When I called down the hall, Ferial Govashiri, the president’s personal aide, said he was on the phone but, “Come on down!”
On a small, three-by-five card with “The White House” printed on top, I wrote in all caps: WE HAVE AN IRAN DEAL. Card in hand, Avril, Ben, and I walked into the Oval Office and flashed the note before the Boss. The president knew that a deal might be close, but as we had learned repeatedly (and not just with the Iranians), nothing is done until it’s done.
Obama’s face lit up, and he ended the call. We all whooped and fist-bumped. Obama hugged me, and Ben jokingly suggested that Obama call the guy from the 2007 YouTube primary debate who asked if Obama would engage Iran.
John Kerry called in shortly thereafter to report the news officially and to receive well-deserved congratulations. He and a tireless team of U.S. negotiators led by Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, and including Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz, our extremely capable NSC coordinator for the Middle East Rob Malley, and an all-star cast of experts from NSC, State, Treasury, Energy, USUN, and the Intelligence Community, had spent nearly two years negotiating with Iran, the European Union, and the P5+1 (the U.S., Russia, China, France, and the U.K., plus Germany).
Negotiations between the U.S. and Iran had begun in earnest in the summer of 2013. After years of painful sanctions and under the new leadership of the more pragmatic President Hassan Rouhani, Iran decided that it was time to stop stringing along the P5+1, as it had over the years, and to ascertain whether progress with the U.S. was actually possible. As President Obama stated as far back as the 2008 campaign, we were willing to test the same proposition.
Following a few rounds of secret negotiations in Oman between the U.S. team of Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan and their Iranian counterparts, we could begin to see the contours of an interim agreement. President Obama and President Rouhani both signaled publicly at the U.N. General Assembly in late September 2013 their cautious hope that discussions could yield progress. In a historic first since the severance of diplomatic relations in 1979, the two leaders spoke by phone, as Rouhani was heading to the airport in New York, to affirm their commitment to talks. Kerry and Iranian foreign minister Mohammed Javad Zarif met for the first time as counterparts at UNGA and launched a more formal and public negotiation in Geneva that would include the P5+1.
As with Cuba, the talks with Iran in the months leading up to the September 2013 conversation between Obama and Rouhani were very closely held within the U.S. government. Six months prior to that, the direct dialogue with Iran began in Oman, but it was not until Rouhani’s election in June that it seemed our contacts might lead somewhere. We were concerned that any premature exposure of the talks would invite sabotage and poison the potential for progress.
Up through this early stage, my role was to liaise with the president and provide our negotiating team with strategic guidance and support, offering input on the parameters of what we could accept. Before late September 2013, we informed neither our European allies nor Israel of the first few rounds of talks, though we suspected the Israelis might know through their own means. Our allies were not happy to learn they had been left in the dark, especially the French, who like to be at the center of everything. Later, in November, the French demonstrated their enduring discontent by blocking P5+1 agreement on the initial version of the interim nuclear agreement.
It was Israel, however, that was most incensed and claimed to have been blindsided by the speed of events. I was meeting with my Israeli counterpart, Yaakov Amidror, in my White House office while, unbeknownst to us both, President Obama spoke by phone to Rouhani on September 27, 2013. The Israelis (and our Gulf partners) reported being shocked to learn of the call. Netanyahu was scheduled to meet with Obama at the White House three days later, and it was then that the president laid out the state of our engagement with Iran and our intention to try to resolve the nuclear issue through diplomacy. The day after their meeting, Netanyahu colorfully blasted the nuclear talks and Rouhani in his UNGA speech, saying, “He fooled the world once. Now he thinks he can fool it again. You see, Rouhani thinks he can have his yellowcake and eat it too.”
By November 2013, after painstaking negotiations, we reached an interim agreement to freeze the progress of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for modest sanctions relief—in order to create time and space for negotiations toward a full, final deal. Once the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) was signed by the U.S., Iran, and the P5+1, the difficult contentious negotiations toward a comprehensive agreement got under way. The JPOA was set to last six months but had to be renewed twice due to the political and substantive complexity of the negotiation.
