America and the World

DAVID IGNATIUS: We’ve talked about many of the foreign policy issues a new administration will face. Now let’s turn to the practical details of how to make policy in a way that responds creatively to the world and the challenges the two of you have described. I’d like to ask you to put on your old national security advisor hats and speak, in very practical terms, about what a new president could do in the first one hundred days to enable him- or herself to respond to the world we’ve talked about. Brent?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: The world has changed, but the structures we employ for national security, essentially the National Security Council and its associated apparatus, were built for the cold war. The National Security Act of 1947 established the NSC, set up the Air Force, set up the CIA and the Defense Department. All of this was constructed for the cold war, based on lessons learned from World War II. That structure hasn’t changed. We have proliferated the NSC in a way: Clinton added a National Economic Council, Bush added a Homeland Security Council.

So we’re beginning to proliferate structures to deal with separate subjects. What we don’t have is a system to manage issues that cut across traditional boundaries, for example, partly military, partly combat, partly reconstruction, and partly civil society building. We have no way inside the government to manage those sorts of things. That’s one of the first needs of a president.

SCOWCROFT: No. But I would look at the National Security Act with a view to modifying it. We made some changes on intelligence, though it’s too soon to tell whether they’re adequate. The National Security Act specifies, for example, that foreign intelligence is the job of the CIA and domestic intelligence is the job of the FBI. In the cold war that was fine because most of our intelligence collection was overseas. But terrorism makes that differentiation meaningless. Part of the problem we saw with 9/11 was that we had two different agencies, with very different philosophies about how to do things, trying to pass information across a bureaucratic barrier.

Iraq is another example. Once Saddam’s government had been destroyed, we set up a U.S. administrator for Iraq. Who did he work for? Well, first he worked for Defense. Then he worked for the NSC. Then he worked for—it’s confusing. And in Afghanistan, there is no one in overall charge.

SCOWCROFT: And even staffing. How do you staff an enterprise to try to rebuild a government? In Iraq we asked for volunteers, because there’s no systematic way to do it. You need judges. You need police. You need all kinds of things that we’re not organized to provide.

BRZEZINSKI: Well, on the assumption that the next president wants to play an active role in shaping foreign policy, that he or she is not preoccupied primarily with domestic politics—which sometimes is the case—I would first of all urge the next president to choose as his national security advisor a person he knows reasonably well and feels comfortable with.

And with whom he has a kind of communion of mind. That’s terribly important. The national security advisor is close to the president, has to see the president often. He has to be willing to exercise authority on the president’s behalf, with the confidence that he reflects the president’s views. So it ought to be a person with whom the new president feels comfortable, but also a person with stature in his or her own right. I think part of the problem, for example, that Condi Rice encountered throughout her tenure as national security advisor was that she really was outranked by Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. She couldn’t coordinate and impose presidential leadership on policy-making.

Secondly, I would tell the president that what is lacking in the U.S. government generally is some effective, centralized strategic planning mechanism. The State Department does its own thing on the assumption that foreign affairs is diplomacy. Defense Department has a myriad of planning agencies. But by and large, there isn’t any effective planning organism like the one that existed under Eisenhower, who had a special planning board, I forget what it was called, under Bob Bowie. I think some deliberate effort to recreate that in the White House would be timely. Such a board would also provide a venue for informal consultations between that planning body and congressional leadership, to maintain an ongoing dialogue in the higher levels of the government regarding longer-range plans.

That planning board would, of course, be subordinated to the national security advisor. There are some aspects of that today—you probably had something like it too, Brent. I had Sam Huntington come in as a planner for a while. But I think a more deliberate effort to locate strategic planning in the center of U.S. government and not on its peripheries is essential.

My third point relates to what Brent said—and I think his diagnosis is absolutely right. There’s a kind of gridlock that is inherent in functional specialization of the different departments. Part of the reason is the complexity of their structures and the fact that the current arrangements are, as Brent said, a continuation of cold war policies. But they also reflect 150 years of tradition. There’s a Department of Foreign Affairs. There’s a Department of War, as it used to be called, now Defense. There are other specialized departments. These divisions, I think, have outlived their usefulness.

