Team of Heavyweights

By Henry Kissinger

President-elect Barack Obama has appointed an extraordinary team for national security policy. On its face, it violates certain maxims of conventional wisdom: that appointing to the Cabinet individuals with an autonomous constituency, and who therefore are difficult to fire, circumscribes presidential control; that appointing as national 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 to have been the precondition for creativity. Both Obama and the secretary of state-designate, Sen. 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 the president and the 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. 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 State Department in it require that the president and the secretary of state have a common vision of international order, overall strategy and tactical measures. Inevitable disagreements should be settled privately; indeed, the ability of the secretary to warn and question is in direct proportion to the discretion with which such queries are expressed.

The U.S. Foreign Service is an incomparable instrument honed by lifetimes 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, perhaps on the theory that they could not have passed the Foreign Service exam. Secretaries of state have been frustrated by its complex internal clearances, and presidents have complained in their memoirs about how slowly it reacts.

In its daily business, the State Department is in effect a big cable machine responding to thousands of reports from posts all over the world. In the vast majority of cases, these deal with the immediate; there is no institutional filter on behalf of the long-range. Processed through the various assistant secretaries for formal action, only a small percentage of these cables ever reach the secretary, and even fewer make it to the White House. Geopolitical and strategic considerations have no organic constituency. Though a Policy Planning Council exists, its activities are often shunted off into non-operational, semi-academic sideshows or, most frequently, into speechwriting.

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. This role of the secretary is all the more important because, organizationally, the State Department is geared more toward the secretary than the White House.

No one has ever been appointed national security adviser who had the command experience of retired Gen. James L. Jones, the former head of the Marine Corps and NATO commander. Inevitably, the facilitating function of the security adviser will be accompanied by a role in policymaking based on a vast, almost unique, experience.

The maxim that the national security adviser should act as a traffic cop, not a participant in the policy process, is more theoretical than practical. No president will feel obliged to limit advice to flow charts prescribed by schools of public administration. Whenever a department insists on its bureaucratic entitlements vis-a-vis the White House, it has already lost half the battle. And the frequency of the security adviser's contact with the president makes the distinction between management and policy advice psychologically untenable.

Ideally, the task of the national security adviser is to ensure that no policy fails for reasons that could have been foreseen but were not and that no opportunity is missed for lack of foresight. The security adviser takes care that the president is given all relevant options and that the execution of policy reflects the spirit of the original decision. Departments tend to equate internal morale with the adoption of their own recommendations and are prone to interpret decisions in the sense closest to their proposals. The security adviser's role in insisting -- if necessary -- on additional or more complete options or on more precision in execution is therefore not universally embraced.

The security adviser inevitably has the advantage of propinquity. His or her office is 50 feet from the president's; the secretary of state is 10 minutes away. That difference seems to ensure special access for the security adviser. Then, institutionally, the security adviser works almost exclusively on problems of concern to the president. The secretary of state has many clients around the world requiring attention, sometimes not of overwhelming presidential interest. The secretary also travels frequently, while the security adviser is almost always within reach of the president. His special relationship to the president requires a delicacy in conduct not always achieved by security advisers, including myself.

The continuation in office of Robert Gates as secretary of defense is an important balancing element in that process. Alone among the key players, he is at the end, not the beginning, of his policy contribution. Having agreed to stay on in a transitional role, he cannot be interested in the jockeying that accompanies all new administrations. The incoming administration must have appointed him with the awareness that he would not reverse his previous convictions. He must make the difficult adjustment from one administration to another -- a tribute to the nonpartisan nature of the conduct of his office in the Bush administration. He is a guarantor of continuity but also the shepherd of necessary innovation.

Process is no substitute for substance, of course. But even with this caveat, the new national security team encourages the hope that America is moving beyond its divisions to its opportunities.

Obama's New World Order

By Karen Tumulty and Mark Thompson

It was hard to miss the message that Barack Obama was sending with the powerful tableau lined up behind him onstage in Chicago. "I assembled this team because I'm a strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions," the President-elect said of his national-security picks. The top three members of that team certainly fit the description. In Hillary Clinton, Obama is getting a Secretary of State who battled him to the bitter end of a Democratic primary season focused largely on the question of who was better equipped to be Commander in Chief. In bringing in retired Marine general James Jones as his National Security Adviser and retaining Defense Secretary Robert Gate, Obama is turning to two men who might have seemed more obvious choices had John McCain won the White House. And all three were on the opposite side from Obama on the defining foreign policy decision of the past decade: whether to invade Iraq.