Over this period, the Principals Committee met on numerous occasions, as did the NSC with the president, to define the limits of our negotiating posture and decide how to surmount various obstacles. Throughout, our bottom line was that any deal must fully and verifiably eliminate every potential pathway for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. We were also determined to extend the time it would take for Iran to acquire enough nuclear material to make a bomb (if it decided to violate the deal)—from two or three months to over one year. That increased “breakout time” would give the U.S. plenty of opportunity to respond, including militarily, before Iran developed any weapon.
One important concern we faced was how to reimpose U.N. sanctions swiftly if Iran broke the deal. We could not allow Russia or China to veto renewed sanctions, should they differ with us on whether Iran was to blame and how to react. In response to a question about how to address this challenge during an interview on 60 Minutes that aired in December 2013, I replied (speaking as a former U.N. ambassador) that I believed we could craft some kind of “automatic triggers” that would reimpose sanctions “for failure to comply” and avert a Russian or Chinese veto. We could insert unorthodox language into the U.N. resolution, which would codify any eventual deal, that allowed sanctions to be reinstated by any permanent member of the Security Council if there were a significant violation.
In other words, I felt confident there was a way to ensure we could “snap-back” sanctions, as I told my colleagues at the next Principals Committee meeting on Iran, even though I had not yet figured out exactly how. My off-the-cuff answer on TV put “snap-back” into the sanctions lexicon and inspired us to devise effective UNSC resolution language and then work with the Russians to embed it in the implementing resolution. The “snap-back” assurance became a core element of the final deal and our ability, ultimately, to sell it to Congress.
Kerry and Foreign Minister Zarif were the lead diplomatic negotiators. Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s nuclear enterprise, were nuclear physicists with shared ties to MIT who together chaired the technical nuclear discussions. There were numerous fits and starts, near collapses, and efforts at sabotage—on both sides. At times, their meetings became so testy that John Kerry once slammed his fist on the table so hard that he propelled a pen and directly hit Zarif’s deputy Abbas Araghchi. At any point, we knew the whole deal could fall apart and, sure enough, on the final day of negotiations, an exasperated and dramatic Zarif moved to walk out. For all intents and purposes, the negotiation appeared to be collapsing—until the very last moment when the walkout was blocked by a hobbled John Kerry, recovering from surgery on a badly broken leg, who used his crutch to bar the door.
Throughout, hard-liners in Iran opposed any restraint on its nuclear program and completely distrusted the U.S. Meanwhile, hard-liners in Washington—mainly Republicans but also some Democrats—decided well in advance of any agreement that the only good deal with Iran was no deal; and they made every effort to force us to fail. Their devious tactics ranged from Senator Tom Cotton’s “open letter” signed by forty-six other Republican senators to Iran’s leaders aimed at undermining their confidence in the durability of any deal; to House Speaker John Boehner’s secret invitation to Prime Minister Netanyahu to deliver a joint address to Congress in March 2015, during which Netanyahu roundly condemned the “bad deal” with Iran.
Inside the White House, we seethed at the Israeli prime minister’s machinations to orchestrate a joint session invitation behind the back of the administration and Democrats in Congress. In my view, this marked a new low in the already strained U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship, removing it from the customary protection of bipartisanship. As I said at the time in an interview, Netanyahu’s gambit “injected a degree of partisanship, which is not only unfortunate, I think it is destructive of the fabric of the [U.S.-Israel] relationship.”
One month later, in early April 2015, we agreed with Iran on the framework for a comprehensive deal. Negotiations continued through the evening of July 13, when our team in Vienna sent back the final draft text for one last review by Washington. It was a 150-plus-page tome full of technical complexities. Reviewing it line-by-line and providing timely feedback to our exhausted and impatient negotiating team was a challenge.
