relationships with other powerful
administration personalities such as Vice President Cheney, Powell and
Rumsfeld.
Rice has made it clear she will not be a policy initiator or implementer,
and that she expects to be seen and heard far less than her predecessor,
Samuel "Sandy" Berger. Several administration officials said she sees her
task as making sure Bush is briefed and staffed to play his role in foreign
and security matters, advancing his strategic agenda while thinking through
big issues such as guidelines for foreign intervention, and serving as an
honest broker of differences among the major policy players.
Rice's vision of a lean, strategically focused operation, closeted from
public view, stands in stark contrast to the Clinton years, when the NSC
ballooned in size, functions and visibility to become the center of foreign
policy action -- often at the perceived expense of a weak and demoralized
State Department.
State Department sources said they have been told they now will run
interagency meetings that focus on single countries or regions, while the
NSC will chair meetings dealing with "cross-cutting issues" that are less
regionally focused or where no one agency has a lead role. "What's new is
not that the NSC is smaller," said a senior official. "What's new is what's
behind the sizing. It's a view about what the NSC staff ought to be for this
president."
Rice has defined it as "working the seams, stitching the connections
together tightly . . . provid[ing] glue for the many, many agencies and
instruments the United States is now deploying around the world."
Since it was established in 1947, the NSC has been the White House staff
that reflects the president's worldview while helping manage competing
interests on the cabinet. While the influence and power of national security
advisers have varied from one administration to the next, they often have
become embroiled in troubled relationships among presidents, their White
House foreign policy staffs and their cabinet secretaries.
Rice's mentor and model is one of the notable exceptions to this pattern:
Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to Bush's father.
President George Bush. Hailed by all sides as a paragon of modesty and
effectiveness in crises from the collapse of the Soviet Union to Operation
Desert Storm, Scowcroft's NSC was strictly an inside operation, while not
interfering with the work of the cabinet secretaries.
Rice "believes we shouldn't have two secretaries of state," said a senior
administration official.
For some Washington skeptics, the real question is not how many secretaries
of state Bush will have, but how many national security advisers. The
administration has several 800-pound gorillas working on foreign policy, and
Rice, who served as provost at Stanford University after holding a senior
staff position on Scowcroft's NSC, is junior in experience, rank and age to
all of them.
Cheney, a former defense secretary and presidential chief of staff, is
assembling a mini-NSC on his own staff and is expected to play an important
foreign policy role. Powell, national security adviser to Ronald Reagan and
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the senior Bush and during
Clinton's first year, brings far more heft to the job than his predecessor,
Madeleine Albright. The strong-willed Rumsfeld is doing his second stint as
defense secretary.
Bush has said he expects Cheney and the vice presidential advisers to be
full participants in national security policy. The stated plan is that the
NSC and Cheney's staff will be treated as one, with what a senior official
called "maximum communication and transparency."
For the moment, comity is facilitated by the fact that, while many of the
senior players across the administration have well-known differences on some
issues, most of them learned to work together in previous administrations.
And there is a strong desire, emanating from the top, to avoid public
controversy.
But these are early days, and a rare period with virtually no immediate
foreign policy crises. When the going gets tough, "it takes a very strong
president to insist that these people get along," Walt Rostow, who served as
President Lyndon B. Johnson's national security adviser, told the Brookings
Institution, which is compiling oral histories from NSC veterans.
Since 1947, the council has been reinvented under each administration to
reflect the president's style and needs. It has been large -- 74 staffers
under Eisenhower, and more than 100 during Clinton's second term -- and it
has been small. John F. Kennedy slashed it to 12 members. Richard M. Nixon
wanted to "run foreign policy out of the White House," he said in his
memoirs, and adviser Henry A. Kissinger assembled a 50-person staff to do
it. President Jimmy Carter cut that number in half.
President Ronald Reagan -- who ran through six national security advisers in
eight years -- left the NSC largely on its own. The result, among other
things, was the staff-initiated Iran-contra operation under Oliver North.
