How John Bolton Broke the National Security Council
How John Bolton Broke the National Security Council
He weakened one of the few constraints that kept Trump from running foreign policy by the seat of his pants.
By John Gans at the NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/opinion/john-bolton-trump.html
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Instead, Mr. Bolton decided to break the interagency system that had served as the heart of American foreign policy for over seven decades. Driven by confidence in his own ideas about what government should do and how it should run, he had in mind something closer to Roosevelt’s juggling: The president in a room with the national security adviser and a few aides making decisions about most important issues in the world. To realize that plan, Mr. Bolton included fewer people in meetings, made council sessions far less regular, and raced to always be by Mr. Trump’s side. There was no longer a National Security Council, in effect, just a national security adviser.
Mr. Bolton broke government and then it broke him. As the national security adviser, he pushed for a hard line on North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Afghanistan. But without a structure behind him, Mr. Bolton was increasingly alone trying to sell positions that were a hard sell to Mr. Trump, who is much less an ideologue and much harder to pin down. Eventually, Mr. Trump split with Mr. Bolton and began consulting with outsiders like the Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. When Mr. Bolton fell out with the president, the ad hoc system collapsed right along with him, as reports over the messy decision-making on the proposed Afghanistan peace deal and talks demonstrate.
Mr. Bolton’s singular achievement was to dismantle a foreign-policymaking structure that had until then kept the president from running foreign policy by the seat of his pants. Mr. Bolton persuaded Mr. Trump he didn’t need the National Security Council to make decisions; it is no surprise that the president eventually felt confident deciding he did not need a national security adviser, either. Whether Mr. Trump names a replacement for Mr. Bolton does not matter: No one is going to convince the president he needs a system now, let alone the one that existed for 70 years.
Presidential juggling is back, and one does not need to compare Mr. Trump to Roosevelt in order to worry. Today, Washington is more dependent on the presidency, and the world is more dependent on Washington’s decisions, than it was in the 1930s and ’40s. At a moment of division at home and disarray abroad, the breaking of the federal government is the most consequential crisis of all.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
said as much on CNN tonight. But, she added, even if it was functional tRump wouldn't take their advice or pay much attention, so it doesn't really matter if it's broken or not.