Avril assembled a cadre of NSC lawyers and experts in the Situation Room. We plugged in Vienna via secure video so we could seek clarifications in real time from the negotiating team and give rolling responses as we plowed through the text. Avril and the NSC team worked through the night and woke me several times to obtain guidance on our proposed amendments. By morning, we thought we might have the makings of a deal, pending the agreement of the other parties. Indeed, on July 14, 2015, Secretary Kerry signed the final agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
As soon as the ink dried, the truly hard work began: persuading Congress not to torpedo the deal. Again, sadly, it was the Obama administration vs. Netanyahu. Congress had recently passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which required the president to submit the full, final agreement to Congress. The law prevented the president from waiving or suspending nuclear-related sanctions against Iran (as the deal required, if Iran fulfilled its commitments) until congressional review was complete and no resolution of disapproval had been enacted. In other words, if sixty days after signing the deal, Congress did not vote to disapprove it (or, thereafter, if Congress failed to override an Obama veto), the sanctions could be suspended, and the deal could go into effect—pending full Iranian compliance.
As a practical matter, this meant the administration had to gain support from at least thirty-four Democratic senators and, ideally, one-third of all House members to sustain a veto. But we sought to gain the support of at least forty-one senators so that Democrats could successfully filibuster any Republican attempt to pass a resolution of disapproval in the first place. This might seem like an easy lift since we only needed Democrats, but it was not, given widespread misunderstanding about the complicated terms of the deal and Israel’s heavy-handed efforts to sink it.
I spent hours on the phone arguing, reasoning with, and cajoling friendly members of Congress, including Congresswoman Terri Sewell, my buddy from Oxford; Senators Mark Warner and Claire McCaskill; and Senator Michael Bennet, my friend since nursery school. While we shared their concern that Iran could not be trusted, we argued that this deal was based not on trust but on the strictest and most intrusive verification regime. As many former officials in Israel’s security establishment acknowledged, if not the country’s current political leaders, the agreement would benefit Israel’s security rather than diminish it. Ultimately, after a summer of sustained personal engagement by the president, vice president, Kerry, Moniz, Sherman, and many others, we obtained more than the necessary support. The congressional review period expired without a vote of disapproval. The deal was done!
The Iran agreement is proof of the value of tough sanctions, when combined with skillful, relentless diplomacy, to accomplish the seemingly unachievable in international affairs. The JCPOA was a finely detailed agreement that effectively closed all pathways to Iran developing a nuclear weapon and ensured Iran would face the most rigorous, intrusive international inspections regime ever established. It was never able, nor was it intended, to halt all of Iran’s nefarious behavior—its support for terrorism, its destabilization of neighboring states, its hostility toward Israel, or its ballistic missile program. Still, it effectively addressed our biggest concern and that of the international community—preventing Iran from posing a far more dangerous threat to the region and the world through its acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Understandably, Israel always said it viewed Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat. So, surely, the removal of that threat would be welcome news to Israel, our Gulf partners, and their backers. In reality, we discovered that removing the nuclear threat was not in fact their principal motivation. Rather, Israel and the Gulf Arab countries aimed to put permanent and crippling economic and military pressure on Iran such that either the regime collapsed, or it was too weak to wield meaningful influence in the region. The nuclear deal, which allowed Iran to access much of its own frozen assets held abroad under sanctions, in exchange for full and verifiable compliance with the terms of the agreement, was deemed worse than no deal at all by those who prioritized keeping the international community’s boot on Iran’s neck above halting its nuclear program. It turns out, the whole Likud-led campaign against a nuclear-armed Iran was never on the level.
Indeed, as the U.S. Intelligence Community and International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly validated, the Iran deal was working exactly as intended when later President Trump decided to withdraw from the agreement in May 2018. Iran had fully complied with its obligations to constrain its nuclear activities—relinquishing 97 percent of its uranium stockpile, dismantling its plutonium facility and two-thirds of its centrifuges, forswearing ever producing nuclear weapons, and submitting to the most stringent verification regime ever established.
