No subject

Fri Feb 24 11:55:10 PST 2006

policy may have been greater than that of any individual other than the 
president since Henry A. Kissinger held the positions of national 
security adviser and secretary of state during the Nixon years. Defense 
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld served as Cheney's partner in steamrolling 
bureaucratic rivals; Colin L. Powell toiled loyally at the largely 
ignored and mistrusted State Department; and Condoleezza Rice, national 
security adviser and ostensibly the coordinator of policy, played the 
role of tutor to a neophyte president and seldom challenged Cheney. As a 
result, policies were largely shaped by the vice president and his circle.

But Cheney's influence has waned. He's lost his top aide, his public 
approval ratings are dismal, and his network of supporters inside the 
administration has dissolved. At the same time, Rice has taken charge at 
State, and the National Security Council has faded even further. The 
result is a kinder, gentler face on foreign policy, but also a void in 
the Bush administration foreign policy apparatus just where it matters 
most -- the White House.

Presidents need strong figures in the White House to harmonize competing 
views and cabinet departments. Otherwise, an administration cannot deal 
effectively with the pressing problems of foreign policy. And there are 
plenty of them for Bush today, ranging from the immediate, such as 
Iran's challenge to the nuclear nonproliferation regime, to the long 
term, such as how to manage our interdependence with China.

Last week demonstrated the new order. Cheney was relegated to the 
traditional vice presidential duty of playing the president's heavy. He 
rattled the U.S. saber and threatened Iran with "meaningful 
consequences" for its failure to comply with international nuclear 
safeguards, only to have Rice temper his comments later the same day. As 
secretary of state, Rice is now more policy architect than presidential 
aide. Cheney was a role player, not the puppetmaster.

The ebbing of foreign policy initiative away from the White House over 
the last year represents a striking change from the previous 35 years. 
During that time, the NSC asserted primacy in foreign policy, nudging 
aside the State Department, which had been the grande dame of American 
cabinet agencies since Thomas Jefferson served as its first secretary.

Created in 1947, the NSC was transformed by Richard Nixon and Henry 
Kissinger from a tiny team of paper pushers and facilitators into a hub 
of real policy shapers. Nixon and other Oval Office occupants worried 
that the appointees they sent to State would "go native" over at Foggy 
Bottom, just 10 minutes from the White House. "You'd be surprised how 
big a deal that distance can become," remarked Kissinger. The NSC gave 
the president a foreign policy staff he could call his own and who owed 
loyalty only to him.

Since Kissinger, national security advisers have equaled or surpassed 
secretaries of State in influence. His successors such as Brent 
Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, Powell and Samuel R. 
Berger have often galled the State Department by taking the lead.

Then, during George W. Bush's first term in office, something 
unprecedented happened. The seat at the head of the White House 
policymaking table was, in effect, taken over by the vice president. 
Cheney's own national security team was larger than the entire NSC staff 
had been during the early days of John F. Kennedy's administration. 
Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis 
"Scooter" Libby, enjoyed the same protocol rank as the president's 
national security adviser.

What has changed? First, the president no longer depends on the vice 
president as he did in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush was 
still learning national security on the job and the nation was in 
crisis. The president today is better schooled, more experienced and 
more confident. Second, Rumsfeld, who is Cheney's staunchest supporter 
after the president and whose vacation home is just a few steps away 
from Cheney's on Maryland's Eastern Shore, has lost a lot of his clout. 
No longer the center of attention, as he was during the offensives in 
Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumsfeld has legions of his own detractors.

Third, Libby's legal woes over his alleged disclosure of a CIA 
operative's identity has been a huge distraction. And his departure was 
only part of the disintegration of the administration's network of 
neoconservatives that Cheney tapped into. Deputy Secretary of Defense 
Paul Wolfowitz decamped for the World Bank, Undersecretary of Defense 
Doug Feith left government, and Undersecretary of State John Bolton 
received the ironic punishment of being posted to the United Nations, an 
institution he had derided as irrelevant.

Then there is the matter of Cheney's personality. One former top Bush 
administration official says, "I have always felt that his relentless 
pessimism was unsustainable. After a while people want more than fear, 
they want a positive vision and that was not his strong suit."

Now, Rice is in her ascendancy at State. Diplomatic, thoughtful and a 
good listener, she is the Un-Cheney. She has the ear and trust of the 
president and she has been embraced by U.S. allies for her efforts to 
repair the damage to ties frayed by first-term policies. She has 
appointed seasoned internationalists and her former deputy, Stephen J. 
Hadley, who has replaced her at the NSC, seems content to remain 
subordinate to her. One former NSC staffer said to me, "He runs the NSC 
like it was a bureau of State's."