What Obama calls strength might sound like a formula for contentiousness or even failure, especially when you consider what happened with George W. Bush's first foreign policy team, which had its share of big personalities too. So fraught with palace intrigue was that arrangement that then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to attend key meetings called by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Secretary of State Colin Powell, for all his star power, was all but frozen out of the real decision-making—and the foreign leaders he visited knew it. And Vice President Dick Cheney was a power center unto himself. "You look at the team that George W. Bush brought in, and they also were very talented and experienced people," says Stephen Biddle, a defense expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It turned into a disaster because the President did a very poor job managing his staff and couldn't resolve disputes among his people." (See pictures of Barack Obama on election nigh.)

The potential for disputes would seem to be even greater for Obama's team, given how its members have disagreed with the President-elect and one another on not only the Iraq war but also a range of other policy fronts that include Iran, Afghanistan, missile defense and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Whatever their differences in the past, however, Obama insists they can work together: "They would not have agreed to join my Administration and I would not have asked them to be part of this Administration unless we shared a core vision."

An improving situation in Iraq has helped bring about that convergence, especially between the incoming President and his future Defense Secretary. During the presidential campaign, Gates criticized Obama's 16-month withdrawal timetable, but now that proposal doesn't look very different from the security agreement the Bush Administration has since signed with the Baghdad government. Nor has Gates offered any resistance to Obama's plan to install his own loyalists in the upper echelon of the Pentagon bureaucracy, which is now staffed largely by Rumsfeld holdovers. "Every new President traditionally fills civilian positions at the Department of Defense," Gates said. "It will be no different now."

As for the future, both Obama and Gates share a belief that there should be less emphasis on military power and more on using diplomacy and foreign aid to bend other nations toward U.S. interests. One thorny question at a time of economic crisis will be how much of the money for that reorientation will have to come from the Pentagon's budget.

This emphasis on "soft power" would suggest an even greater role for the new Secretary of State. But while she is well known overseas, Clinton understands she will have real influence abroad only if she is seen as having it within the Obama inner circle at home. One of her demands was assurance that she would have a direct line of communication to the President whenever she felt she needed it. She has also insisted on picking her own team at the State Department, though it helps that she and Obama reportedly have agreed that her deputy should be James Steinberg, an Obama confidant who was also Deputy National Security Adviser in the Clinton White House.

The key to making all this work is most likely to be the man who is the least familiar of the triumvirate. Jones, the 6-ft. 5-in. retired general who will be the chief conduit of foreign policy advice to the new President, was the first Marine to serve as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and has an Eisenhower-like appeal to both parties. But he was not part of Obama's circle of campaign advisers and reportedly resisted initial overtures to take the job, fearing he could get caught in the kind of infighting that Rice faced when she was Bush's National Security Adviser. Obama promised Jones both the power and the access he needs.

Jones is known for having sharp political skills of his own, which is one reason William Cohen recruited him to be his senior military assistant when Cohen, a Republican, was Defense Secretary in the Clinton Administration. "I wanted Jim because he knew where the bodies were buried," Cohen says. "And I wanted to make sure that mine wasn't among them." What could make Jones' job easier is the fact that both Clinton and Gates respect him. Clinton knows him through her tenure on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Gates, though he's never worked with Jones, knows him by reputation from their years at the Pentagon. Still far from clear is what role Joe Biden will play in this delicate arrangement. It was largely on the strength of his foreign policy credentials that Obama picked him to be Vice President. And the fact that he will be close at hand in the White House means Biden will certainly have the opportunity to weigh in on important policy questions. But no one expects him to be as big a force behind the scenes as Cheney has been or to seize entire portions of the portfolio for himself.

Of all of them, Gates probably has the best sense of what lies in store. After all, Obama will be the eighth President he has served. "There will no doubt be differences among the team," says Gates, "and it will be up to the President to make the decisions." A powerful team can succeed, but only if everyone agrees who is in charge.

Time