Although the Bush team promises it will be different, "tensions between the
national security adviser and the secretary of state seem to run through
every administration," Reagan security adviser Frank C. Carlucci told
Brookings. Feuding between Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and secretary
of state Cyrus Vance eventually led to Vance's resignation.
Some veterans of Washington's foreign policy wars are betting that Rice will
be quickly overshadowed and outmaneuvered by the administration's big guns.
Even Scowcroft has observed that no matter what the structure, a successful
national security adviser needs a president who is engaged in foreign
policy, something that remains unclear in Bush's case.
Others insist it is "madness," as one official in cabinet department put it,
to think that the genie of NSC dominance can or should be put back in the
lamp.
The vision of a smaller NSC has become fashionable among foreign policy
experts, recommended by a series of think tank and special commission
reports to the new administration. Brzezinski, Carter's activist adviser,
supports a more limited NSC role. "For every 200 decisions made every day in
foreign affairs, maybe only 10 should be presidential level," he said.
But Anthony Lake, Clinton's first term national security adviser, argued
that the nature of foreign policy today calls for a major NSC role in
governing, not just in advising the president.
"Increasingly, almost every issue has economic dimensions, security
dimensions and classic diplomatic dimensions. And that means that no agency
can take the lead and expect the other agencies that have an interest to
follow it," Lake said, "because State simply won't do what Defense says and
Defense won't do what State says."
Last September, Rice asked Philip Zelikow, a fellow staffer on the Scowcroft
NSC and now head of the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public
Affairs, and arms control expert and Republican State Department veteran
Robert Blackwill, to draft memos on organizing the NSC along Scowcroft's
lines. Edited by Rice and others, the memos were further refined when Rice's
deputy Stephen Hadley came on board, and Zelikow and Blackwill became part
of the transition and were free to roam the halls of the Clinton NSC
operation.
In keeping with a lower profile, NSC legislative and communications
functions were returned to the main White House staff. The press and
speechwriting components were slimmed from three to one official each. While
reporters routinely called the Clinton NSC, including Berger, for policy
information, callers are now referred to the White House and State
Department press offices.
A new post of deputy economics adviser, reporting to both Rice and chief
economics adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey, reflected a desire to enhance the
role of economic considerations in foreign policy. Although no official
appointment has been made, trade specialist Gary Edson, deputy to former
U.S. trade representative Carla Hills, is expected to be tapped for the
post.
Clinton's NSC Nonproliferation and Export Controls Office has become Bush's
Nonproliferation Strategy, Counter-proliferation and Homeland Defense
office -- the locus for national missile defense. At its head is Robert G.
Joseph, an advocate of missile defense who served in the Reagan and senior
Bush administrations.
Rice has turned to experienced hands rather than ideologues for most jobs.
New Europe/Eurasia director Daniel Fried is a career foreign service officer
with long experience in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. From
1993 to 1997, he served in the Clinton NSC, where he played a major role in
NATO enlargement. Franklin C. Miller, director of the Defense and Arms
Control directorate, served in the Defense Department and co-authored the
Clinton nuclear targeting guidelines.
Rice and her team redrew much of the regional chart, moving countries to
where they seemed to make more geographic and policy sense. Southeast Asia,
paired with the Near East under Clinton, has rejoined Asia under director
Torkel Patterson, a Japan expert who served in the Scowcroft NSC and whose
selection sidestepped the rift in the Republican Party over the direction of
China policy.
North Africa has been combined with the Near East in the directorate still
temporarily headed by Clinton holdover Bruce Reidel. The new director for
the rest of Africa is former Rice student, Harvard professor and transition
aide Jendayi Frazer, who also did a stint on the Clinton NSC. Heading the
Western Hemisphere directorate is career foreign service officer John
Maisto.
Still up in the air is what to do with the NSC office of Transnational
Threats, initiated and headed under Clinton by Richard A. Clarke. Clarke has
remained in place while the administration decides what to do with the
office.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company