In the eyes of many, notably State Department types who have long felt 
that foreign policy should be led by diplomats, that is just fine. They 
would like the NSC once again to become more of a coordinating mechanism 
than an originator of ideas.

But diplomacy is only one of many tools the United States has at its 
disposal when it comes to international relations. The State Department 
is in no position to mobilize Defense, Treasury, the U.S. Trade 
Representative or any other agency. The NSC is the place where all the 
president's options come together.

With the profile of the NSC receding under Hadley, this critical role 
has been weakened. A lawyer who has worked closely with virtually every 
GOP foreign policy team since the 1970s, Hadley gets high marks for 
improving interagency coordination. But the joke for the past year in 
the foreign policy community has been that Rice has two deputies: Robert 
Zoellick at State and Hadley. One longtime associate of Hadley who 
worked closely with him in this administration says, "Steve is very, 
very, very, very, very, very, very cautious. He is a lawyer not just by 
training but by disposition." Despite traditional rivalries between the 
NSC and State, one State Department official said, "My only concern is 
whether he is too invisible, whether the administration wouldn't be 
better off if he were more out in front on the issues."

So how well will this new, more harmonious dynamic serve U.S. foreign 
policy? As Brzezinski said to me, "The question really is whether the 
administration's new look amounts to merely a toning down of past 
policies or whether it is really the beginning of something new." Will 
the Bush foreign policy legacy be something more than Afghanistan, Iraq 
and the opportunity costs of the overwhelming focus on the latter?

"I believe people will ultimately look at the foreign policy of this 
administration as having had four quarters, like a football game," one 
senior official at State told me. "The first was focused on 9/11 and the 
instant coalition that was offered to us by the world to support our 
efforts in responding to the terrorist threat. The second came as we 
made the decision to enter Iraq and did so in a way that undercut much 
of our international support. The third has been spent, during the past 
year, with Condi's leadership, rebuilding those international 
coalitions. But the fourth will be about Iran."

And as any football fan knows, the last quarter often counts the most. 
Iran "is the critical challenge we face," the State Department official 
added, "but I would have to say, that if I were a betting man, I would 
not give us very high odds of achieving our goal of keeping Iran from 
gaining nuclear weapons or emerging as an even more formidable threat to 
us in the Middle East."

As it happens, the Bush administration devoted itself to containing the 
weapons of mass destruction threat of a terrorist-supporting Gulf state 
during its first term. Now diplomacy, however frustrating, has replaced 
preemption even though the administration is now facing such a threat, 
this time more real than imagined. If Iran becomes a nuclear power, then 
the test for U.S. policy will not be about prevention at all, but rather 
about how to manage new threats in a world in which the nuclear 
nonproliferation regime is rapidly failing and in which 
terrorist-sponsoring states will have real nuclear capabilities.

To manage that will require the help of one of our most critical 
partners, China, which is also one of our most challenging rivals. We 
compete for oil resources, jobs and influence. Yet, unlike the distance 
between us and our Cold War rival, interdependence characterizes our 
relationship with China. To hurt China would be to injure ourselves. We 
benefit from its growth and China benefits from ours.

Yet our policy toward China lacks coherence. Some people may long for 
political instability that could bring about a more humane, democratic 
way of life in China, but unrest there could also take lives and wound 
the world economy. While there was a great hue and cry about China's 
desire to purchase a U.S. oil company last year, there was virtually 
none when the same Chinese company made a major acquisition in Africa, a 
region from which, in 10 years, we are likely to get as much of our oil 
as we do today from the Middle East.

If our foreign policy is to do more than damage control from the first 
term of the Bush administration, it must tackle a new and broader set of 
priorities with real creativity. For example, in the case of our 
relations with China, we need to develop a Doctrine of Interdependence 
-- an approach that carefully uses the levers at our disposal, all the 
carrots and the sticks, the tools of our interdependence, to help shape 
relationships, contain threats and drive common interests. In the case 
of Iran, we need a replacement for a worn-out and abused nuclear 
nonproliferation regime.

These are hardly policies that can be run from the State Department 
alone. The reason the NSC has risen in influence in the past is that 
relationships such as these require genuine collaboration among all 
agencies, mutually conceived and orchestrated policies, and these can 
only be driven and implemented by the White House. The decline of the 
NSC is antithetical to the new challenges we face. It's good to have a 
more effective, engaged State Department and a diminution of the role of 
the vice president, who is in no position to play the role of honest 
broker. But the real challenges of our time require that Rice and Hadley 
go well beyond process and damage control. Being better than the last 
term is not enough.

drothkopf at carnegieendowment.org <mailto:drothkopf at carnegieendowment.org>

David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for 
International Peace and the author of "Running the World: The Inside 
Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American 
Power" (Public Affairs).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006031002060.html

