Ben Rhodes Proves the National Security Council Needs to Be Reformed

Helle Dale /

Recent remarks by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes to the New York Times shows us that the National Security Council (NSC) as an institution is urgently in need of an overhaul.

Rhodes, who handles the president’s strategic communications, takes pride in how he sold the Iran nuclear deal to the American press.

In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,’ he said. ‘We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.’ He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. ‘We drove them crazy,’ he said of the deal’s opponents.”

Rhodes’s arrogant comments were quoted by Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, when he introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to reform the National Security Council by capping its staff at 100 and taking away its accreted bureaucratic powers.

Under President Obama, the National Security Council is a far cry from the advisory body envisioned in 1947 when President Truman, hired three people to counsel him on foreign affairs.

It at times circumvents the State Department as well as even the Department of Defense.

The National Security Council today, under National Security Advisor Susan Rice, is some 400 people strong, politicized, powerful, and controlling. It at times circumvents the State Department as well as even the Department of Defense.

In “Memo to a New President How Best to Organize the National Security Council,” Heritage Distinguished Fellow Kim R. Holmes, makes the case that National Security Council reform is within the powers of the next president—no legislation needed.

Holmes advises:

Reforming the National Security Council should be among the next president’s first tasks. When the National Security Council takes charge of U.S. foreign policy, the results are often disastrous. President John F. Kennedy discovered this during the Bay of Pigs catastrophe.

President Barack Obama has among other failures the debacle of Libya to show for letting the National Security Council run the show.