Now, I don’t think a new president can immediately undertake a huge restructuring of the bureaucracy. But if he were to do it partially, with regard to some critical issues that demand immediate attention in the first months of the administration, then he might be able to take advantage of the urgency to launch a somewhat different institutional initiative.

What I have in mind is something like this: It involves essentially three presidential task forces that are not functionally organized, like the Department of State or Defense, but are mission oriented. And each would be headed by a presidential delegate who would be the senior person—equal or even superior to cabinet members—assigned to deal with the task force’s issue: global climate, environment, or what have you. If the Democrats win, obviously, Gore would be the ideal person to head a climate task force. It could draw resources from the different departments, but it would run on its own under the presidential delegate.

I would do the same—although this is more problematic and maybe Brent will shoot me down—with two other problems that require immediate attention and much more initiative than we’re capable of generating from our current structure. One of the two issues would be the Middle East. I would have a presidential delegate head up a task force to deal with the complex of issues Brent and I discussed regarding the Middle East. Because that’s urgent. We don’t have much time.

The third presidential delegate I would appoint right away would head a task force dealing with alliance relationships. How do we deal with Europe? How do we involve countries like Japan and South Korea in some of the Atlantic Alliance’s undertakings? Not to suck them into NATO, but to have a partnership with them that enhances NATO’s contribution to global stability. A task force could help overcome the gridlock and quickly generate action on some critical problems that require attention.

BRZEZINSKI: Well, the secretary of state is nominally responsible for the world. But as a practical matter, it’s too much to handle. As a result, even urgent issues get part-time attention. Look at the Middle East. Rice has tried to give it her attention. While I fault her in part for our policies there, part of the problem is that she’s really overworked. There are many other problems that can be handled in a more traditional way, where the urgency isn’t so acute, or where there isn’t the same need to break through bureaucratic logjams.

IGNATIUS: Certainly, where there’s been one address per policy—Chris Hill in charge of North Korea and the six-party talks, Nick Burns on relations with the European allies and forming a united policy on Iran—there’s been more success and effectiveness. So that argues for your approach.

Brent, the interagency system was created precisely to enable the White House to form ad hoc task forces, if you will, to deal with urgent policy matters. Under the National Security Council, you’d have representatives from State, Defense, CIA, and other relevant agencies meeting together to hammer out policies. That doesn’t seem to have worked so well under this administration. And frankly, I’m not sure it worked very well during the Clinton administration either. But you had a lot of success with it under Bush I. How can this interagency process be made to work better so it’s more dynamic and flexible?

SCOWCROFT: The interagency process works fundamentally the way the president wants it to work. Each administration has done essentially the same thing in a little different way, depending on how the president wanted to work. I don’t think there’s any magic to it. At this level, things are very heavily personality driven. As Zbig mentioned, in the first Bush term, Condi Rice was junior to Powell and Rumsfeld. In fact, national security advisors have always been junior to all of the statutory members of the NSC in rank.

SCOWCROFT: In rank. But the national security advisor needs to be able to speak with the authority of the president. That’s the key. On this convening of ad hoc groups, I don’t want to overburden the national security advisor. But suppose you made all of the cabinet secretaries members of the NSC, but they would only attend meetings depending on what the subject was. Each cabinet officer would have a liaison in his department called the NSC cell. You would essentially do the same things Zbig is talking about, but you wouldn’t have one group off here and another group over there, operating separately. They’re still tied together, but you can have enough division of responsibility to make it work.

SCOWCROFT: There are seven now. It has gotten unwieldy. One of the enormous advantages of the NSC for a president is its agility. If a president calls a department to ask for something, it can take forever to get it. The NSC can operate very quickly. It’s important to preserve that capacity for instant response to the president. But the span of authority is getting so wide that the agency can’t cover all the areas it needs to cover and still maintain that instant response.

