The National Security Council has been ground zero in the campaign against President Trump from the beginning. Gen Flynn’s appointment as National Security Advisor had touched the third rail because the NSC had been used to coordinate anti-Trump operations in the Susan Rice era.
What started out as a formal kitchen cabinet turned into a monster. And that didn’t exactly take decades. The NSC staff was at 50 people under George H.W. Bush. It hit 400 under Obama.
NSC was meant to be a forum in which the heads of existing agencies would coordinate foreign policy and national security options. Instead, the NSC’s staff tends to set the foreign policy. A support structure turned into a think tank and policy shop, and its very own deep state.
The worst example was Ben Rhodes, an aspiring novelist who evolved from a speechwriter to deputy national security adviser for communications, and, in that capacity ran our foreign policy. War and diplomacy weren’t run by the cabinet members, but by political operatives.
The NSC had become a state within a state, a rogue organization reporting directly to Barack Obama. This wasn’t Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex or the deep state, it was something worse.
The NSC violates constitutional checks and balances. It undermines the rule of law. Its current function is an absurd perversion of the simple and straightforward purposes that it was meant to serve.
Abolishing the NSC will, in some ways, be a policy victory for the Left. But the Left has shown that it can do far more damage with the NSC, than without it, and that makes it too dangerous to exist
