Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

NATIONAL SECURITY AND THE NATURE OF THE PRESIDENCY

The modern presidency has been shaped by the three seminal experiences of the 20th century: the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. The powers of the presidency were expanded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, first as a response to the Depression, and then later as a wartime measure during World War II. The President's powers were further expanded after the advent of the Cold War. The demands of a growing superpower, the most important of which was the need to manage nuclear weaponry and a global set of military alliances, created a national security state. At the top of this superpower presided the American President, whose powers and privileges greatly exceeded those of any previous President.

The end of the Cold War has created a debate not only over the nature of American national security interests and strategy, but also over the nature of the presidency. The question naturally arose: Should the presidency itself change now that the demands of the Cold War are over? This question is important because it goes to the heart of the next President's attitude toward both national security strategy and the organizational apparatus to implement it.

Fareed Zakaria, Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs, has said that the end of the Cold War fundamentally changed the presidency. What once was a privileged position became a position that once again had to compete with reemerging actors. As Zakaria says, the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War combined "to create a `national security state' and to privilege the President as the national spokesman, bureaucratically far above other leaders within society and the government in general." This situation, however, began to change in 1989.

Congress was the first to reemerge as a challenge to presidential dominance. The second major player, notes Zakaria, is the states. As he says, "a second and somewhat less remarked upon change has been the rising power of the states ... [which] have asserted prerogatives about the central government that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War." He points to the recent refusal by the Governor of Virginia to accept a request from the Secretary of State, and then from President Clinton, to abide by certain treaty obligations with regard to the arrest of a foreign national.

The third challenge to the centrality of presidential authority, notes Zakaria, is the rising influence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on U.S. national security policy:

The number of NGOs that have grown and that have been started in the last 10 years is triple what it was 10 years ago. This trend is likely to continue because, as in business, there are now dramatically lower costs to entry into the NGO world.

The attention given to NGOs demonstrates both their growing influence and their savvy use of technology to focus attention on an issue. Looking at the 1999 demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Zakaria observed that many of the groups "quoted on CNN and MSNBC ... were three people and a fax machine" and that this trend" was "likely to continue because you will get down to the point where it might even be no real organization, just a powerful e-mail-blasting system within a server."

The Gulf War, Zakaria argues, reflected the changed circumstances for presidential leadership and foreshadowed future decision-making by the commander in chief under the influence of various actors:

In opposing Iraq's conquest of Kuwait, President Bush felt it necessary to use the United Nations to get Iraq condemned as an aggressor, the underlying legal basis for Operation Desert Storm. He also felt it necessary to engage other regional and international actors to gain broad legitimacy for the operation to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Yet Charles Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist, offers a contrary view of the presidency. He believes that the presidency has been "miniaturized" during the past eight years, reflecting changing historical circumstances:

With the end of the Cold War, [the United States has] been so obviously dominant we haven't had the kind of crises and challenges that characterized the 60 years before that. We haven't needed a great President, an FDR or a Churchill, and we haven't had one with any inclination to act as an FDR or a Churchill.

While Zakaria argues that the emergence of Congress to restrain presidential power is a new phenomenon, Krauthammer believes that the President is still the dominant player. Even with the attention focused on Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution of 1994, Krauthammer says:

It turns out that in the modern era, in the media age, a President can dominate the political stage in a way that is simply impossible for a disparate congressional leadership, even one as flush with victory and for a time united as were the Republicans.

In fact, argues Krauthammer, Congress "hasn't had a role at all in the Clinton era [comparable to] the role of the Democratic opposition in the debates on Nicaragua, El Salvador, on Euromissiles--on the Pershings--on the whole structure of the Cold War struggle" as it did in the 1970s and 1980s:

Compare how powerful and important the Democrats were. I'm leaving out here the Vietnam War era, of course, where Congress was able to entirely undermine a President's policy. Compare that with how ineffectual has been any opposition by Congress to foreign policy as waged by the Administration over the last eight years.

Krauthammer's assessment is shared by former Reagan Administration official Robert Kagan. Pointing to President Bill Clinton's decision to intervene in Kosovo, Kagan notes that "Congress was against Kosovo. It was totally against Kosovo, and [President Clinton] did it anyway without the smallest difficulty."

