That process works something like this:

The president sets a goal for a country or region and wants policy options for achieving that goal. This is communicated to the NSC, which gets the interagency process rolling. Meetings—so many meetings—will be convened, involving representatives from every government component that might plausibly play a role in achieving that goal.

This includes the usual suspects, like the state department, the military, and the intelligence community, but might also include everyone from agriculture to the department of justice.

The goal is to both leverage the full capacity of the US federal government while also avoiding duplication of effort, figuring out costs and risks, assigning roles, mediating disagreements between different agencies, identifying potential allies who can help, etc etc.

This process goes up and down a hierarchical chain. At the lowest level, you have relatively junior personnel working out the nitty-gritty aspects of policy: who will do what, exactly, with what money, according to which laws. These recommendations are kicked up to higher levels, who might either approve them or send them back down to be revised, or to answer questions, or to consider more contingencies.

Eventually, though, something like a coherent set of options might make its way up to the principles committee—the actual NSC—who will then present those options to the president to either select one to approve or restart the whole process if he doesn’t like them.

It is a cumbersome, slow process that often produces policy that reflects a bland average of the decisions of many different bureaucrats. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee good outcomes, because these are ultimately policies to implement the goals of the US president.

But it’s at least a process, operating according to predictable rules, that is designed to produce achievable outcomes that match material means to explicit goals. We want to achieve X, so here’s how agency Y can legally leverage the resources it has to contribute according to a coherent plan.

That process no longer exists, as a meaningful contributor to policy, under the Trump regime.

Trump is deeply incurious, profoundly ignorant, compulsively impatient, and, worst, a fascist. As Umberto Eco observed, fascists are anti-intellectual, anti-rational, and fetishize action for action’s sake. A process like the NSC is profoundly antithetical to the fascist’s worldview.

Under fascism, the Leader issues a declaration about the state of reality and then all of his fawning, obsequious underlings begin a competitive process of trying to bring reality into a plausible accordance with the Leader’s declaration. That’s it. That’s the process.

No slow, patient, bureaucratic procedure for clearly articulating ends, identifying means of rationally achieving them, coordinating between different components to achieve a whole-of-government approach, ensuring all stakeholders have endorsed the policy and had their concerns addressed.

Just declaration and then action.

This is how we end up in a situation in which the US has gone to war with Iran, yet again, without even a clearly articulated strategic goal or desired outcome.

Trump has variously indicated that he wanted to intimidate Iran into negotiating with (ie, bribing) him, or to protect Iranian protesters, or to destroy a nuclear program he previously claimed he had destroyed, or regime change.

And the means of achieving whatever goal he wants to achieve is no more sophisticated than “drop many bombs on Iranian military and government targets.” This is simple punitive violence, the absolutely least sophisticated or precise approach to warfare. “Hurt them until they give you what you want” except that he hasn’t even articulated (and probably has not really conceived of) what he wants from the Iranians.

So many people will die, in Iran and elsewhere in the region, to achieve something unclear, with no ability to identify operational objectives that would allow the US to evaluate whether it has made progress towards its strategic goals (because it doesn’t have any).

The Saudis tried this in Yemen starting in 2015; they’re still fighting there, while the Huthis still rule much of the country. Let’s see how this latest war works out for the US.