_____On the Web_____ • National Security Council Web site _____Special Report_____ • Bush and Foreign Policy E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version Subscribe to The Post

By Karen DeYoung and Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 10, 2001; Page A01

The Bush administration has substantially restructured the National Security Council during its first three weeks in office, providing an early indication of how the new White House plans to handle foreign policy and promote its strategic priorities.

Armed with memos and staffing lists drafted last fall, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice cut the NSC staff by a third and reorganized it to emphasize defense strategy, including national missile defense, and international economics. In a White House first, Rice has expanded her regular meetings with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to include Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill.

The consolidation of offices once dealing separately with Europe, Russia and the Balkans has reflected not only a smaller-is-better view, but Bush's desire to decrease U.S. involvement in the Balkans and signal to Russia "that this administration is not going to treat Russia as a special case," said one Russia expert.

Other notable changes have been the elimination of divisions handling international environmental and health issues, and of the NSC's communications and legislative offices.

Bush still has not issued the traditional presidential directive formally spelling out his national security structure -- a document his two immediate predecessors signed their first day in office. But the reorganization of the NSC reveals how Rice envisions her relationships with other powerful administration personalities such as Vice President Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld.

Rice has made it clear she will not be a policy initiator or implementer, and that she expects to be seen and heard far less than her predecessor, Samuel "Sandy" Berger. Several administration officials said she sees her task as making sure Bush is briefed and staffed to "play his role" in foreign and security matters, advancing his strategic agenda while thinking through "big issues" such as guidelines for foreign intervention, and serving as an honest broker of differences among the major policy players.

Rice's vision of a lean, strategically focused operation, closeted from public view, stands in stark contrast to the Clinton years, when the NSC ballooned in size, functions and visibility to become the center of foreign policy action -- often at the perceived expense of a weak and demoralized State Department.

State Department sources said they have been told they now will run interagency meetings that focus on single countries or regions, while the NSC will chair meetings dealing with "cross-cutting issues" that are less regionally focused or where no one agency has a lead role. "What's new is not that the NSC is smaller," said a senior official. "What's new is what's behind the sizing. It's a view about what the NSC staff ought to be for this president."

Rice has defined it as "working the seams, stitching the connections together tightly . . . provid[ing] glue for the many, many agencies and instruments the United States is now deploying around the world."

Since it was established in 1947, the NSC has been the White House staff that reflects the president's worldview while helping manage competing interests on the cabinet. While the influence and power of national security advisers have varied from one administration to the next, they often have become embroiled in troubled relationships among presidents, their White House foreign policy staffs and their cabinet secretaries.

Rice's mentor and model is one of the notable exceptions to this pattern: Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to Bush's father. Hailed by all sides as a paragon of modesty and effectiveness in crises from the collapse of the Soviet Union to Operation Desert Storm, Scowcroft's NSC was strictly an inside operation, while not interfering with the work of the cabinet secretaries.

Rice "believes we shouldn't have two secretaries of state," said a senior administration official.

For some Washington skeptics, the real question is not how many secretaries of state Bush will have, but how many national security advisers. The administration has several 800-pound gorillas working on foreign policy, and Rice, who served as provost at Stanford University after holding a senior staff position on Scowcroft's NSC, is junior in experience, rank and age to all of them.

Cheney, a former defense secretary and presidential chief of staff, is assembling a mini-NSC on his own staff and is expected to play an important foreign policy role. Powell, national security adviser to Ronald Reagan and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under the senior Bush and during Clinton's first year, brings far more heft to the job than his predecessor, Madeleine Albright. The strong-willed Rumsfeld is doing his second stint as defense secretary.

Bush has said he expects Cheney and the vice presidential advisers to be full participants in national security policy. The stated plan is that the NSC and Cheney's staff will be treated as one, with what a senior official called "maximum communication and transparency."

For the moment, comity is facilitated by the fact that, while many of the senior players across the administration have well-known differences on some issues, most of them learned to work together in previous administrations. And there is a strong desire, emanating from the top, to avoid public controversy.

But these are early days, and a rare period with virtually no immediate foreign policy crises. When the going gets tough, "it takes a very strong president to insist that these people get along," Walt Rostow, who served as Lyndon B. Johnson's national security adviser, told the Brookings Institution, which is compiling oral histories from NSC veterans.