VISION, PRIORITIES, AND STRATEGY

The changing international environment and the vision, priorities, and strategies adopted by a particular President will shape the nature and role of the presidency. How the President conceives of America's role in the world, and whether a President chooses to focus mainly on domestic or foreign priorities, will determine the leadership style and content of national security policy. The organization, management style, and personnel choices of the administration will reflect the President's vision for America's international role. While the President's vision is open to debate, it does not obviate the importance of these choices. Instead, it accentuates the importance of understanding the President's vision for America's role in the world.

Presidential Vision and America's Role in the World

The President's vision of America's international role is critical to the structure and management of national security policy. In fact, concludes Krauthammer, the President must use his vision of America's role in the world as a starting point for a coherent policy strategy:

In thinking about how to structure and organize the policy of a new administration, [the President] must start with what a former President once called the "vision thing." ... It would be very important for a President to be able to, apart from the structure of those who serve under him, and apart from his relations with allies and the military and Congress, to have a vision if he is going to conduct an effective foreign policy. If there is going to be a new foreign policy by a new administration, it will have to begin with a vision, and it will have to be sold to the American people.

Krauthammer goes on to argue that two competing world-views have emerged in the post-Cold War era, a liberal view and a conservative view. The next President, he says, will reflect one of these two visions or represent some blend of the two. The liberal vision has three basic tenets: "universalism, a sense that it is international institutions which ought to be the focus of American policy; legalism, an enormous emphasis on treaties, agreements, on parchment; and lastly, on humanitarianism, America acting as a benefactor all around the globe." The ultimate liberal objective is the creation of "a kind of global, international community."

The conservative vision, on the other hand, does not rest on the United Nations or abstract legalism. Rather it represents a "a nationalist foreign policy rooted in the understanding that what keeps international stability is ... American power first and last," with the complementary understanding "that America ought to conserve stability and serve the world by advancing its own national interest as opposed to trying to create a kind of global, international community."

Robert Kagan, however, does not see a major difference between the foreign policy philosophies of the Democrat and Republican parties: "The nation has the character it has. There is only so much you can do to reorient the functional feelings that the nation has."

Instead, Kagan believes that what separates the two parties is "a nationalism issue." For instance, he says that the Republican presidential candidates represent--although it may seem paradoxical--"internationalist nationalists." Thus, they support the notion that American "nationalism is about universal ideas." While there is no clear definition of the meaning of nationalism, Kagan argues:

It's not a blood-and-soil nationalism. It's not the Fatherland-type nationalism. [Instead] there is an inherent international view in our nationalism.... The most successful American Presidents who happened in the century ... and I'm thinking particularly of Roosevelt and Reagan, essentially married an appeal to nationalism with an appeal to the idea that that nationalism means that the United States has a role to play in the world.

In Kagan's assessment, this "international nationalist" wing of the Republican Party dominates the party, or, at least, this approach rules among those who vie for the Oval Office. A different strain of nationalism, however, has emerged in the Republican-led Congress:

The other strain, which is more located in Congress, is a more insular nationalism, which I think is closer in its sensibility to almost a blood-and-soil nationalism because it's also married up in certain cases with concerns about immigration, with concerns about multiculturalism, which may or may not be justified.

This nationalism, however, is subject to change. Kagan believes that if a Republican wins the presidency, the hesitancy on the part of Congress to intervene will vanish. As he says:

My guess is Congress is going to flip around. Republicans who have been more restrained and looking toward a more minimal foreign policy are probably going to follow the direction of the Republican President, who is going to be more internationalist.

Kagan believes the Democrats will also change positions as well, moving away from their support for President Clinton's interventions:

The Democrats will go back to their earlier, more isolationist incarnation. I predict that the next Republican President is going to get involved in one of these quasi-humanitarian, quasi-national-interest interventions with substantial support in the Republican Congress and almost total opposition from Democrats in the Congress.

POLICY PRIORITIES: NATIONAL SECURITY VERSUS DOMESTIC POLICY

A President must decide early whether national security and foreign policy are a high or low priority--and this decision will affect the President's vision and strategy. Former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski both agree that the President must determine the priority to be given to foreign policy. From this determination will follow decisions on personnel and organizational structure. As Weinberger notes, "in order to organize an administration for national security ... you have to have, first of all, a decision by the administration as to what it wants to accomplish in foreign policy."