Unfortunately, the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal put Iran’s continued compliance in jeopardy, did nothing to address our other concerns about Iran’s behavior, placed us at odds with our closest European allies with whom we negotiated the deal, and called into question why any adversary would agree to strike a deal with a self-evidently fickle America. The Iran deal wasn’t perfect, but it was a damn good way to resolve a grave and growing threat to international peace and security while avoiding resort to a highly costly and deadly war. With the U.S. abrogation, reimposition of crushing sanctions, and America’s military buildup in the region, Iran has resumed its nuclear program and stepped up its destabilizing actions in the region. Moreover, the risks of a direct U.S.-Iran conflict are much increased, as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and many in the Trump administration appear intent on embarking on a foolhardy and unnecessary military operation to try to effect regime change in Iran.
Of all the vindictive and shortsighted actions President Trump has taken only to undo President Obama’s legacy—from abandoning the Paris Climate Agreement to withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement—jettisoning the Iran nuclear deal is the most dangerous and dispiriting to me. We and our allies expended years of painstaking diplomacy to reach an agreement that was fully meeting its objective. The sheer stupidity of withdrawing without an alternative strategy to accomplish their ill-defined objectives, the wasted effort, and the poisoned relationships amount to mind-boggling recklessness. While we can potentially rejoin Paris and the successor to TPP, it’s very hard to imagine how we will ever again verifiably dismantle Iran’s nuclear program short of war—and even then only temporarily.
The president was pissed off, or, as he often said when he was most annoyed, “I’m aggravated.”
How come we have ISIS in Mosul practically overnight and virtually no warning that the Iraqi security forces would fold like a cheap tent? In the midst of (rather gently) chewing out Jim Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Obama pressed Jim to explain why the Intelligence Community had failed to warn him and senior policymakers that the terrorist group known by various names, but most simply the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), was about to conquer a large swath of northern Iraq.
It was a fair question. Prior to June 2014, we had not been warned of the likelihood that ISIS, a reincarnation of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which had gained strength in Syria and seized the Iraqi city of Fallujah, would move across the Syrian border and swiftly take Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. More significantly, it had not been predicted that ISIS’s roughly one thousand fighters would easily overrun thirty thousand Iraqi security forces (ISF) soldiers who abandoned their positions, dropped their weapons, and fled. As director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper readily acknowledged the Intelligence Community was surprised by the Iraqis’ lack of will to fight.
As policymakers, we too failed to anticipate and react swiftly enough to ISIS’s march and the Iraqis’ ineptitude. We knew Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was a venal Shia sectarian whom we did not trust to govern in the interests of all Iraqis. But we did not fully appreciate the extent to which he had allowed the Iraqi army to atrophy in both will and capacity. Before 2014, we had viewed ISIS as more of a concern in Syria than Iraq and as a lure for foreign fighters who might return home to conduct attacks. Most of my colleagues and I underestimated ISIS as an occupying army that would seize and hold territory, much less try to establish a caliphate. Until Mosul.
As soon as Mosul fell, and ISIS elements started heading south toward Baghdad, we knew we were living in a different world. ISIS and its so-called “caliphate,” at this point spanning large portions of both Syria and Iraq, could not be allowed to stand. Prime Minister Maliki wanted American air combat support against ISIS, but his corrupt, anti-Sunni tyranny had facilitated ISIS’s advance. President Obama rightly determined that we weren’t going to be Maliki’s air force against the Sunni. For the Iraqis themselves to defeat ISIS, as they had to do, they needed to be unified in their cause—Sunni, Shia, Kurd. Maliki was a force for division and defeat; he needed to resign and, until he did, the United States would not intervene militarily to help the Iraqi army.
As Maliki clung to power, ISIS advanced on the predominantly Kurdish city of Erbil, seized the Mosul Dam, and threatened Baghdad. Erbil was an important city that housed a U.S. consulate and U.N. agencies. To protect Americans in Erbil and regain control of the Mosul Dam, President Obama authorized limited air strikes in early July to support mainly Kurdish forces who were fighting ISIS in the north.
