Mounting Crises Raise Questions on Obama Team's Ability to Cope

Washington: One day this month, as the nation shuddered with fears of an Ebola outbreak and U.S. warplanes pounded Sunni militants in Syria, President Barack Obama's national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, invited a group of foreign policy experts to the White House Situation Room to hear their views of how the administration was performing.

She was peppered with critiques of the president's Syria and China policies, as well as the White House's repeated delays in releasing a national security strategy, a congressionally-mandated document that sets out foreign policy goals. On that last point, Rice had a sardonic reply.

"If we had put it out in February or April or July," she said, according to two people who were in the room, "it would have been overtaken by events two weeks later, in any one of those months."

At a time when the Obama administration is lurching from crisis to crisis - a looming Cold War in Europe, a brutal Islamic caliphate in the Middle East and a deadly epidemic in West Africa - it is not surprising that long-term strategy would take a back seat. But it raises inevitable questions about the ability of the president and his hard-pressed national security team to manage and somehow get ahead of the daily onslaught of events.

Early stumbles in the government's handling of the Ebola crisis as well as its belated response to the Islamic State militant group have fueled speculation that Obama may shake up his team, which is stocked with battle-tested but exhausted White House loyalists and Cabinet members, like Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who are viewed as less cohesive than the "team of rivals" in Obama's first Cabinet.

"There is an inflection point in every presidency, and this certainly is a logical one, if the president feels he might be better served by some replacements on his team," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

While Blumenthal said the administration had borne up well under the circumstances, the scale and complexity of the problems, he added, "would exact a toll personally and professionally on any group."

There is little evidence that the president plans a wholesale shake-up. But he has already brought in new blood: Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, to manage the response to Ebola, and Gen. John R. Allen, a former commander in Afghanistan, to marshal the coalition against the Islamic State.

Obama is also leaning more than ever on his small circle of White House aides, who forged their relationships with him during his 2008 campaign and loom even larger in an administration without weighty voices like those of Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, or Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state.

Over the Columbus Day weekend, the White House chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, traveled to the San Francisco home of Sen.

Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to negotiate personally about redactions in a Senate report on the CIA's detention and interrogation policies after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

That McDonough would get involved in such an arcane matter puzzles some legislative aides on Capitol Hill, given the other demands on his time. But it testifies to how Obama tends to hand delicate assignments to his most trusted advisers. Kerry and Hagel, meanwhile, are struggling to penetrate the tightly knit circle around the president and carve out a place in the administration.

Kerry is vocal and forceful in internal debates, officials said, and gets credit for putting together the coalition of Arab states that conducted military strikes in Syria. But he often seems out of sync with the White House in his public statements. White House officials joke that he is like the astronaut played by Sandra Bullock in the movie "Gravity," somersaulting through space, untethered from the White House.

In separate interviews, McDonough and Rice rejected that portrait, saying he dials into meetings and is heavily involved in the policy process. Aides said a long memo he wrote on the Islamic State has become the playbook for combating the group.

Hagel has a different problem. A respected former senator, like Kerry, Hagel says little in policy meetings and has largely ceded the stage to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E.

Dempsey, who officials said has won the confidence of Obama with his recommendations of military action against the Islamic State.

Defenders of Hagel attribute his reticence in meetings to fears that the details will leak into the news media, and say he is more vocal in one-on-one sessions with the president. They also insist that he is more assertive on policy than his reputation suggests, citing a sharply critical two-page memo that he sent to Rice last week, in which he warned that the administration's Syria policy was in danger of unraveling in the near term because of its failure to clarify its intentions toward President Bashar Assad.

McDonough and Rice both said the president was satisfied with his Cabinet.

"Deciding policy is just one step," McDonough said. "You need the secretaries to implement."

To do that, however, Obama obviously has decided that he also needs reinforcements like Klain and Allen. Klain, aides said, is viewed as a potential replacement for John Podesta, the president's counselor, or even McDonough, if he chooses to leave.

But these outsiders, sometimes called czars, can cause their own problems. Allen's appointment as special envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition antagonized Dempsey, several officials said, because he worried that the retired general would stray onto the Pentagon's turf.

Nobody on Obama's staff has genuine czar status, though McDonough comes closest. He has been equally immersed in domestic policy and in politics, but he has played a far more active role in that area than previous chiefs of staff have. Before taking on the CIA report, for example, he flew to Berlin to heal a rift with Germany over the National Security Agency's eavesdropping on the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

McDonough's broad portfolio, several officials said, has posed a particular challenge to Rice, a blunt-spoken former U.N. ambassador who also has close ties to the president. She coordinated the debate over how to handle the CIA report and the repercussions from the NSA's surveillance, though she did her part to aggravate those tensions in a bitter exchange with her German counterpart.

"I guess I could be a testosterone-driven, territorial kind of personality in this role," she said. "My view on this is that it's an asset to have a partner down the hall."

McDonough said that he viewed his role as supporting Rice, and that he did not insert himself into her staff's core business of developing policies. He described Rice as a friend and said, "The president has exactly the national security adviser he wants."

Some liberals have been deeply disappointed with Obama's slowness in embracing the Senate report, and have questioned McDonough's involvement in redacting it, noting his close ties to the CIA director, John O. Brennan. McDonough said he traveled to Feinstein's home because he views the role of Congress in foreign policy as sacrosanct.

"This is an important case study of the role of Congress in foreign policy," he said, "and I want to get it right."

Whatever their jurisdictional issues, officials said McDonough and Rice were generally aligned on policy. Both were skeptical about being drawn into the civil war in Syria and about providing weapons to Ukrainian forces to push back Russia-supported rebels. Their caution, one official said, tends to reinforce Obama's own instincts.

That may have been a factor in the slow U.S. response to the
threat of the Islamic State. McDonough said he wished the administration had acted sooner and acknowledged that the administration misjudged the robustness of the Iraqi army.

The White House-centric approach has other disadvantages.

David Rothkopf, a Clinton administration official who has written widely about the National Security Council, said the toxic relationship between the Israeli government - typified by a recent slur against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by an unnamed senior U.S. official - pointed up the dangers of an NSC overly involved in diplomacy.

"All NSCs are tempted to meddle in operational issues, but it not only undercuts the deployed officials, it keeps the White House from focusing where it should: on bigger, strategic issues," said Dennis C. Blair, who served as the director of national intelligence until 2010.

Obama is also dealing with another curse of second-term presidents: an exodus of talented staff members. William J. Burns, a deputy secretary of state and key player in on nuclear diplomacy with Iran, retired last week. Antony J. Blinken, Rice's deputy and an influential voice on Ukraine, is in line for Burns' post, but the White House is uncertain about how to replace him.

Ultimately, of course, the administration's crisis management reflects the president. Obama, several officials said, came back from his summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard frustrated that the White House seemed reactive to events, and instructed his staff to shift its response into a higher gear. Yet he remains deliberative, methodical and not swayed by outside criticism. His blowup during a meeting on the response to Ebola two weeks ago was the exception rather than the rule, they said.

"We're managing a multi-ring event, and I think reasonably well. I would say very well, if I were not trying to be a little bit studied," Rice said. "We've got a lot of balls in the air, and frankly, they're still in the air."