Policy Prioritization and Personnel

Weinberger observes that a President who "accepts the fact that we need to play a leadership role in the future ... will have a quite different organization and quite different personnel than if the goal is to be re-elected." But this distinction is not the only concern in selecting the personnel responsible for the implementation of national security policy. Brzezinski's experience leads him to conclude that "Presidents who put a higher emphasis on domestic policy tend to lean heavily on Secretaries of State who are dominant [while] Presidents who see themselves as architects of foreign policy tend to lean more heavily on their National Security Advisers." In the latter case, the National Security Adviser becomes "the bureaucratic beneficiary of presidential reliance on that close relationship."

From these observations, Weinberger agrees with Brzezinski's remark that:

The President really needs to reflect how he is going to use his time and where his priorities are going to be and choose his key advisors on that basis ... a President who is not really interested in foreign policy should make a very deliberate effort to choose a Secretary of State who is going to play a preeminent role; [but] if he thinks otherwise, then he should choose someone who is more of a luminary and put more emphasis on the office of the National Security Adviser.

The President's priorities even affect the national security apparatus he will establish. Brzezinski continues:

In that connection, I think the President also must give some thought to what kind of a national security system he desires. In making that system, he should ask himself whether it helps the foreign policy coordination process to impose direct presidential control.

THE TRANSITION

The electoral campaign and the transition process influence the prioritization of issues and provide an indication of a President's focus once elected. Brzezinski notes that the transition process usually distinguishes between those "Presidents who put primary emphasis on foreign policy in the definition of their role and in their sense of historical responsibility, and [those] Presidents who will put more of an emphasis on domestic politics." This prioritization "immediately tends to affect how they operate and the kind of choices they make." Brzezinski adds:

The electoral campaign [however] is not necessarily a good guide in making this determination, because an electoral campaign is designed to win the elections, and that may not tell us too much about a new President. It certainly doesn't tell us much about the major foci of his foreign policy because a presidential campaign distorts foreign policy. It tends to primitivize foreign policy, reducing it to simple black-and-white issues.

Yet before a President can enact his vision, he must first take over the machinery of government. To be successful, the candidate must make a smooth transition from campaigning to governing. This requires serious and early planning. All too often, Presidents arrive in Washington woefully unprepared for the task of leading the nation. Long before they and their teams enter the White House, careful planning must be completed, and specific steps must be taken to prepare the way for a successful presidency.

Brzezinski notes that it is important to focus the attention of the transition teams on the purposes and goals of the administration:

One of the problems over the years has been that transition teams tend to be formed very quickly, without much advance thought regarding these questions. Transition teams necessarily are staffed by people who are aspirants to jobs and are often focused on securing a position in the new administration rather than answering the critical questions that the President and his closest associates may have. Hence, the choice of a transition team ought to be made very clearly with these larger questions in mind. Otherwise, a transition team can become a source of confusion or simply self-promotion rather than serving the interests and the choices that the new President-elect ought very consciously to make.

Weinberger, using the Reagan experience, emphasizes that presidential campaigns need to start transition planning early:

Transition planning started very early. Without an overriding position ... you're going to have confusion, and then you're going to have a reflection of that not only in the people who have been chosen, but in the bureaucracy that is expected to carry out the orders.

Washington Times editorial page editor Helle Bering also notes the importance of starting early with transition teams. She describes the historical experiences of the Reagan and Clinton Administrations:

The Clinton team did the exact opposite of what the Reagan people did. [The Clinton team] waited until the last minute, and then they acted out of complete chaos in the months of December and January, whereas if you go back to 1980, already after Reagan had won New Hampshire, he started putting together his foreign policy and domestic policy agendas and teams, and they started acting as early as February, which made for a huge difference.

The lack of preparedness on the part of the Clinton team was responsible for much of the confusion in Clinton's foreign policy. As Bering notes:

When the Clinton team came in, all they could do was say that there was no daylight between them and the Bush Administration. There was no vision. There was no sense of purpose, and that soon evolved into the grasping onto the United Nations as the saving life raft for their foreign policy, which was not a particularly good idea, whereas with the Reagan people you had a strong sense of purpose.

Reagan, prior to taking office, had a clear idea of where he wanted to take the country. Weinberger describes how policy dominated the discussions of the transition teams for President Reagan:

The important thing is to have a very clear policy, and it seemed to me that those discussions that we had prior to the inauguration of President Reagan set the stage to a very considerable extent for the policies that he was going to follow.