In early August, confronted with a major humanitarian crisis, Obama ordered the U.S. military to strike ISIS targets and air-drop critical relief supplies to assist thousands of displaced people from the Yazidi sect who were stranded on Sinjar Mountain and facing potential genocide. The president, nonetheless, rightly continued to resist directly aiding the Iraqi government until Maliki resigned. By mid-August, Maliki relented and relinquished power to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a rational, responsible Shia leader who sought to unite the country. This transition enabled the U.S. to deploy military trainers and combat aircraft to fully join the Iraqi-led campaign against ISIS.
Over months of meetings in the Situation Room, we crafted, refined, and implemented an integrated campaign plan designed to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. We deployed over 5,200 U.S. forces to train, advise, and equip the Iraqi security forces so that, once sufficiently regenerated, they could take the ground fight to ISIS. The U.S. also employed extensive air strikes against ISIS command facilities, forces, bases, banks, oil infrastructure, and leaders. In Syria, we trained, advised, and equipped Kurdish and Arab opposition elements, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to fight ISIS and provided air support for their battles to retake strategic territory in the far south as well as in the north—from Kobane to Manbij and, eventually, Raqqa.
Led by Special Envoys General John Allen and Brett McGurk, the Obama administration assembled a coalition of over sixty-five partner countries from NATO, the Gulf, and Asia to wage war against ISIS. Through intensified, targeted strikes, the U.S. military hit both ISIS and Al Qaeda (Khorasan Group) targets across Syria. The strategy also entailed cutting off financial pipelines to ISIS, restricting the flow of foreign fighters into Syria, assisting the Iraqi government to stabilize its finances and to govern more inclusively, and countering the ISIS propaganda machine, which recruits soldiers and spreads venomous propaganda through the internet and social media.
We faced many gut-wrenching and white-knuckle moments over the course of the counter-ISIS campaign, particularly the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, the subsequent brutal bombings on the subway and airport in Brussels, and the ISIS-inspired massacre in San Bernardino, California. Most personally painful was the killing of Kayla Mueller, an American human rights activist and humanitarian, and the brutal beheadings by ISIS of American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, and humanitarian aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig. At the White House and throughout the U.S. government, led by Lisa Monaco, our colleagues and I worked tirelessly to win the freedom of Americans held hostage abroad, especially in Syria. I got to know James Foley’s mother, Diane, who visited me at USUN and later the White House as she pursued every avenue to bring her son home safely. As a mother, my heart broke for the Foley family, and I grew emotionally invested in James’s fate.
In the summer of 2014, we received information about the location where we believed Foley and other captives were being held. President Obama swiftly ordered Special Forces to conduct a high-risk nighttime rescue operation. Anxiously, I waited late in my office for the results of the raid, praying that I would have the opportunity finally to give Diane Foley good news. I was crushed when word came back that the compound where the hostages had been held was empty. There was nobody left to rescue.
In the U.S., fear of ISIS reached irrational, near fever levels by the fall of 2015. When I visited senior executives at NBC headquarters in New York, I was shocked to be asked by a smart and very well-informed executive whether she should still allow her children to walk to school in New York City, given the risk that ISIS might behead them. As a parent, I could relate to her concern, but as national security advisor, I found such outsize fear to be baffling. So too did President Obama, whose ever-rational, calm cool threatened to lead him to downplay the degree of public fear.
At a November 2015 press conference in Turkey shortly after the Paris attacks, President Obama was peppered with questions on ISIS, including by CNN’s Jim Acosta, who asked breathlessly, “Why can’t we take out these bastards?” By this point, the president had reached his limit. This last question was so over the top that an exasperated Obama dismissed it, saying he “just spent the last three questions answering that very question, so I don’t know what more you want me to add.”
I shared President Obama’s frustration with those journalists and political opponents who were irresponsibly hyping the ISIS threat, but I worried that he risked sounding out of touch with the popular mood. Before each press availability over the duration of that trip, the traveling senior staff and I joined forces to remind the president that, when it comes to ISIS, like Ebola, he needed to “meet the public where they are,” however out of proportion their alarm may seem. Grudgingly and gradually, the president calibrated his public comments to acknowledge popular concerns without stoking panic. Our focus, however, remained on steadily executing our strategy to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIS, while preventing terrorist attacks on Americans and our allies. Meanwhile, as the 2016 election approached, others cravenly used ISIS as a cudgel to demonize refugees, immigrants, and Muslim Americans for political benefit.