--------------080905090709060605070101
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
 <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type">
 <title></title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
Look Who's Running the World Now 
By David J. Rothkopf 
The Washington Post Sunday Outlook Magazine 
Sunday, March 12, 2006; B01 

The Dick Cheney era of foreign policy is over.
From
2001 to 2005, the vice president's influence over U.S. foreign policy
may have been greater than that of any individual other than the
president since Henry A. Kissinger held the positions of national
security adviser and secretary of state during the Nixon years. Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld served as Cheney's partner in steamrolling
bureaucratic rivals; Colin L. Powell toiled loyally at the largely
ignored and mistrusted State Department; and Condoleezza Rice, national
security adviser and ostensibly the coordinator of policy, played the
role of tutor to a neophyte president and seldom challenged Cheney. As
a result, policies were largely shaped by the vice president and his
circle.
But Cheney's influence has waned. He's lost his top aide,
his public approval ratings are dismal, and his network of supporters
inside the administration has dissolved. At the same time, Rice has
taken charge at State, and the National Security Council has faded even
further. The result is a kinder, gentler face on foreign policy, but
also a void in the Bush administration foreign policy apparatus just
where it matters most -- the White House.
Presidents need strong
figures in the White House to harmonize competing views and cabinet
departments. Otherwise, an administration cannot deal effectively with
the pressing problems of foreign policy. And there are plenty of them
for Bush today, ranging from the immediate, such as Iran's challenge to
the nuclear nonproliferation regime, to the long term, such as how to
manage our interdependence with China.
Last week demonstrated the
new order. Cheney was relegated to the traditional vice presidential
duty of playing the president's heavy. He rattled the U.S. saber and
threatened Iran with "meaningful consequences" for its failure to
comply with international nuclear safeguards, only to have Rice temper
his comments later the same day. As secretary of state, Rice is now
more policy architect than presidential aide. Cheney was a role player,
not the puppetmaster.
The ebbing of foreign policy initiative
away from the White House over the last year represents a striking
change from the previous 35 years. During that time, the NSC asserted
primacy in foreign policy, nudging aside the State Department, which
had been the grande dame of American cabinet agencies since Thomas
Jefferson served as its first secretary.
Created in 1947, the NSC
was transformed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger from a tiny team
of paper pushers and facilitators into a hub of real policy shapers.
Nixon and other Oval Office occupants worried that the appointees they
sent to State would "go native" over at Foggy Bottom, just 10 minutes
from the White House. "You'd be surprised how big a deal that distance
can become," remarked Kissinger. The NSC gave the president a foreign
policy staff he could call his own and who owed loyalty only to him.
Since
Kissinger, national security advisers have equaled or surpassed
secretaries of State in influence. His successors such as Brent
Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, Powell and Samuel R.
Berger have often galled the State Department by taking the lead.
Then,
during George W. Bush's first term in office, something unprecedented
happened. The seat at the head of the White House policymaking table
was, in effect, taken over by the vice president. Cheney's own national
security team was larger than the entire NSC staff had been during the
early days of John F. Kennedy's administration. Cheney's chief of staff
and national security adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, enjoyed the
same protocol rank as the president's national security adviser.
What
has changed? First, the president no longer depends on the vice
president as he did in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush was
still learning national security on the job and the nation was in
crisis. The president today is better schooled, more experienced and
more confident. Second, Rumsfeld, who is Cheney's staunchest supporter
after the president and whose vacation home is just a few steps away
from Cheney's on Maryland's Eastern Shore, has lost a lot of his clout.
No longer the center of attention, as he was during the offensives in
Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumsfeld has legions of his own detractors.
Third,
Libby's legal woes over his alleged disclosure of a CIA operative's
identity has been a huge distraction. And his departure was only part
of the disintegration of the administration's network of
neoconservatives that Cheney tapped into. Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz decamped for the World Bank, Undersecretary of Defense
Doug Feith left government, and Undersecretary of State John Bolton
received the ironic punishment of being posted to the United Nations,
an institution he had derided as irrelevant.
Then there is the
matter of Cheney's personality. One former top Bush administration
official says, "I have always felt that his relentless pessimism was
unsustainable. After a while people want more than fear, they want a
positive vision and that was not his strong suit."
Now, Rice is
in her ascendancy at State. Diplomatic, thoughtful and a good listener,
she is the Un-Cheney. She has the ear and trust of the president and
she has been embraced by U.S. allies for her efforts to repair the
damage to ties frayed by first-term policies. She has appointed
seasoned internationalists and her former deputy, Stephen J. Hadley,
who has replaced her at the NSC, seems content to remain subordinate to
her. One former NSC staffer said to me, "He runs the NSC like it was a
bureau of State's."