BRZEZINSKI: Let me make another point about what the new president needs. It’s something which is very hard to convey. But my experience taught me that it’s very, very easy for even the most independent-minded, self-critical president to get a swelled head in no time flat. The atmosphere in the White House is so conducive to flattery, and to elbowing in order to get in the good graces of the president, that it’s very easy for a president to lose a sense of reality about himself and, in the larger sense, about the world.

The president has to have, both in the domestic area and in foreign affairs, some people who are not charged with line responsibility but who are his confidants. It has to be somebody that McCain or Clinton or Obama has known well for a long time, who can be the person who says to the president privately, “That was awfully stupid, what you said,” without any fear of losing their influence or their access. That’s absolutely essential, especially in as complicated a world as the one we have been discussing.

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah, sort of, maybe. But not in the sense that these people offer alternative policies or make decisions. But simply keep a critical eye out and inform the president frankly, unabashedly, of problems they see on the horizon or of inadequacies and shortcomings. I don’t know how to define it. But something like that.

BRZEZINSKI: Yes. But I knew him well before. I did it at first very easily and then, after a while, deliberately. It wasn’t easy in that atmosphere. I had to say to myself, “My job is to tell him.” But I would only do it one-on-one. And I can say this much: I really did bug him on issues. I really did. I would go back and I would argue and so forth. Only once in the entire four years did he object. I remember that vividly: His secretary appeared in front of my desk and very ceremoniously put an envelope in front of me. The envelope was the green presidential stationery, and it was addressed “Zbig.” She kind of stood there. She obviously knew what was in it.

And it said: “Zbig, Don’t you ever know when to stop? JC.” Now, let me tell you, I appreciated it. He didn’t lose his temper. He wasn’t yelling at me. He wasn’t intimidating me. He was just saying, “Come on. Lay off after a while.” I really appreciated that.

SCOWCROFT: This is what I said earlier. At this level, it’s all personality. I had a very close relationship with President Bush. I worked for three different presidents, and each liked to get his information, advice, and do his decision-making in different ways. And you’ve got to accommodate that while doing your job. Because if they don’t like the way they’re being served, they’ll set up another system they like better. Then you’ve got competing voices and organizations, and that doesn’t work. A new structure may be needed, but it must have the flexibility to suit any president.

SCOWCROFT: Well, it depends how you do it. Again, it depends on the personalities. I tried a few different approaches with him. But the bottom line is, it’s important that the national security advisor tell the president what you think he or she needs to know.

IGNATIUS: One recurring problem for both Condi Rice and Steve Hadley as national security advisors has been the very strong role of the vice president, who has operated, sometimes, as his own national security advisor, and whose staff has sometimes operated as a parallel NSC staff. I wonder if you both would agree that the next vice president from either party should be very careful not to set up what is, in effect, a competing NSC staff.

BRZEZINSKI: Almost. I think it’s about thirty people. That’s unthinkable to me. And I don’t think I would have been able to do my job if Vice President Mondale had had a staff that size. He had one person. I took his principal foreign policy advisor and made him my deputy, because I liked him and I also thought it would be good for my relationship with the vice president. But to have this competing staff advocating policy, preparing papers, and injecting itself into the NSC process I think would be just chaotic.

SCOWCROFT: No, I was not. And to me, it doesn’t matter how big the vice president’s staff is. It’s what happens to the information and with what authority it gets to the president. The president can use anybody he wants as an advisor. The vice president can be his principal advisor if the president wants him. Most presidents have not, for a variety of reasons.

But there has to be some centralized organization to make the system work. If you have competing systems, you have chaos. That’s the chief problem. And it needs to be flexible enough so that the president can do the kinds of things in the manner he finds comfortable. But you also have to preserve the essentiality of a system that’s able to operate quickly and efficiently to provide the president what he needs. If the president says he wants everything to go through the vice president, that’s the president’s prerogative. But then he needs a different system.

