Editorials & Other Articles

"The administration might have been readier had it not chopped back the State Department’s Middle East desk, gotten rid of its oil and gas experts and eliminated its dedicated Iran office. The administration handicapped its own National Security Council by firing staff members,"

"Normal administrations set up policy processes that assemble evidence from varied sources, collate viewpoints and priorities across multiple agencies and ensure rational deliberation before options reach the president. One of us served in three Republican administrations and participated as interagency reviews took place in a cabinet department, in an executive agency and in the White House itself. A single line in a presidential foreign policy statement might require the input of 20 or more people from the Defense Department, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Department of the Treasury and more.

The policy review process can be tortuous and sometimes mistaken. It can’t substitute for wise presidential judgment. But it is vital. It asks hard questions and assesses competing arguments. It ensures expert input in specific domains, anticipates how policies may ramify and prepares for contingencies.

In all those ways, the systematic review of policy amounts to an institutional mind: a cognitive process that organizes the government’s deliberations to keep them rational and anchored in reality. You might think of it as the government’s equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for high-level executive functions such as impulse control and long-term planning."