Farewell Waltz, farewell National Security Council?

A much-misunderstood role and institution

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Donald Trump has fired National Security Advisor Michael Waltz in the wake of the Signal messaging scandal, although he wants us to believe that the firing is about something else. According to anonymous quotes which turned up right on time, Waltz was actually fired because he was secretly plotting with Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran. Most of the media seems to have fallen for the spin, but it’s important to remember that the sequence of events went like this:

1. Signalgate happened and the media said Waltz should be fired;

2. It was widely reported that Trump wanted to fire Waltz but didn’t want to give in to the media, but would wait a few weeks then find another reason to do it;

3. A few weeks passed and Waltz was fired for what the administration claimed was some other reason.

So while it is true that Waltz was at the center of a struggle between hawks and America First-ers and that the latter are happy to see him gone, I think we should all be skeptical that the real reason he was fired is because some beef about Israel from months ago suddenly reached a boiling point. He was clearly fired because of Signalgate. That is encouraging, because it means the administration is not entirely immune to embarrassment and the media might be able to claim more scalps in the future.

But what is even more interesting is the fact that Trump has appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to replace Waltz, making Rubio the first person to hold both jobs at once since Henry Kissinger.

One way to react to this news is to say that this proves that Rubio truly has the president’s confidence and has unparalleled influence within the administration. Another is to say that this actually shows that Trump doesn’t regard either of these positions as particularly important and so it doesn’t matter much who holds them.

I lean heavily towards the latter interpretation, with a caveat: Trump might not care much about these positions, but they really do matter a lot. And having someone double-hatting as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor is a recipe for disaster.

What is the National Security Council anyway?

The media doesn’t often do a great job of communicating exactly what it is that the National Security Advisor does. With a job title like that, you’d think that the holder’s main task would be advising the president, sort of like a councillor in a court. But while the NSA preferably is someone who has the president’s ear, their main job is actually to coordinate the various foreign policy departments (State, Defense, CIA, etc.) and ensure that they are all implementing the president’s vision.

They do this with a staff of hundreds of people who have expertise in various regions or issues and who are typically career civil servants on loan from other departments. This means that the “National Security Council” actually has a dual meaning. On the one hand, it is the term used to give a name to the meeting in which the heads of various departments get together to make decisions about U.S. foreign policy. But on the other, it also refers to this permanent bureaucracy of civil servants who are quietly beavering away at policy implementation.

When Kissinger held both of these jobs back in the 1970s, the bureaucratic side of the NSC was much less developed than it is now, with a staff that was an order of magnitude smaller. I spent close to a decade of my life researching and writing a book about the Vietnam War and I can only name perhaps three people other than Kissinger who were involved in running the NSC during his tenure. It was simply a much smaller thing, and the main job of the National Security Advisor was actually just to advise the president. Having someone do both these jobs at once still wasn’t a great idea, but it was much more plausible.

Nowadays, policy-making is a lot more complicated. The world is more interconnected, things move faster, and the U.S. government is bigger and more complex. Presidents have come to expect a greater degree of control and coordination over day-to-day details of foreign policy, which is one reason why the size of the NSC has ballooned. People in the other departments sometimes complain about this, because they would like more independence. But a good National Security Advisor creates a process in which every department can make its voice heard and contribute to arriving at a sensible policy.

Trump’s non-NSC

It goes without saying that this is not how the Trump administration runs things. The same articles that have headlines like ‘Rubio’s swift rise to a central spot in Trump’s orbit’ also mention that the Secretary of State has frequently been taken completely by surprise when Trump makes major policy announcements. This tracks with how things look from the outside, which is basically that Trump makes impulsive decisions and then the people around him scramble to justify and implement them.

This explains why Trump might not much care much about who is in charge of the NSC. As The Washington Post reports:

Some officials question whether Trump truly needs a traditional National Security Council. They say they are seeking ways to serve Trump himself, rather than the White House as an institution. A National Security Council staffed with mid- to senior-level policy experts might not be part of the equation for a president who thinks he is his own best adviser and is deeply skeptical of conventional wisdom on world affairs, they say.

The idea here seems to be that Trump doesn’t need to take the advice of woke civil servants, so who needs a National Security Council anyway? But as anyone with any understanding of how the government works could tell these officials, giving advice is only one part of what the NSC does. It also coordinates the president’s agenda and ensures it is implemented. And that is a task that needs to be performed even if the agenda is to Make America Great Again.

If Rubio’s double-hatting becomes permanent, the administration will be shooting itself in the foot. The Secretary of State needs to be travelling all of the time to push progress abroad, while the National Security Advisor needs to be in the White House overseeing the nuts and bolts of policy coordination. It is simply not possible to see how one person can do both of these things at once in the present day.

For opponents of Trump’s agenda, this creates a paradox. On the one hand, it would be great to see more of the chaos that prevented Trump from implementing much of his agenda in the first term. But on the other hand, weighty questions of world peace hang on U.S. government policy-making processes running smoothly and effectively. Just concentrating more and more power in the hands of a possibly senile guy who thinks he can run everything by tweet is not going to create good outcomes for anyone.

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