Decapitating the National Security Council leads to foreign policy chaos

There is so much happening in the Trump administration that events often pass in a blur, and their significance can’t be grasped until weeks, months or even years later. The slow-motion dismantling of the National Security Council is a case in point. At first it seemed like a minor bureaucratic blip, but now it is evident that the NSC’s weakness is contributing to incoherent U.S. policymaking on matters from Venezuela to Ukraine and beyond.

On April 3, President Donald Trump fired at least five key NSC staffers at the behest of notorious MAGA conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. A few weeks later, on May 1, Trump got rid of national security adviser Michael Waltz, a former Army officer and member of Congress who was one of Trump’s better-qualified national security officials. His firing offenses included setting up a Signal chat about airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthis that included a prominent journalist and prematurely advocating for airstrikes on Iran - a position that Trump himself came to embrace less than two months later.

Rather than appoint a strong, new national security adviser, Trump gave the job to Marco Rubio, who was already busy as secretary of state (as well as acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and archivist of the United States). Rubio thus became the first person since Henry Kissinger to serve as secretary of state and national security adviser simultaneously - without displaying any of Kissinger’s diplomatic genius. Making Rubio’s job all the harder, Trump also decided to fire dozens of NSC staffers in late May, reportedly reducing the NSC’s staff by more than half.

Why does this matter? The NSC was created in 1947 not only to support the president in foreign policy decision-making but also to coordinate all of the various national security agencies - state, defense, treasury, justice, the CIA, etc. - and to ensure that they are all marching in lockstep in executing administration policy. In our system of government, an effective NSC is necessary for effective policy formulation and execution. Having such a diminished NSC is a recipe for chaos and dysfunction - and all the more so when many senior administration policymakers are inexperienced.

In the wake of the NSC’s decapitation, members of Trump’s national security team have been pursuing their own agendas, sometimes at odds with the agenda of the president or of other officials.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, is the worst, though not the only, offender. Hegseth and his strong-willed policy chief, Defense Undersecretary Elbridge Colby, reportedly caught other administration members off-guard recently by announcing a review of the AUKUS (Australia-U.K.-U.S.) pact to sell nuclear submarines to Australia. The review surprised Australian officials and led them to fear, probably wrongly, that the administration is going to deep-six the deal.

Last week, Hegseth and Colby shocked the world again by pausing U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine on the grounds that the munitions were necessary for U.S. warfighting requirements, even though the military’s Joint Staff concluded that U.S. weapons stockpiles were perfectly adequate. The Hegseth-Colby move came as a surprise not only to Ukraine, European allies and members of Congress but also, apparently, to Trump himself.

CNN reported that Hegseth did not notify the White House in advance about his decision to stop the arms shipments. Asked at a Cabinet meeting who authorized the weapons stoppage, Trump was visibly irked, replying, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” On Monday, after a contentious call with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, the president told the Pentagon to resume shipping weapons to Kyiv.

But the unilateral Pentagon pause, even though it was quickly reversed, nevertheless sent a message of U.S. irresolution and confusion that can only embolden Putin and complicate Trump’s hopes of ending the war. Such sudden reverses also make it more difficult for Ukrainian officials to plan or to respond effectively to escalating attacks. Hegseth and Colby appear to be pursuing their own neo-isolationist foreign policy at odds with a president who sometimes acts like a warmonger and sometimes like a peacemaker.

The New York Times just uncovered yet another glaring example of the administration’s foreign policy confusion, this time regarding Venezuela. It seems that Rubio was trying to negotiate the release of Americans being held in Venezuela, as well as of Venezuelan political prisoners, in return for roughly 250 Venezuelans who had been deported from the United States to El Salvador. But the deal was never concluded, the Times reported, in part because the Maduro regime received a more generous offer from another Trump administration representative: special envoy Richard Grenell. Grenell, unlike Rubio, was offering to extend Chevron’s license to pump oil in Venezuela.

The mother of one of the Americans detained in Venezuela expressed frustration to the Times: “The sense that we parents had was that you had various people talking, but they weren’t working together - one negotiator would say one thing, and another would say something else. You would think they would be duly coordinated.”

You would think. But that’s not the way things work in the Trump administration. In part, of course, that’s because Trump is so averse to regimentation and consistency. The president changes his mind frequently and keeps all options open until the last second. But that makes it all the more imperative to have an NSC that supervises an orderly policy process to serve up options to the president and make sure his decisions are faithfully implemented. A strong NSC reduces the administration’s dysfunction; a weak NSC amplifies it.

At the moment, unfortunately, the NSC is as weak as it has ever been. Here is how Politico described the situation: The interagency process “is now one in which important meetings aren’t held, career staffers are often in the dark about what’s expected of them and some people or their institutions try to take advantage of power vacuums.”

Such dysfunction will continue to hobble the Trump administration unless and until the president decides to do something about it. If he wants to improve the situation, he needs to appoint an experienced, full-time national security adviser; reduce the number of special envoys like Grenell who are flitting about; and replace incompetent leaders such as Hegseth with officials who know what they are doing. If Trump fails to act, he will continue to find himself unpleasantly surprised by one policy snafu after another.