In the eyes of many, notably State Department
types who have long felt that foreign policy should be led by
diplomats, that is just fine. They would like the NSC once again to
become more of a coordinating mechanism than an originator of ideas.
But
diplomacy is only one of many tools the United States has at its
disposal when it comes to international relations. The State Department
is in no position to mobilize Defense, Treasury, the U.S. Trade
Representative or any other agency. The NSC is the place where all the
president's options come together.
With the profile of the NSC
receding under Hadley, this critical role has been weakened. A lawyer
who has worked closely with virtually every GOP foreign policy team
since the 1970s, Hadley gets high marks for improving interagency
coordination. But the joke for the past year in the foreign policy
community has been that Rice has two deputies: Robert Zoellick at State
and Hadley. One longtime associate of Hadley who worked closely with
him in this administration says, "Steve is very, very, very, very,
very, very, very cautious. He is a lawyer not just by training but by
disposition." Despite traditional rivalries between the NSC and State,
one State Department official said, "My only concern is whether he is too
invisible, whether the administration wouldn't be better off if he were
more out in front on the issues."
So
how well will this new, more harmonious dynamic serve U.S. foreign
policy? As Brzezinski said to me, "The question really is whether the
administration's new look amounts to merely a toning down of past
policies or whether it is really the beginning of something new." Will
the Bush foreign policy legacy be something more than Afghanistan, Iraq
and the opportunity costs of the overwhelming focus on the latter?
"I
believe people will ultimately look at the foreign policy of this
administration as having had four quarters, like a football game," one
senior official at State told me. "The first was focused on 9/11 and
the instant coalition that was offered to us by the world to support
our efforts in responding to the terrorist threat. The second came as
we made the decision to enter Iraq and did so in a way that undercut
much of our international support. The third has been spent, during the
past year, with Condi's leadership, rebuilding those international
coalitions. But the fourth will be about Iran."
And as any
football fan knows, the last quarter often counts the most. Iran "is
the critical challenge we face," the State Department official added,
"but I would have to say, that if I were a betting man, I would not
give us very high odds of achieving our goal of keeping Iran from
gaining nuclear weapons or emerging as an even more formidable threat
to us in the Middle East."
As it happens, the Bush administration
devoted itself to containing the weapons of mass destruction threat of
a terrorist-supporting Gulf state during its first term. Now diplomacy,
however frustrating, has replaced preemption even though the
administration is now facing such a threat, this time more real than
imagined. If Iran becomes a nuclear power, then the test for U.S.
policy will not be about prevention at all, but rather about how to
manage new threats in a world in which the nuclear nonproliferation
regime is rapidly failing and in which terrorist-sponsoring states will
have real nuclear capabilities.
To manage that will require the
help of one of our most critical partners, China, which is also one of
our most challenging rivals. We compete for oil resources, jobs and
influence. Yet, unlike the distance between us and our Cold War rival,
interdependence characterizes our relationship with China. To hurt
China would be to injure ourselves. We benefit from its growth and
China benefits from ours.
Yet our policy toward China lacks
coherence. Some people may long for political instability that could
bring about a more humane, democratic way of life in China, but unrest
there could also take lives and wound the world economy. While there
was a great hue and cry about China's desire to purchase a U.S. oil
company last year, there was virtually none when the same Chinese
company made a major acquisition in Africa, a region from which, in 10
years, we are likely to get as much of our oil as we do today from the
Middle East.
If our foreign policy is to do more than damage
control from the first term of the Bush administration, it must tackle
a new and broader set of priorities with real creativity. For example,
in the case of our relations with China, we need to develop a Doctrine
of Interdependence -- an approach that carefully uses the levers at our
disposal, all the carrots and the sticks, the tools of our
interdependence, to help shape relationships, contain threats and drive
common interests. In the case of Iran, we need a replacement for a
worn-out and abused nuclear nonproliferation regime.
These are
hardly policies that can be run from the State Department alone. The
reason the NSC has risen in influence in the past is that relationships
such as these require genuine collaboration among all agencies,
mutually conceived and orchestrated policies, and these can only be
driven and implemented by the White House. The decline of the NSC is
antithetical to the new challenges we face. It's good to have a more
effective, engaged State Department and a diminution of the role of the
vice president, who is in no position to play the role of honest
broker. But the real challenges of our time require that Rice and
Hadley go well beyond process and damage control. Being better than the
last term is not enough.
<a href="mailto:drothkopf at carnegieendowment.org" target="">drothkopf at carnegieendowment.org</a>
David
Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and the author of "Running the World: The Inside
Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American
Power" (Public Affairs).
<a
 href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006031002060.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006031002060.html</a> 
</body>
</html>

--------------080905090709060605070101--