02:44 pm
A Foreign Policy Back Channel? Unlikely
Ezra Klein on whether the new alliance between foreign policy liberals and realists can hold:
[T]he post-Iraq consensus between liberals and realists. . .will hold as long as the question is Iraq. But what if the topic changes? If China triggers a confrontation over Taiwan or a threatening genocide cries out for a swift intervention? Where does Gates, or Jones, stand then?
On one level, it may not matter. Policy on pressing priorities is set from the top. Cabinet secretaries can either implement the agenda or resign in protest. There’s the question of advice, of course, but Samantha Power and Richard Danzig will be able to send Obama memos, too. That said, it does raise the question of tensions and divisions. The consensus around Iraq may or may not signal broad agreement on other foreign policy issues, but this will nevertheless be the team that faces down the full spectrum of foreign threats and crises. It will be a harsh test for the young bond between the two camps.
I don’t take issue with Ezra’s broader point, but if past experience is prologue, sub-Cabinet personnel will not have direct access to the President. Not only will their own Department heads not approve, the entire NSC apparatus is designed to force consensus through carefully established channels (some would say stovepipes). To put it bluntly, sub-Cabinet officers serve at the pleasure of the Department head, not the President, and while Obama probably could save their hide, he may choose not to do so (see Power, Samantha: primary season).
This is not to say that Obama won’t change the system. He could, for example, set up something like the dissent channel at the Department of State, which gives junior foreign service officers the opportunity to raise policy concerns without risking their careers. In fact, Obama should do just that, even if every member of his Cabinet fiercely opposes it.
But if he doesn’t, people like Power and Danzig are unlikely to have access to the President. It’s one thing for an Assistant Secretary to have a direct line to the Secretary, bypassing the relevant Undersecretaries (and Deputy Secretary), but it would be a whole different order of magnitude for someone outside the White House to maintain direct contact with the President. The obverse also is true: if Presidents want advice from particular people, they put them on their own staff, not in a secondary position in a distant Department.
Perhaps the best example of this is John Bolton, who served as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control before being named U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Powell and Armitage hated Bolton and often avoided working with him, both because he didn’t understand even the most basic concepts of teamwork and because he was widely regarded as as Cheney’s spy at Foggy Bottom. In fact, at the time of Bolton’s appointment to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., many analysts speculated whether it had as much to do with Rice’s desire to get Bolton out of the building as it did with the notion of assigning an attack dog to Turtle Bay.
If folks like Danzig and Power feel the need to reach out to Obama, they’re far more likely to go through someone they trust within the bureaucracy than to contact the President directly.