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.

@HeavenlyPossum

The liberal deliberative process and the fascist declaration of reality end up with the same actions anyways.

@richpuchalsky

They absolutely can, as with Bush II’s invasion of Iraq, during which the interagency process existed to support the president’s goal of fascist imperialism. And the president can always override the interagency process, as when Biden decided to materially support genocide in Gaza against the law and over the objections of the interagency.

The difference is, I think, the extent to which decisions like this are being made on the immediate and semi-random whims of a fascist who is also suffering from both (i strongly suspect) psychopathy and advanced dementia. It’s a level of Caligula-esque decadence that I don’t think the US has experienced in a while, at a time when it is materially stronger, in coercive terms, than it ever has been.

@HeavenlyPossum

I don't really like the mental illness explanations. During the Cold War Presidents routinely made decisions to kill lots of people because some country or other didn't follow US interests, but they were either deniable, or justified by anti-Communism so they didn't seem like whims. But they were not essentially different.

@richpuchalsky

I’m not sure how to explain this distinction without sounding like an apologist for Cold War presidents—which I absolutely am not—but there seems to me to be an important distinction between a rational process and an irrational one, even if only from the perspective of “how effective is this evil empire at achieving its evil goals.”

Trump has, for example, started a war that has, for the first time ever, resulted in direct and *damaging* retaliation against US military facilities in Bahrain. This is something that previous acts of aggression did not provoke, because those were all carefully calibrated in terms of means, goals, and risks. In this case, Trump has *wrecklessly* ignored risks to his own assets because he is not just pursuing irrational or evil goals, but also because he is doing so in a haphazard and irrational fashion.

If anything, this is good news for accelerationists.

@HeavenlyPossum

It's not a major thing, but I still disagree. Take the gradual US escalation in Vietnam, for example. None of the Presidents involved ever went through a rational process of carefully considering means, goals, and risks.

@richpuchalsky

They absolutely did! That was a golden age of the interagency process and the ascendency of national security advisors like Kissinger. Noting that the process was rational does not mean that the policies they recommended were good or that the president would somehow correctly pick the “best” option. Of course they messed up! But there was at least a process, in contrast to one person’s whim.

I don’t want to convey the impression that I think the US security apparatus is good or does good things or is how we should structure society. I’m just trying to explain what is functionally different, including the rapid erosion of this state capacity. I think this is evidence that the US state is rapidly shaking itself apart.