ORGANIZING NATIONAL SECURITY POLICYMAKING

There are many facets to organizing the apparatus for national security policymaking. Once the President decides whether national security will be a priority, he can decide not only what kind of people he wants in the Cabinet, but also how to apportion power and influence among the various agencies and offices involved in the making of national security policy. The workings of the government--both its limitations and its possibilities-- must be fully understood before it can be properly utilized. The interagency process should be organized to reflect the President's goals, priorities, and style of leadership. The organization of the national security apparatus should not be left to chance or even tradition, but should be consciously adapted to achieve the President's agenda.

Zbigniew Brzezinski supplies a list of the questions the President must answer in organizing a national security system:

Does he see the national security system essentially as a coordinating function providing him with analysis to enlighten his understanding and to facilitate some of his choices? Is the national security system designed to overcome the inherent inclination of large bureaucracies to be overly cautious and not particularly innovative? And does the national security system spur new policies and produce initiatives?

The answers the President provides to these questions will help him decide on the structure of national security agencies and processes. Brzezinski continues:

Closely connected with this issue is the whole question of how actually to structure the decision-making process. Every President shortly after the assumption of office issues an order structuring his decision-making system, in fact, very deliberately--frankly, out of political and personal ego--renaming the key steps for the documents that are going to be issued in the President's name, the names of committees, and so forth.

That is an extremely important component of the transition process, for it sets in motion the necessary decision-making dynamics and the process very early on. A President has to be very conscious of the fact that the manner in which he proceeds will ultimately determine how his system will be structured.

A President should decide on the structure and organization of the policymaking apparatus prior to taking office, because the consequences of inattention to these decision-making details can be troublesome. As Brzezinski points out, "Slight degrees of emphasis, small shades of difference, or even minor sources of confusion in setting up the process can have a long-term impact on the ability to operate."

Indeed, the President should have documents outlining the structure of government ready on the day he takes office. Brzezinski concludes:

The key document describing the proposed restructuring should be produced quickly, preferably on the first or second day of the new administration, so as to ensure that it doesn't become an object of bureaucratic struggle.

The President's Relationship with the Director of Central Intelligence and the National Security Adviser

One of the President's most important decisions, Brzezinski argues, is structuring the relationship of the President to the National Security Adviser and the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Brzezinski says:

There is the problem of how you organize larger scale planning in the government, and that planning process in the U.S. government is very messy and has been that way for years. There is a specific problem of the role of the CIA and the Director's access to the President.

The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) typically desires direct access to the President. ... Clearly the DCI must be involved in the NSC process, and there should indeed be some access. Whether he should brief the President every day, however, is an open question. Over the years, a tendency has developed for the National Security Adviser to fill this role rather than the Director, in part because the President, in being briefed, does not want to deal with the head of a huge agency which then gets feedback from the briefing.

Moreover, the President also wants to be able to use the briefing to sharpen his understanding of the immediate policy issues that he faces, and in so doing he needs some interaction with a person that's close to him and can give him advice and can refine the analysis that he is getting. The Director of Central Intelligence cannot do that. It has to be someone close to the President.

Hence, I would emphasize the unique role of the National Security Adviser because he alone can say: "Look, in the next three days you have to make the following three decisions. Here is the way the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense disagree. Here is the input from the JCS and the CIA, and these are the ramifications of your decision."

Then the President can say: "Well, Joe, what do you think, since I trust your judgment? If I didn't, you wouldn't be here." I don't think the President can have that kind of an interaction with the DCI.

The President's Relationship with the Military

Another important concern is the President's relationship with the armed forces. Brzezinski argues:

Obviously, the Secretary of Defense is critically important and a broadly significant player in the national security process. This begs the question of whether the President should have a direct relationship with the Chairman of the JCS, and how the President makes sure that what the Secretary of Defense tells him corresponds with what the Chairman of the JCS thinks, and vice versa.

Obviously within the Department of Defense structure, the Chairman of the JCS cannot undermine the Secretary of Defense. At the same time, however, the military perspective is very important, and sometimes even politically sensitive. Hence, some sort of a direct, carefully structured relationship between the President and the JCS chairman is necessary while keeping the line of command hierarchically clean.