Since 1947, the council has been reinvented under each administration to reflect the president's style and needs. It has been large -- 74 staffers under Eisenhower, and more than 100 during Clinton's second term -- and it has been small. John F. Kennedy slashed it to 12 key members. Richard M. Nixon wanted to "run foreign policy out of the White House," he said in his memoirs, and adviser Henry Kissinger assembled a 50-person staff to do it. Jimmy Carter cut that number in half.

Ronald Reagan -- who ran through six national security advisers in eight years -- left the NSC largely on its own. The result, among other things, was the staff-initiated Iran-contra operation under Oliver North.

Although the Bush team promises it will be different, "tensions between the national security adviser and the secretary of state seem to run through every administration," Reagan security adviser Frank C. Carlucci told Brookings. Feuding between Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and secretary of state Cyrus Vance eventually led to Vance's resignation.

Some veterans of Washington's foreign policy wars are betting that Rice will be quickly overshadowed and outmaneuvered by the administration's big guns. Even Scowcroft has observed that no matter what the structure, a successful national security adviser needs a president who is engaged in foreign policy, something that remains unclear in Bush's case.

Others insist it is "madness," as one official in cabinet department put it, to think that the genie of NSC dominance can or should be put back in the lamp.

The vision of a smaller NSC has become fashionable among foreign policy experts, recommended by a series of think tank and special commission reports to the new administration. Brzezinski, Carter's activist adviser, supports a more limited NSC role. "For every 200 decisions made every day in foreign affairs, maybe only ten should be presidential level," he said.

But Anthony Lake, Clinton's first term national security adviser, argued that the nature of foreign policy today calls for a major NSC role in governing, not just in advising the president.

"Increasingly, almost every issue has economic dimensions, security dimensions and classic diplomatic dimensions. And that means that no agency can take the lead and expect the other agencies that have an interest to follow it," Lake said, "because State simply won't do what Defense says and Defense won't do what State says."

Last September, Rice asked Philip Zelikow, a fellow staffer on the Scowcroft NSC and now head of the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, and arms control expert and Republican state department veteran Robert Blackwill, to draft memos on the organization of an NSC along Scowcroft lines. Edited by Rice and others, the memos were further refined when Rice deputy Stephen Hadley came on board, and Zelikow and Blackwill became part of the transition and were free to roam the halls of the Clinton NSC operation.

In keeping with a lower profile, NSC legislative and communications functions were returned to the main White House staff. The press and speechwriting components were slimmed from three to one official each. While reporters routinely called the Clinton NSC, including Berger, for policy information, callers are now referred to the White House and State Department press offices.

A new post of deputy economics adviser, reporting to both Rice and chief economics adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey, reflected a desire to enhance the role of economic considerations in foreign policy. Although no official appointment has been made, trade specialist Gary Edson, deputy to former U.S. trade representative Carla Hills, is expected to be tapped for the post.

Clinton's NSC office of Non-proliferation and Export Controls has become Bush's office of Non-proliferation Strategy, Counter-proliferation and Homeland Defense -- the White House locus for national missile defense. At its head is Robert G. Joseph, an advocate of missile defense who served in the Reagan and senior Bush administrations.

Rice has turned to experienced hands rather than ideologues for most jobs. New Europe/Eurasia director Daniel Fried is a career foreign service officer with long experience in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. From 1993 to 1997, he served in the Clinton NSC, where he played a major role in Nato enlargement. Franklin C. Miller, director of the Defense and Arms Control directorate, served in the defense department and co-authored the Clinton guidelines for nuclear targeting.

Rice and her team redrew much of the regional chart, moving countries to where they seemed to make more geographic and policy sense. Southeast Asia, paired with the Near East under Clinton, has rejoined Asia under director Torkel Patterson, a Japan expert who served in the Scowcroft NSC and whose selection sidestepped the rift in the Republican Party over the direction of China policy.

North Africa has been combined with the Near East in the directorate still temporarily headed by Clinton holdover Bruce Reidel. The new director for the rest of Africa is former Rice student, Harvard professor and transition aide Jendayi Frazer, who also did a stint on the Clinton NSC. Heading the Western Hemisphere directorate is career foreign service officer John Maisto.

Still up in the air is what to do with the NSC office of Transnational Threats, initiated and headed under Clinton by Dick Clarke. Clarke has remained in place while the administration decides what to do with the office.