On a separate issue related to ISIS, our fears were in no way overblown. The Mosul Dam in northern Iraq was, and is, a disaster of biblical proportions waiting to happen, causing the president, me, and our team significant stress. The foundation of the dam is profoundly damaged and precarious. For years, the dam was expertly grouted to mitigate its degradation, but war and ISIS’s proximity to the dam resulted in long periods without maintenance so that the dam’s deterioration accelerated.
If and when the Mosul Dam breaks, the mighty Tigris River will nearly instantly destroy hundreds of thousands of lives, countless acres of critical agricultural land, and spread death and disease from Mosul to Baghdad. Experts predict the city of Baghdad, including the U.S. embassy compound, will be inundated within three to four days. Iraq as we know it will be gone. Our Intelligence Community prepared a video simulation of the destruction that the dam’s collapse would wreak. When it was shown to the Principals in the Situation Room, there was utter silence. The U.S. government repeatedly sounded the alarm, struggling to animate the Iraqi authorities with the necessary urgency, and pressed them to fund and deploy security personnel for an international grouting operation that would work to stave off the dam’s potential collapse. Of all the terrifying scenarios I lost sleep over—pandemic flu, a terrorist attack employing weapons of mass destruction, a North Korean nuclear strike—the collapse of the Mosul Dam remained in the top five of my recurring nightmares.
Throughout the duration of the administration, the intensity of our efforts to defeat ISIS never waned. The president convened his NSC on ISIS over and over again. I chaired countless Principals Committee meetings, and Avril held scores of Deputies sessions, to sustain the interagency focus that the president demanded. Obama tasked my NSC colleague Rob Malley with coordinating the counter-ISIS campaign day-to-day from the White House and directed that we provide weekly updates and assessments of the campaign’s progress. In December 2015, Obama internally mandated that his administration “put ISIS in a box” by the end of his term.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter, a cerebral, self-assured academic with long and deep policy experience, worked with Joint Chiefs chairman Martin Dempsey and later Joseph Dunford, alongside Central Command Generals Lloyd Austin and, subsequently, Joe Votel, to devise and continuously improve an intensified military campaign to fulfill the president’s directive. Their plan entailed retaking Raqqa and Mosul and then cleaning up remaining pockets of ISIS in Syria’s south and east as well as the seam between Iraq and Syria.
Throughout, we wrestled with persistent challenges, including de-conflicting our operations with those of the Russians deployed inside Syria, and balancing Turkey’s contributions to the counter-ISIS campaign with the imperative of supporting the Kurds. The Turks viewed the Kurds as terrorists, but the Kurds formed the backbone of our Syrian force fighting ISIS. This tension was extremely difficult to manage, but President Obama was able to massage Turkish president Erdog˘an enough to keep the campaign on track. By the time President Obama left office, the coalition had retaken over 60 percent of territory controlled by ISIS in Iraq and almost 30 percent in Syria. Raqqa was under mounting pressure, and preparations for the campaign to retake Mosul were well-advanced.
Through intensive, coordinated interagency effort, we did indeed manage to “put ISIS in a box” by the end of the administration, placing it securely on the path to defeat and neatly packaged for Obama’s successor to finish off. We knew from the outset that the fight against ISIS would take time and entail setbacks as well as successes. To its credit, for two years the Trump administration pursued our very war plan to continued positive effect, retaking Raqqa and Mosul, eliminating the so-called “caliphate” and, eventually, ISIS’s sole remaining stronghold along the Iraq-Syria border.
Then, in December 2018, President Trump shocked his closest advisors, Congress, and the world by declaring that he would rapidly withdraw all two thousand U.S. forces from Syria, putting in jeopardy the painstaking gains made against ISIS and abandoning meaningful efforts to assist battle-damaged, liberated portions of Syria. Trump later decided to leave only four hundred U.S. military personnel—fewer than needed to keep ISIS and the Syrian regime in check, much less Iran and Russia, or to protect the Kurd and Arab forces who bore the brunt of the fighting against ISIS. Thus, the risk that ISIS will revive and reinvent itself remains.