Cap Weinberger agrees that the President must bring in the military early for national security planning, not only because of its expertise, but also because the military's support will be needed to enact the President's program. Weinberger contends that there must be recognition of the military's major role:

By this, I don't mean trying to politicize the military or bring them in support of an individual or a party. This would be about the worst thing anybody could do. Rather, I mean gaining an understanding among the people who are senior in the military who either are or are likely to be a part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as to what it is that this incoming administration wants to accomplish. It is important not to start with a blank page on January 20.

Bipartisanship

Brzezinski argues that it is important to strive for bipartisanship in national security because it is one of the keys to enacting a successful national security program. He says:

The new President from the new party in power has to make a very serious effort early on to set in motion some structured process to create bipartisanship in foreign policy. This is crucial, and it tends to be neglected.

I would hope that a new President would reach out and have a bipartisan effort not only in terms of rhetoric and outreach, but in terms of appointments.

GETTING THE RIGHT PEOPLE

One factor critical to the successful enactment of the President's national security agenda is getting the right people--people who believe in the President and his program, and people the President trusts. However, before the President can know which people to choose, he must know what he wants to accomplish. People and policy are intrinsically linked. Brzezinski makes this point clear:

The President has to have some self-conscious understanding of the role he wants to play, particularly with regard to foreign policy because there are significant, even very nuanced, differences between different kinds of roles the President can play.

A President ought to determine on the basis of that involvement where he places the people that he wants to work with him. A President may choose a different kind of a person to be Secretary of State and a different kind of person to be National Security Adviser. That choice is very sensitive and very critical. Then, having made that choice, he goes on to the process.

The process has to be consistent with the choices he has already made. If the process is to maximize the central role of the President and the concentration of decision-making in the White House, then obviously you make arrangements which enhance the role of the NSC. If you want the State Department to be dominant, if you are not going to be deeply involved, but you have a sense of direction, then you choose a person who can provide continuity and a general sense of direction from State. One must make this decision with the knowledge, however, that you are not going to get very much innovation because inevitably the Secretary of State becomes a prisoner of the bureaucratic machinery.

So it starts really with the President, goes from the President to his people, and then to the process. The three have to be closely related.

Brzezinski notes that time is critical to this part of the process, arguing that the President-elect should make "basic choices at the beginning of December so that [his] transition teams reflect those choices and don't complicate the process. And [he] ought to have people in place and a presidential order ready by the last week of January."

Weinberger believes that it is critically important for the President to hire people who share his vision of the world, noting that:

They might not necessarily be representatives of various wings of the party. They might not necessarily be people who had a geographic balance. They might not necessarily be people who would help in getting an administration re-elected.

Weinberger sees the campaign as an important mechanism for vetting and choosing the President's national security team: "People should be chosen for their capabilities in presenting the foreign policy program of the candidate during the campaign." Those who can skillfully articulate and defend the candidate's foreign policy positions "could fall rather naturally into the role of helping to carry out the policies and the plans of the new administration."

THE NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAUCRACY

Sometimes, however, having the right people is not enough. Former Reagan Administration Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Peter Rodman describes how President Nixon's loyal national security team faced a hostile bureaucracy in the State Department:

Nixon pulled the reins of power into the White House, and the National Security Adviser and his office was given the chair of the some of these key committees [formerly chaired by the State Department]. This at the time was thought of as a great coup d'etat.

Rodman notes that "most recent administrations have adopted more or less the same bureaucratic structure," but that "what really led Nixon to pull the reins of power into the White House in such a systematic way was the fact that the State Department seemed willfully to misunderstand the foreign policy that he wanted to conduct." Rodman describes how this process worked with respect to Nixon's policy toward the Soviet Union:

Nixon came in with a very definite idea that he wanted to link arms control with other aspects of Soviet policy. He didn't want to start arms control negotiations right away. [Rather] he wanted to formulate a defense strategy within which negotiations on arms control would have a place.

He sent messages, both orally and in writing ... to his Cabinet departments that this is how he wanted to proceed. But, again, the State Department was negotiating with the Russians almost immediately on setting a date for arms control and this and that because obviously the State Department, and to some degree even the Defense Department, were much more responsive to media pressures and congressional pressures than they were to presidential authority.

