James Jones fires a shot over the bow

By Will Inboden

The headline on this front-page story from Sunday’s Washington Post is: "Obama’s NSC Will Get New Power." It might well instead have been "National Security Advisor Jones Cautions Other Cabinet Members That He Is In Charge."

The story breathlessly purports to describe an organizational paradigm shift creating a "dramatically different NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II." If true, this would be front-page news indeed. But when the story relates the details of the proposed changes, it all sounds rather familiar: closer integration between economic and national security issues, cabinet secretaries besides State and Defense attending principal’s meetings, directorates reorganized to deal with transnational challenges, dissemination of policy decisions to relevant agencies, an NSC staff that oversees implementation of presidential decisions, and a national security advisor with direct access to the president. All of this was the case in the Bush administration NSC, and the Clinton administration NSC before that. 

To be sure, there are a couple of new organizational changes suggested, such as folding at least part of the Homeland Security Council into the NSC, and aligning the countries covered by regional bureaus across each cabinet agency (though even this last point raises the question of how uber-envoys such as Richard Holbrooke’s Pakistan-Afghanistan portfolio or George Mitchell’s Middle East portfolio will correlate with, let alone cooperate with, staff from the NSC and other agencies). Yet it is also quite reminiscent of the changes made within the NSC organizational structure by previous national security advisors, most recently Steve Hadley’s restructuring of the NSC in the second Bush term to create five new deputy national security advisor positions on priority issues.

So if there is less than meets the eye to this alleged expansion of the NSC’s power, then what is the real story here? One suspects that it might be found in this sentence:

Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the "back channels" that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president’s office to unilaterally influence and make policy out of view of the others.

In other words, this may be a cautionary reminder from Jones to certain cabinet secretaries that his West Wing office is down the hall from the Oval. 

Just before the 2008 election, now-Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg and soon-to-be Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell published Difficult Transitions, a thoughtful book on presidential transitions and foreign-policy challenges, anchored in the lessons of history. In a chapter of advice on the selection of senior officials, they contend that presidential decisions to appoint prominent figures "without significant previous personal connection to the candidates has, with the important exception of Kissinger, proved problematic." Moreover, "the synergies of the group are an important consideration, and … in selecting senior national security officials the president-elect needs to focus not only on the individual suitability of candidates for each position, but also on how well they are likely to work together."      

Taken together, this passage and the Post story raise an interesting question. The members of the Obama national security team have rightly been lauded for their stature and experience. But will they work well together?