Over a year after I left the White House, with the stresses of being national security advisor behind me, my cell phone rang. Answering, I was surprised to hear a familiar voice start without even a hello, “Boy, do I miss that micromanaging bitch!”
I laughed uproariously, delighted to hear from a still serving senior general with whom I worked closely in the Obama administration, calling to say “Hi” and commiserate. The general was jokingly referring to the public rap on the Obama White House and his NSC that we, and especially I, micromanaged the agencies and the policy process. The bill of indictment included such dings as: 1) The Principals Committee met too frequently; 2) Meetings went too long; papers were late; and discussion went too much in the weeds; 3) We got too deeply into the agencies’ knickers; and 4) We were overly directive.
There is some validity to these criticisms. Several of these shortcomings we could and did address, making improvements at least on the margins, if not always to the satisfaction of every principal. After establishing a system to track weekly the number and topics of PCs, we worked to reduce their frequency to the extent events permitted as well as to start and end them more promptly. We increased the timeliness of preparatory paper for PCs, but not uniformly, and tried to focus Principals meetings on the most consequential decisions.
Almost all of my predecessors, most experts, and I laud the “Scowcroft model” of running the NSC—that of the legendary Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft when he served his second tour as NSA under President George H. W. Bush. In his day, the NSC was viewed as lean and efficient—far smaller, more nimble, and playing a simple coordinating role while generally refraining from involvement in the operational work of the State Department and other agencies. However, the advent of email, the 24/7 cable news cycle, and social media have fundamentally changed the pace and the pressures of national security decision making. The enormous range of national and homeland security issues weighing on any modern president in the post–Cold War world, the incessant demands for immediate response, the intractable reality that the toughest problems, by definition, have no satisfactory solutions, combined with the politicization of foreign policy have largely rendered the Scowcroft gold standard of NSC management obsolete.
In any event, President Obama’s own approach to governing was not well-suited to a hands-off NSC. He delved deeply into issues, demanded stringent analysis and options, confronted the hardest problems squarely, and to the greatest extent possible made tough decisions on the merits rather than based on political considerations. With his formidable intellect and vast ability to absorb information, Obama was a detail-oriented commander-in-chief who expected that the national security process match his standards of rigor and comprehensiveness. Equally, he required me and his national security team to mirror and support his style of governing. Any less would have been wholly unsatisfactory to him.
I and my deputies, therefore, worked to the best of our abilities to serve a hands-on president with an ambitious agenda, who took decision making very seriously. President Obama did not want to own responsibility for what he called “stupid shit,” or dangerous choices that he didn’t make, even as he would readily take the blame for those he did. Whether regarding drone policy, if and when to execute a risky hostage rescue operation, or how many troops to deploy and with what mission to Iraq or Afghanistan, President Obama was determined to make, rather than delegate, those most consequential decisions. His was a management style that matched my own temperament and instincts, and I was comfortable driving a policy process that best suited him. That engendered some frustration, particularly at DOD and to some extent at State, and surely inspired some sniping in the press about how we did our jobs.
Neither at the time, nor in retrospect, however, do I regret the president’s hands-on approach and the assiduous work we did to support it. I will gladly take criticism for micromanaging, since the alternative (as we have seen of late) too often is chaos. When the nation’s security is at stake and the costs of failure are so high, I would always rather err on the side of thorough analysis and careful consideration of the risks and benefits—even when we must run the policy process at warp speed.
By contrast, I do not think it wise to grant unlimited discretion to theater commanders to prosecute military campaigns without any high-level civilian oversight, which enables senior leaders to weigh the consequences of discrete operations for our broader national security. Equally, I strongly prefer that the U.S. president govern with intellectual rigor, clear accountability, and a disciplined policy process rather than with loose, uncoordinated pronouncements based on ideology, whim, or political expediency, which often fail to align with U.S. interests. But I may be old-fashioned.