America's National Security: Are We Safer Now?

Scoring Pres. Obama's National Security Team


Fresh from his election victory, Pres. Barack Obama introduced a new national security team last December that included two key players – National Security Adviser Jim Jones and holdover Secretary of Defense Robert Gates – he had hardly met. A third, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had been his bitter rival in the Democratic presidential primaries.

Meanwhile, an inner circle of Obama campaign aides mostly drawn from Capitol Hill took up positions in the National Security Council, with official ranks and titles that often understated the unofficial power they drew from the close personal relationship and trust they had forged with Obama on the thrilling upstart presidential campaign — an intimacy that Jones, Clinton and Gates lacked.

Who would excel in the new administration? Who would feel their influence ebbing and leave? A year later we know some of the answers.

The most influential player is arguably the one Obama expected to stay on only temporarily, Gates. Jones has overcome an early sense of dislocation and dismay at the wide-open, un-hierarchical Obama White House to re-impose lines of authority in the NSC, maintain a balance of power among the principals, and give the president space to assert control over the military.

In the process, a couple of Obama’s closest friends have left the administration, come under fire, or been relegated to second-tier jobs.

Clinton has arguably proven her loyalty to the new president, lent her global brand to promoting his foreign policy vision, and forged a strong alliance with the professional State Department bureaucracy.

But super-envoys previously portrayed as rivals for Clinton’s turf don't look quite so super one year on. And a powerful White House staff of foreign policy professionals and insiders has kept the locus of the new administration’s foreign policy coming from the White House, directed to an unexpected degree by the president, who has proven inclined to decide fraught policy battles in favor of pragmatism and even expedience over some of the progressive values he campaigned on, from closing Guantanamo Bay to checking executive power.

On the Way Up:

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

A veteran of a half dozen administrations, former cold war CIA chief, and the deputy national security adviser in the George H.W. Bush-era NSC that Obama sought to emulate, Gates proved to be the fulcrum of the Obama cabinet’s second recent, often highly contentious Afghanistan war policy review, guiding the president to choose a modified “hybrid” option of 30,000 of the 40,000 new US combat troops the generals were requesting, with NATO kicking in the difference.

Once widely expected to depart midway through Obama’s first term, the obvious question Gates’ increasingly influential status raises now is how Obama could afford for him to leave before 2012 at the very least – with a near term agenda that includes withdrawal from Iraq, the U.S. escalation in Afghanistan, and the tough phase of coercive diplomacy with Iran, where Gates has repeatedly said the U.S. should avoid a third military conflict.


Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Her relationship with Obama has been as scrutinized for tensions as closely as satellite photos of Iranian enrichment sites. But Clinton has shown no daylight from the foreign policy inclinations of the president she agreed to serve, from supporting engagement with Iran to his earlier tough stance on Israeli settlements.

While earlier in the administration chatterers questioned whether she had allowed the most pressing foreign policy challenges – Afghanistan, the Middle East – to be outsourced to high profile envoys, Clinton has quieted most of the doubters, forged strong alliances with the key department under secretaries and assistant secretaries, pursued an exhausting travel schedule with no sign of sweat, and most of all proven herself loyal to a president she once ran against.

The National Security Council’s Tom Donilon, Dennis Ross, Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes

Gates’ role as the linchpin of Obama’s security policy is unquestioned, but the real day-to-day power has been wielded by the low-profile professionals, many of them veterans of Obama’s presidential campaign.

Atop the national security bureaucracy is Donilon, a Clinton administration veteran, lawyer and former Biden campaign aide, who, as deputy national security adviser, runs the key deputies committee meetings where the key American foreign policy decisions get managed and key policy decisions surfaced.

Ross, Clinton’s former Middle East peace envoy, quietly abandoned the State Department for what has become a senior role developing Iran and wider Middle East strategy at the White House -- sometimes to the seeming disadvantage of Middle East envoy George Mitchell pursuing an exhausting shuttle diplomacy mission to try to get the re-launch of Israeli Palestinian peace talks.

But the fastest rise may be that of McDonough, who coordinated foreign policy on the campaign trail and spends much of the day at Obama’s side. Currently NSC chief of staff (he previously was in charge of NSC’s strategic communications), but, like Donilon, McDonough speaks for the president inside and outside of the NSC, and as such, enjoys a measure of respect and in some cases fear and jealousy from other parts of the executive and Democratic foreign policy establishment.

Council on Foreign Relations president emeritus Les Gelb recently christened him the “Lord High Executioner.”

When McDonough replaced Mark Lippert as NSC chief of staff in October, it made space for Obama’s foreign policy speechwriter, Ben Rhodes to assume the strategic communications portfolio. At 30, Rhodes’ rise stems in part from his place crafting what’s been to date one of the most important tools of Obama’s foreign policy: his speeches.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry

An administration staffed, from the chief of staff on down, by veterans of Congress might be expected to defer more to congressional leaders, but there have been lots of early congressional complaints of the administration not sufficiently consulting them.

But there has been no rancor toward the administration public or private expressed by Kerry, though he’s recently acknowledged what everyone already knew: That he’d coveted the post of Secretary of State. He has emerged as a powerful and gracious player, ensuring that Congress and the White House are aligned on the central issues of foreign policy, and served as a key intermediary with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the administration’s bid to salvage that country’s election.

On the Way Out:

Mark Lippert, former NSC chief of staff

The White House announced in October that Lippert, and Obama’s longest serving foreign policy adviser was returning to active duty in the Navy. As one of Obama’s only inner circle aides who had a foot in the military, Lippert played a key role in influencing Obama’s decision to pick Jones, but the two were said to have a sometimes tense relationship, and Lippert was said to not enjoy the administrative nature of the NSC chief of staff job.

Still, "you don't leave one of the most powerful foreign policy positions in a new Administration, having personally served the President for the last five years in his formative ascent to the Oval Office, to take some unspecified position in the U.S. Navy," said one Democratic official familiar with Lippert from the campaign, suggesting there was more of a back story.

White House counsel Greg Craig; deputy attorney general David Ogden; Phil Carter, assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs

All three announced their departures in the past two months. Some reports have suggested Ogden wasn’t getting along particularly well with his boss, Attorney General Eric Holder. Carter has insisted he left for personal reasons. And Craig was essentially forced out in a leak campaign that began last summer and episodically accelerated in the fall until he announced he was returning to the private sector in January.

Accounts suggested other White House aides, including Rahm Emanuel, were annoyed that Craig struck out early positions on legal issues such as closing Guantanamo and releasing Bush-era Justice Department memos on water boarding, that set off firestorms in Congress and from former Bush administration officials for which the White House was not fully prepared.

Struggling:

Special envoys George Mitchell , Richard Holbrooke and Scott Gration

If there were early expectations that Clinton's high-profile envoys would overshadow her, the reverse has been true.

Mitchell, the former Senate Majority and Mideast envoy, has had even his legendary patience tested by a peace process that has yet to get off the ground, while the high profile and frank talk of Afghan and Pakistan envoy Holbrooke annoyed the White House, which temporarily muzzled him. At the same time, it seems possible to envision a scenario in which Holbrooke could move up, thanks to his strong continued relationship with Clinton.

Perhaps the most controversial envoy, however, has been Gration, whose uber realist approach to working with the Sudanese regime has made him a lightning rod for Darfur activists and Congress wary of poking at higher-ranking officials.



Sources: Politico, Fox News