National Security Adviser John Bolton has yet to convene a Cabinet-level meeting to discuss President Donald Trump’s upcoming summit with North Korea next week, a striking break from past practice that suggests the Trump White House is largely improvising its approach to the unprecedented nuclear talks.
For decades, top presidential advisers have used a methodical process to hash out national security issues before offering the president a menu of options for key decisions. On an issue like North Korea, that would mean White House Situation Room gatherings of the secretaries of state and defense along with top intelligence officials, the United Nations ambassador, and even the treasury secretary, who oversees economic sanctions.
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But since Trump agreed on a whim to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un on March 8, the White House’s summit planning has been unstructured, according to a half-dozen administration officials. Trump himself has driven the preparation almost exclusively on his own, consulting little with his national security team outside of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Senior officials from both the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations called the absence of a formal interagency process before such a consequential meeting troubling. Peter Feaver, a former National Security Council (NSC) official in the George W. Bush White House, said his colleagues would likely have held "quite a few" meetings of the so-called Principals Committee of Cabinet-level NSC members in a comparable situation. A former top Obama White House official echoed that point, calling the lack of top-level NSC meetings “shocking.”
Trump has also not presided personally over a meeting of those senior NSC officials, as a president typically does when making the most important decisions.
Trump’s ad hoc approach to talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, with whom he has traded threats of nuclear war, partly reflects the disorder that has always gripped the Trump White House —itself a reflection of the commander in chief’s management style.
But officials say that the policymaking process across the White House, never a tightly organized affair, has recently grown less disciplined. They point to John Kelly's loosening grip on the West Wing, which Trump has always chafed at, and with it, the dissolution of many of the processes he tried to institute when he arrived a year ago. This has affected not just North Korea but the president's recent imposition of tariffs on American allies. Many also cite Trump's frustration with Bolton, who has irritated the president after just two months on the job.
Without that coordinated process, the president “cannot understand the equities that different elements of the government have in this,” said a former senior Bush administration official who served both in the White House and at the State Department. The White House declined to comment for this article.
Part of the problem is Trump’s on-and-off chemistry with Bolton. The president fumed after Bolton spoke of a hardline “Libya model” for North Korean denuclearization on CBS News in late April — implying that the U.S. would make no concessions until after Kim had physically surrendered his nuclear program. After North Korea responded furiously, Trump blamed Bolton for derailing the summit. In turn, Trump dictated to Bolton a letter to Kim canceling the nuclear summit and insisted that Bolton read it back to him.
On Friday, when a top North Korean official arrived in Washington, the president did not invite Bolton to join them in the Oval Office — another departure from tradition, in which the national security adviser attends every significant meeting with a foreign official. A second former Bush NSC official said he could not recall a single important meeting for which the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was not present.
“The pageantry of who’s in or not does matter here, and I think the president is probably signaling that that kind of a model is not what he has in mind,” Suzanne DiMaggio, director and senior fellow at the New America Foundation said at a Monday lunch for reporters.
Bolton will nevertheless travel to North Korea with the president, presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway said Wednesday.
"He'll be part of those talks. The absence of someone in any one meeting, any one event, means absolutely nothing other than they weren't in that particular meeting," she said. But it remains unclear exactly what role the national security adviser will play at the summit, to be held at a posh resort hotel in Singapore. The North Korean government described Bolton last month as “repugnant” and has previously called him “human scum.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Kelly will also travel to Singapore with Trump, and Pompeo, who has emerged as the lead American negotiator with North Korea, has met twice previously with Kim in Pyongyang.
The absence of interagency of meetings on North Korea also reflects the breakdown of Kelly’s effort to impose traditional policymaking processes at the White House — which extends beyond national security to issues like trade, where Trump’s position has veered back and forth with little sign of a coherent plan.
“There isn’t the kind of order that Kelly had started to impose when he came in. Kelly has really backed off in a lot of ways, he is really not playing an assertive role,” said a third former Bush administration official who remains in close contact with several Trump aides. “When they need a presidential decision, everybody kind of tries to manipulate things to get the decision that they want.”
That's precisely what Kelly tried to change when he took the reins last July, insisting that the president close the doors of the Oval Office to prevent aides from wandering in to cajole him on one issue or another or to drop articles on his desk in an attempt to sway his views.
But the White House feels like it has returned to the early days of 2017, when then-chief-of-staff Reince Priebus exercised little control and the policymaking process was non-existent.
Kelly’s arrival last July initially sparked a change. The retired Marine general charged former staff secretary Rob Porter with overseeing the White House’s various policy councils, including the NSC, and insisted the president take no action without first signing a decision memo presenting the recommendations of various Cabinet departments and agencies and any disagreements they might have.
Kelly’s diminishing status and staff changes have eroded those processes. Porter left the White House in February in the wake of domestic abuse charges. His replacement, Derek Lyons, did not inherit Porter’s title of deputy assistant to the president for policy coordination, and has not developed the same chemistry with the president.
The departures of economic adviser Gary Cohn and his deputy, Jeremy Katz, has also unraveled a tightly-controlled trade policy process. Cohn and Porter used interagency planning meetings to help rein in the president’s impulsive decisions.
But those days are over. Cohn’s replacement, Larry Kudlow, has the president’s ear, he has yet to find a permanent deputy to help him run the National Economic Council. Shahira Knight holds the job on an acting basis but plans to leave the White House in the coming weeks and the White House has not settled on a permanent replacement.
Meanwhile, the administration’s statements on trade have careened in every direction. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told Fox News late last month that a possible trade fight with allies was “on hold” — days before Trump smacked American Canada and the European Union with steel and aluminum tariffs.
On core national security issues, some say disorder has spread since Trump fired national security adviser H.R. McMaster’s in late March.
“McMaster was all about process, almost to a fault,” said a former Trump White House official. “He revamped the NSC to where they were having tons of meetings, and we made sure that before the president did anything there was a policy process.”
Others, however, argue that McMaster convened too many meetings and that Bolton, who holds fewer, is nonetheless more effective. One senior administration official said that under Bolton, meetings of the Principals Committee — which have been held on issues other than North Korea — are more focused than before. The official added that the administration has benefited from Bolton's closer political alignment with the president than that of McMaster, who had deep reservations about Trump’s worldview.
Many Asia experts worry that Trump is, as one former Bush official who worked on Asia policy recently put it to POLITICO, “is going to wing this summit.” The concern is shared by Japanese government officials who consider North Korea a threat to their security and worry Trump might cut a superficial deal that does too little to disarm Kim.
Conway on Wednesday insisted that Trump is hard at work in preparation for the summit, scheduled to begin at 9pm Eastern Time on Monday night. But when pressed, she declined to elaborate on any specifics. “This president prepares in many different ways for many different major summits,” she told reporters. “It is structured it is extensive, it is, at this point, intense.”
Annie Karni contributed to this report.
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