Kagan describes how Secretary of State James Baker had a similar distrust of the State Department bureaucracy:

The Bush Administration decided that George Shultz had been captured by the State Department and therefore tried to concentrate power in three or four people around the Secretary of State. [I]n some cases that was beneficial, but in some cases that meant that things kept biting them that they didn't see coming around the corner. They were constantly being surprised by events and crises.

The issue, according to Kagan, is not the expertise of the fallible bureaucracy. Instead, it is the structure that exists under the Secretary that matters. If there were "powerful assistant secretaries watching all of these problems ... there would be fewer surprises." As Kagan notes:

The Reagan Administration had very powerful assistant secretaries, not only in the State Department, but also in the Defense Department. You've got people like Richard Perle and Rich Armitage in the Defense Department. You've got Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz and Peter Rodman in the State Department. And I think that one of the things that that determined was that it's not that hard to grasp hold of the bureaucracy if you put your people in at that operational level. Strong, politically appointed assistant secretaries bend very quickly their bureaus to their will.

Weinberger also doubts that the foreign policy bureaucracy is ungovernable. Rather, he believes that the President can make the bureaucracies of the State Department and the Defense Department reflect his will:

Bureaucracy basically will do what it is asked to do. They are very loyal. They are very dependable. They are very expert. But they have to know what the policy is; otherwise, they will either do nothing, they will formulate it themselves, or there will be an enormous amount of confusion as a result. So it goes back to the President, what he wants to do and how early he impresses his appointees with that.

Selecting the Cabinet Secretary

Before the President can mobilize the bureaucracy behind his program, he must choose a Cabinet that believes in his program. The President must find Cabinet officers who will faithfully carry out his program. Loyalty to the President, and not the Cabinet agency, is key. As Rodman points out:

Cabinet officers have to decide whether they are the President's representative in the bureaucracy. Is it their job to represent the President's will and to impose the President's wishes on the bureaucracy, or, alternatively, are they the representative of the bureaucracy in the Cabinet?

Are they just going to reflect the pressures their agencies are feeling all of the time from Congress and the media? If all they are is the bureaucracy's representative in the presidential councils, all they are is another pressure group on the President rather than an ally or an arm of presidential authority.

Even if the President has a loyal team, he still must lead his national security and foreign policy teams and give his programs coherence and direction. As Rodman emphasizes:

Coherence can only come from the President under any procedure. If the President has strong convictions and a vision and a sense of what our strategy should be, then one way or the other he is going to try to impose his coherence and discipline on the government. Ideally, he should do it through clear authority and direction to Cabinet officers who are responsive to his leadership; but I can assure you that if it doesn't happen, then the President ... will find his own ways of giving effect to his wishes, even if the rest of the government is not totally responsive.

GAINING SUPPORT FOR THE PRESIDENT'S PROGRAM

No new President starts his term with a "fresh slate" when it comes to devising and implementing a national security agenda. The long-term security interests of the nation, the commitments of prior administrations, and the statutory requirements imposed by Congress influence the policies of every new President. Nevertheless, a newly elected President can take steps to ensure his administration devises and imposes policies that conform to his vision of the role the United States will play in world events and its security needs.

To succeed, the new President must decide on the emphasis he wishes to place on foreign affairs, and put in place a structure that reflect his priorities. He must also display an understanding of his ability to maneuver in a highly changing international environment, and an appreciation of how actions taken in one part of the world can influence outcomes in others and how his foreign policy apparatus can shape policies. He must devise a system for selecting the persons best able to help him translate his vision into reality.

As daunting as this job may be, Presidents need not be alone when making these decisions. Able veterans from past administrations are available to provide advice and impart the benefits of their experience. Distilling the best of their advice has become a common practice for each administration since the end of World War II. The advice of foreign policy experts helped produce policies that ultimately ended the Cold War, and it could help point the way to a new consensus of what American foreign policy in the future.

Caspar Weinberger emphasizes the importance of early planning in selling the President's program. Even before the inauguration, the President should be meeting with key members of Congress to gain their support. Key opinion leaders in the foreign policy field should be identified and, if possible, brought into the campaign. If they cannot be actual campaign advisers or surrogate speakers, then they should be members of outreach organizations. Finally, the staff should approach key members of the press to explain the President's agenda. The President should not wait until after the election to begin this outreach; all of these efforts should be accomplished during the campaign. Preparing to market the President's agenda should be one of the transition team's top priorities.

