What Trump’s Changes Mean for the National Security Council

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us/politics/national-security-council-stephen-bannon.html

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WASHINGTON — President Trump announced on Monday that he would add the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Council after critics questioned a memorandum released last weekend that also gave a seat to his chief political strategist.

Mr. Trump’s decision to include the strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, on the council’s “principals committee” — where he will sit alongside the secretaries of state, Treasury, defense and energy, and other policy makers — has set off an eruption among the Washington national security establishment. The memo did not stipulate that the director of national intelligence or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would automatically attend those meetings, and raised concerns about the influence Mr. Bannon would exert over national security.

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, insisted on Monday that the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, were welcome to attend any meetings of the committee on subjects relevant to their portfolios. And he noted that Mr. Trump was adding the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, to the list.

“The president has such respect for director Pompeo and the men and women of the C.I.A. that today, the president is announcing he will amend the memo to add C.I.A. back into the N.S.C.,” Mr. Spicer said.

The council is no place for political creatures, many have argued. It is the place where the nation’s deepest intelligence secrets, its fluctuating hierarchy of national interests and its jockeying-for-power cabinet members combine as policy differences are hashed out. It is the forum where decisions about war, from Vietnam to Iraq; drone strikes in Pakistan; and conflicts in cyberspace have unfolded over endless hours of meetings.

Of course, with stakes that large, it has always been about politics — from grand strategy to petty scorekeeping. Here is a quick look.

The nation lived without the council for more than 150 years, until World War II ended and the immense responsibilities of managing the world — and the atomic bomb — descended on President Harry S. Truman. The council was created in 1947, when the C.I.A. and the Defense Department came into being. Like most things in Washington, it started small and, over time, ballooned to such size that every new president swears the first thing he will do is pare it back.

Which, of course, never really happens.

Presidents of both parties have one thing in common: They are control freaks. And the council becomes the instrument of control. “Each individual president has tremendous latitude to shape both the institution of the N.S.C. and the formal and informal mechanisms of his or her White House national security apparatus,” David Rothkopf wrote in his history of the council, “Running the World.”

The council is “all about the influence of one person,” Mr. Rothkopf wrote.

The formal instrument is the “principals committee,” made up of the president, the vice president and all those jockeying cabinet members. That is what Mr. Bannon joins, meaning he won the first week’s access-trust-influence sweepstakes. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence, who were regular members of the council under President Barack Obama, would attend if “issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed.”

(The White House points to similar language in President George W. Bush’s orders for his council, though there was no director of national intelligence at the time.)

That depends who you are. Back in Mr. Obama’s first term, the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, carved out a few countries he dealt with himself, chiefly China, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But the council is not supposed to set policy — it is not supposed to be “operational.” Of course, it frequently is. Get on the plane of the secretary of state or the secretary of defense, and you will almost always run into a council representative, who can keep an eye on things and call back to the White House. During the Iran nuclear negotiations, the council representative was a key player. It has gotten to the point where the council has its tentacles into everything.

In Washington, this is the kind of argument people have in bars. (Well, some people.) But on this issue, there is fairly widespread bipartisan consensus: Brent Scowcroft, who served as President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, “is widely viewed as one of the most effective people who has ever held that job,” the Aspen Strategy Group, which studied the future of the national security structure last summer, concluded in a recent report.

Henry Kissinger might disagree: As President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser, he ran circles around the secretary of state, negotiated to end the Vietnam War and conducted the secret diplomacy with China that created Nixon’s opening. When he became secretary of state, he held onto the national security adviser job.

The council has a staff that numbers several hundred professionals — most borrowed from the State Department, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and other government agencies for two years or so.

As with everything in the White House, real estate guides the path to power. So the national security adviser has a big spacious corner office visible from the driveway of the West Wing, and several senior officials are stuffed into windowless offices in the basement, some right under the floor of the Oval Office.

Much of the day-to-day decision-making is done by the “deputies committee,” where subcabinet officers, and their designees, sit in seemingly endless meetings in the Situation Room to debate out differences, create policy and push the hardest issues to the president and his top advisers. Intelligence officials often open those meetings, providing assessments of what is happening around the world. (They are not supposed to delve into policy suggestions, but it has happened.)

This makes the deputy national security adviser, who convenes those meetings, the most powerful person in Washington that most people have never heard of. It also makes them one of the palest, since they rarely see the sun.

He isn’t. During the Obama administration, David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief political adviser, often sat in on council meetings. But he was never a formal member. Susan E. Rice, who was national security adviser until 11 days ago, called the decision to downgrade the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the director of national intelligence “stone cold crazy.”