Before U.S. President Donald Trump ordered airstrikes against Iran in late February, many foreign policy and national security experts warned that an Iran war would be even more difficult and complicated than the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq — as Iran is a much larger country and is considerably different geographically. And according to national security insiders interviewed by CNN, the Trump adminstration’s downsizing of the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) did a lot to put the United States at a major disadvantage against Iran.
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Reporters Sean Lyngaas and Zachary Cohen, writing for CNN, emphasize that the NSC was “largely gutted in the lead-up to a war with Iran that has seen Trump shuffle through a series of strategies.”
“Instead of using the (NSC) to draw on input from a vast federal network of experts,” the CNN journalists explain, “Trump has leaned on a small group of close allies, such as (Secretary of State and Acting) National Security Adviser Marco Rubio and envoy Steve Witkoff, when debating strategy for the war. That has presented challenges for military planners, who were kept at arm’s length from pre-war discussions before being abruptly tasked with moving U.S. assets to the Middle East, CNN has reported…. The hollowing out of the NSC has altered U.S. foreign policy at key moments of the wars in Iran and Ukraine while catering to Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip management style, four veterans of Trump’s second term said in interviews with CNN.”
The NSC was established by Congress with the National Security Act of 1947, which also created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). And it existed under a long list of U.S. presidents before being “gutted” by the second Trump administration, according to Lyngaas and Cohen.
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One of the former Trump administration officials interviewed by CNN said that while there are advantages to having a smaller NSC — including less bureaucracy — a larger NSC could have made it easier for Trump to coordinate his strategy with U.S. allies in the Middle East and have a more “thorough” discussion of the Iranian regime’s willingness to block the Strait of Hormuz.
“Trump slashed the Council’s staff from roughly 200 in the early days to less than half of that today, according to estimates from three sources,” the CNN journalists note. “Trump made the cuts, at least in part, at the behest of far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who claimed that the NSC was full of people who were inadequately loyal to Trump…. Since its inception, the NSC has periodically frustrated some Pentagon officials who have seen it as a power grab of their war-planning duties. That was true during the Biden administration, where the NSC staff numbered well over 300 people. But few presidents have taken a sledgehammer to the NSC the way Trump has.”
Lyngaas and Cohen add, “It was the Stephen Miller-led Homeland Security Council, a body created in the wake of 9/11 to deal with threats to the U.S. homeland, that was the hub for drawing up plans for a post-(Nicolás) Maduro Venezuela.”
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