BRZEZINSKI: There’s another aspect to it, which also is worth mentioning. Most people don’t realize how much paper flows to the president from the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the CIA, in addition to what the national security advisor generates through his staff. The volume is impossible. One of the problems that has to be dealt with is that the national security advisor ultimately cannot simply become a postman. Papers come in from the secretary of state with a note on top saying “For the president.” That doesn’t help. You have to be able, with the president’s approval, to discriminate between what should go to the president and what the national security advisor can handle on the president’s behalf, in the confidence that he knows, more or less, the president’s mind and sends it back, either to the department from which it originated or to other departments if the thing has to be coordinated. That’s a very tricky business that also requires a great deal of the national security advisor’s personal time.

IGNATIUS: In thinking about how to reshape this machinery so that it fits the world of the twenty-first century, I’m reminded of my colleague Tom Friedman’s phrase, “the flat world.” Our world is less hierarchical. It’s horizontal—you connect across boundaries. You don’t, ideally, have to communicate up through smokestacks. That’s an enormous benefit, but it creates interesting challenges for foreign policy. You have a world in which people can connect in ways you can’t predict or control. Can this hierarchical machinery you’ve been talking about be adapted so that it embraces the flat world rather than fighting it?

SCOWCROFT: President Nixon tried this. He tried clumping his cabinet officers, naming one the senior in a group. It didn’t work, mostly because—this is true in my experience, too—cabinet officers will not work for each other. You cannot put a cabinet officer in charge of other cabinet officers. It just doesn’t work very well as a flat system.

IGNATIUS: But does it need to? In the intelligence community, we’re taking different agencies—different stovepipes—and we’re insisting that they connect the dots, that they collaborate. And we’re creating technologies—there’s now a kind of Wikipedia for intelligence—where people are constantly interacting and creating databases and sharing them. Things the intelligence community thought it could never do in terms of information-sharing are now happening every day. But that hasn’t moved generally across the government. I wonder if you think it’s time to experiment with that on an issue like, say, climate change.

SCOWCROFT: But, David, it didn’t happen in the intelligence community because of a flat organization. It happened because the leadership said, “You will start sharing information.” They set up rules for doing that, and they then enforced the rules. That change in procedures is still not complete. I don’t know whether a flat way would work. But I think we could agree that one of the first areas of focus for a new president, if he hasn’t already started thinking about it during the campaign, is this organizational issue we have been discussing. It’s a serious problem and addressing it ought to be one of his first areas of concentration.

BRZEZINSKI: Let me make one additional point. I think the president has to be very conscious that he has some grave problems on the agenda when he comes to office. But he also has a finite amount of time during which he is capable of mobilizing the political support of Congress and the public by virtue of his newness in office and his electoral victory.

Therefore, the new president ought to make a very conscious choice which issues require the most immediate attention. My earlier point about mission-oriented task forces is related to this. Of the geopolitical problems we discussed—and Brent may have a different list—I would say the complex issues of the Middle East are the top priority. The other issues, perhaps, can be dealt with more on a kind of a continuum and in a more traditional fashion.

SCOWCROFT: I would divide it a little differently. The Middle Eastern problems I would specifically break up. The Palestinian peace process is a separate unit which, if it’s not solved in this administration, could well disintegrate rapidly. Iraq and Iran are huge ongoing problems. Afghanistan is another one. Pakistan may be a fourth one. All of these will require and get the president’s attention, whether he wants to think about them or not. Even if he’s a domestically oriented president, he doesn’t have any choice but to start on these issues.

BRZEZINSKI: When I was national security advisor, I prepared a list of sort of global priorities for the president, with a write-up on each. I believe I had about ten, and I had some notion of what ought to be at the top. What struck me was that President Carter wanted to deal with all ten right away. That’s also where the national security advisor can be useful, in helping the new president prioritize these issues.

