TRANSITIONS

A great team of rivals

By Henry A. Kissinger

Published: December 5, 2008

E-Mail Article

Printer-Friendly

3-Column Format

Translate

Text Size

On its face, the team Barack Obama has appointed for national security policy violates some maxims of conventional wisdom: that to appoint to the Cabinet individuals with an autonomous constituency and who are therefore difficult to fire circumscribes presidential control; that to appoint as security adviser, secretary of state and secretary of defense individuals with established policy views may absorb the president's energies in settling disputes among strong-willed advisers.

It took courage for the president-elect to choose this constellation and no little inner assurance - both qualities essential for dealing with the challenge of distilling order out of a fragmenting international system.

In these circumstances, ignoring conventional wisdom may prove the precondition for creativity. Both the president-elect and the secretary of state-designate, Hillary Clinton, must have concluded that the country and their commitment to public service require their cooperation.

Those who take the phrase "team of rivals" literally do not understand the essence of the relationship between a president and a secretary of state. I know of no exception to the principle that secretaries of state are influential if and only if they are perceived as extensions of the president. Any other course weakens the president and marginalizes the secretary of state.

The Beltway system of leak and innuendo will mercilessly seek to widen any even barely visible split. Foreign governments will exploit the rift by pursuing alternative White House-State Department diplomacies.

Effective foreign policy and a significant role for the Department of State in it require that the president and the secretary of state share a common vision of international order, of overall strategy and of tactical measures. Inevitable disagreements should be settled privately; indeed, the ability of the secretary to warn or question is in direct proportion to the discretion in which it is expressed.

As the president-elect has pointed out, neither of the principals could possibly be undertaking their new relationship unless they had come to similar conclusions. Performance and not formal certification as the leading agency will define the role of the State Department. No president will feel obliged to take advice because an organizational chart requires it.

The Foreign Service of the United States is an incomparable instrument honed by a lifetime of dedicated service. Like every elite service, it does not avoid a certain clannishness. The views of those who did not rise through its ranks are not always taken seriously enough. Secretaries of state have been frustrated by its complex internal clearances, and presidents have complained in their memoirs about the slowness of its reactions.

In its daily business, the State Department is in effect a big cable machine responding to thousands of incoming reports from posts all over the world. Processed through the various assistant secretaries for formal action, only a small percentage of these cables ever reach the secretary, and an even smaller number make it to the White House. Left to itself, the system therefore involves a series of lateral clearances achieved by the mutual balancing of special concerns. Geopolitical and strategic considerations have no organic constituency.

No one can question the secretary-designate's leadership potential for breaking through encrusted patterns or her formidable presence in a negotiation. Her most immediate challenges are to provide strategic guidance and to reorganize the department so that its implementing capacity matches its extraordinary reporting skill.

The guardian of the process of the execution of long-range foreign policy is the national security adviser, institutionally indispensable though treated with reservation by the traditional departments. No one like General James Jones has ever been appointed security adviser, with his experience as former head of the Marine Corps and NATO Commander.

The security adviser's job in its present form emerged in 1961 in the Kennedy administration because no purely administrative staff could handle the flow of papers into the White House. Unless the flow of memoranda is disciplined into defined options, the president would be spending much of his time refereeing intramural disputes. In fact, when the security adviser is weak, interdepartmental arguments have been especially intense.

The security adviser must take care that the president is given all relevant options and that the execution of policy reflects the spirit of the original decision. This is a formidable task because the departments tend to equate internal morale with the adoption of their own recommendations.

The maxim that the security adviser should act as a traffic cop, not a participant in the policy process, is more theoretical than practical. Any individuals able enough to supervise the development of options will be informed enough to contribute to their content. And the daily frequency of the security adviser's contact with the president makes the distinction psychologically untenable.