Furthermore, Weinberger believes, the President should establish contact early with America's key allies before and soon after the inauguration. They need to understand his agenda and be encouraged to support it. If the President works closely with America's allies as early as possible, he may be able to avoid misunderstandings and even crises later in his term.

Dealing with National Security Crises

More than any other issue, national security crises stress the presidency and reveal weaknesses in character, leadership, and organization. If a President is unprepared for a crisis--if his vision is blurred or his team divided--then the nation can be seriously threatened. Crises can shape and alter the course of a presidency, as the Bay of Pigs and Berlin Wall crises did for John F. Kennedy's Administration. And, of course, they can destroy a presidency, as the Iran hostage crisis did for Jimmy Carter. A President ignores crisis planning at his own peril.

Not all crises that affect national security have origins in foreign affairs. Weinberger describes how the air traffic control crisis in the first year of Reagan's presidency helped galvanize support for his presidency and, thereby, demonstrated his credibility and strength abroad. Weinberger says:

One of the very early things in the Reagan Administration was the crisis caused by the air traffic control strike, which had the possibility of not only tying up civil aviation, but making all of the aerial activities of the country either come to a halt or be far more dangerous. How would he deal with this? He dealt with it very quickly and very completely. ... It was a very important thing not only in and of itself, but as a test, as a demonstration of the way the leadership would be exercised in the new administration.

A crisis consumes the President's time, which is extremely limited to begin with. Brzezinski believes that clarity of vision is vitally important to weathering a crisis: "If a President has a clear vision, then he is in a position to make a good judgment when a crisis occurs as to whether the crisis is a challenge to that vision or a diversion from it." Brzezinski continues:

If the President has a sense of strategy or vision and a crisis arises, and he knows it's a challenge to his strategy, he will hopefully give it all of the necessary time and deal with it accordingly. If he doesn't, then I don't think he can decide whether it's a real challenge to his strategy or merely a diversion. Then he can fail to act, not realizing it's a challenge to his strategy, or he can overly engage himself in dealing with something that is not a serious crisis. I think the amount of time President Clinton spent on Haiti is a good example of this point.

Not all crises are to be feared, however. Sometimes a foreign crisis offers an opportunity to demonstrate resolve or accomplish a larger strategic goal. Kim R. Holmes, Vice President and Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation, contends:

In terms of the sense of a crisis being a challenge, how the President handles that can also turn it into an opportunity. I'm thinking about how President Reagan handled the whole Euromissile crisis, for example, which seemed at the time to be an assault on the entire Western alliance. But the way that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Reagan handled that actually turned it into an important solidifying point for the alliance. It also demonstrated a larger commitment to overturn the challenge of the Soviet Union.

Charles Krauthammer agrees:

I think that the Reagan Administration brilliantly seized on the Euromissile crisis ... [which] was the most understated, unappreciated victory in the Cold War. The Euromissile crisis was a threat to the alliance, and it ended up not only with the Soviets backing down, but disarming of the left with the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. It accomplished two ends at once.

Krauthammer points to President Clinton's handling of Haiti as an example of how a crisis can become an emblem of a President's vision of foreign policy:

It may have begun as a distraction but I would argue that, in fact, it became the model or an emblem of what really is the foreign policy vision of the Clinton Administration. ... Madeleine Albright, when she was sworn in as U.N. ambassador, spoke of her mission as being "to terminate the abominable injustices that still plague our civilization." That's a coherent vision: America's role in the world is to terminate abominable injustices. Haiti is one example. Getting more deeply involved in Somalia was a second. Bosnia, Kosovo, I think, are other examples.

Vision can also enable a President to define which crises merit his attention. The "CNN effect," in which television coverage dictates policy is often cited as a rule: "If CNN goes somewhere, the President ineluctably has to follow." Yet, as Zakaria believes, if the President has sufficient vision and resolve, he can not only shape the crisis, but also resist the manipulation by the press and his political opponents. According to Zakaria, it is not true that foreign policy is "a kind of hostage to some 24-year-old [producer] in Atlanta who decided to send a camera crew somewhere":

That just isn't the case, particularly in the post Cold War world in which the threats are more ambiguous. The President has an enormous ability to define what he sees as a crisis and what he sees as a threat. There is no evidence that continued television coverage of some issue forces the President's hand.