IGNATIUS: Any of us who travels around the world sees that and feels it. Maybe our biggest national security problem is that unpopularity. What could the new president do, right at the beginning, in this first hundred days, to turn that page and say to the world, “This is no longer the United States that you’ve become accustomed to dealing with.”

BRZEZINSKI: Well, look, he could close down Guantanamo. He could outlaw torture. He could put more emphasis on civil rights. He could say, “Let’s bury this culture of fear and have a sense of proportion about the threats that we face.” And if America is confident and true to its principles, I think these things would happen. Of course, the larger policy issues would still need to be addressed.

SCOWCROFT: I think one of the first things he could do is to say, “The United States is a powerful country, but we don’t have all the answers to the issues facing the world. We need help. We need the help of every straight-thinking government around the world. And we’re going to seek that help. I want to reach out, to work with anybody who is trying to make this world a better place.” And then implement that pledge. One of President Bush’s real virtues, Bush Sr., was his use of the telephone. At first I was against it. I thought it was a very risky thing for heads of state to do. But he used it brilliantly around the world, to build a friendly climate of relationships. He didn’t call just to ask his counterparts for support on issues. He called to say, “How are you? How are things going?” So when he did call on something specific, he had a receptive atmosphere. I think that’s tremendously important. The United States is the only nation that can mobilize the world to take on these great global problems. But we can’t do it if everybody dislikes us.

IGNATIUS: We often think of strategic communication in terms of finding effective ways for us to speak more loudly or more clearly. But strategic communication, sometimes, is strategic listening. I think that’s a great gift that Bush Sr. had. I think, at his best, Jimmy Carter was a good listener.

BRZEZINSKI: And sometimes we need to speak more modestly. Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in 1937, has a wonderful passage, to the effect that the more a civilization approaches its downturn, the more fervently it proclaims its supremacy. There’s a warning in that. We have tended, in recent years, to define world affairs in Manichaean terms. We are the epitome of right. Those who are not with us are against us. Those who are against us are by definition evil. I think we ought to be a little more modest about our place in the world.

IGNATIUS: In that spirit of self-criticism, let me ask each of you to think back to your time in government, and recall mistakes that you or your presidents made. Because as we think about how to put the world back together, it’s useful to remember things that you’ve learned from experience are potentially dangerous. Zbig, do you have thoughts about that?

BRZEZINSKI: Sure. You can’t do too much all at once. That’s one problem. Two, you can’t ignore the fact that, to be effective, you have to have sustained political support. And therefore you have to be somewhat flexible about your priorities. I think that without arguing as to who was right or wrong specifically within the administration, our policy in dealing with the crisis with Iran was not sufficiently clearly defined.

BRZEZINSKI: Yes. Implemented assertively and early. Which means either Cyrus Vance or I should have been completely overruled. Instead, in effect though not in intent, we tried to follow both strategies at the same time. I could give you another example, after which I’d be glad to give you a list of things I think we did well—and which would be longer.

SCOWCROFT: In the early days of the Bush administration, there was an attempted coup in Panama. We didn’t know who the coup plotters were or what they represented. We knew almost nothing about motivation or support. We had good communications with Panama but through parallel channels of information. The State Department had its communications; the CIA had its communications; so did Defense.

We had an NSC meeting to analyze the situation, and the participants all had different stories. We were, in effect, operating blind, because we had no coherent picture. It showed me the necessity of closer coordination within our government, so I set up a deputies’ committee that would meet periodically, once a week or as often as needed, to make sure that everybody in the NSC, all the principals, had the same information. That worked immensely well. It worked, also, with the issue of the papers that everybody sends up. We let the deputies’ committee look at them first. This worked, for me, very well. Again, it depends on the people involved.

But how you coordinate and keep people informed is one of the crucial jobs. For example, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense see the president maybe once a week or less. As national security advisor, I would see him perhaps a dozen times a day. They have to have faith that they’re being fairly represented in your discussions with the president. And that you’re telling them the things they need to know that the president tells you. If the defense secretary and secretary of state don’t have confidence that you’re conveying their views honestly and accurately, they’ll insist on discussing everything separately with the president. The president doesn’t have time for that. So you have to establish yourself as truly an honest broker. That’s impossible to do perfectly. But without it, the system—at least my system—breaks down.

IGNATIUS: I think most students of this subject would say that you got that closer to right than any national security advisor in modern times. That you had a strong personality, but you managed to submerge it so that you were not seen by your cabinet secretaries as a rival for the president’s attention.

IGNATIUS: For me, one of the paradoxes of this new world is that in economic terms, globalization is a seamless and highly efficient process for making decisions. Global companies manage to react to developments in the world with astonishing speed. They draw the best and the brightest, literally from around the world. If you go into Goldman Sachs or a well-managed technology company in Silicon Valley, you’ll find a remarkably diverse group of Chinese, Indians, Africans, Pakistanis, and Americans, all working together, collaborating, overcoming differences in culture and language. And the company responds very efficiently to the challenges it faces.

Yet in the world of government, we find rigid structures, often based on models that come to us from the nineteenth century or before. And none of that flexibility. I just wonder, as we think about how a new administration could make the right connections with this new world, whether there’s a way it could emulate what corporations do so effectively. Is that hopeless? Is it a hopeless dream that a government agency could operate as effectively as a corporation?

SCOWCROFT: I think so, because the order of merit is much simpler in the business world. There are so many goals and interests that the government has to answer to, that the measure of efficiency is much more difficult.

IGNATIUS: I’ve got one last question for you. The last seven years have seen an increasing polarization of debate in Washington about everything, including national security. The common ground on which Republicans and Democrats once stood when they were thinking about foreign policy has shrunk and shrunk, almost disappeared. I want to ask you to talk about how some measure of consensus could be recreated by a new president and how you’d go about doing it.

BRZEZINSKI: I think it really is essential that the next president, whoever that is, make a very deliberate, symbolic effort to create bipartisanship. And that means appointments. It would be great if a Democratic president appointed a Republican—and I can think of some names—as secretary of state. Senator Hagel comes to mind, for example. But there are others.

Or in some other key position. The same is true of a Republican president: he ought to appoint a Democrat. I think the last several years have divided us substantively, because there are real differences of opinion. But we have also been driven further apart in our world views. These divisions are damaging in that they compound the uncertainty felt by the rest of the world about us, which then reinforces our anxiety, which then degenerates into fear. They reduce the sense of shared direction, of confidence on the grand issues of the day. So I think one of the tasks of the next president will be to do the few simple, obvious, not terribly difficult things to promote bipartisanship through his power of appointment.

SCOWCROFT: I would agree with what Zbig has said. I think it’s a Washington attitude that has been reinforced by the recent changes in the world. In past years, when we were faced with a threat, we subordinated partisan differences.

Recently we’ve gotten out of the habit. The Vietnam War and Watergate were terribly destructive to our sense of community. That bitterness has persisted and even grown. I think it’s been accentuated by an increasing gulf between the executive and the legislative branches. Our presidents used to call congressional leaders down for a drink in the evening, just to talk. They used to bring the opposition into the cabinet room for discussions. These kinds of things are critical to establishing a sense of cooperation. Partisanship is a narrow, tactical thing. It should not be strategic and interfere with the business of government. I think the divide between Capitol Hill and the executive branch has grown ever wider. Meanwhile the Hill itself has gotten more sharply divided.

That has carried over into statecraft, where it truly is corrosive. And again, the key is the attitude of the president. Whether it’s appointing people or in some other visible measure, he has to keep reaching out. And to keep emphasizing that he’s making national decisions.

IGNATIUS: I often am not sure. And that’s the great thing. The two of you, who are veterans of these battles, really are able to get outside of the narrow party lines and limits, and talk together to try to come up with new ideas about very tough problems. And if the two of you can do it, I hope the new president and the Congress can do it too.