Until now few people have had the chance to travel in Calabria, opting instead to visit the Big Three or basing themselves in Italy’s northern regions.

But things are changing.

Boxcutter needed; The National Security Council.(Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power)(Book Review)

The Economist (US) July 16, 2005 WITH its “in” crowd, its “out” crowd and its jostling groups in between, Washington, as the late Meg Greenfield once said, is just like school. And the National Security Council, the White House office that co-ordinates foreign policy, is about as “in” as it gets. David Rothkopf, foreign-policy commentator and former Clinton administration official, falls somewhere in the middle, which may be one reason why he so wanted to peer into the inner circle. His book, while not as juicy as its title suggests, is, however, a sprawling attempt at making sense of one of Washington’s most amorphous institutions.

There are good reasons why Americans know so little about the NSC. Appointed by the president, national security advisers and their staff need no Senate confirmation, so are not required to testify before Congress. Some advisers, such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, have basked in the media limelight, but the NSC’s internal workings usually lie outside public view even when they undergo dramatic shifts. And major shifts are common, for the NSC reflects the ideology and management style of the White House far more than other agencies do. this web site national security council

Mr Rothkopf may be a Democrat, but he is bipartisan when it comes to rating the quality of America’s national security co-ordination. Under Richard Nixon, Mr Kissinger created a powerful department which brutally sidelined the defence and state departments, not to mention the CIA. Nonetheless, Mr Rothkopf gives him high marks for the policies that resulted, notably the opening to China and arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union. (As a former managing director of Kissinger Associates, the author should know Mr Kissinger well). Under Jimmy Carter, Mr Brzezinski also liked to out-muscle his bureaucratic rivals, but he gets credit for his prescient views on Soviet decline. here national security council

When the Reagan administration took over, the president’s advisers wanted to avoid a replay of the bitter rivalries of the 1970s and the rise of another bureaucratic superstar like Mr Kissinger. They demoted the national security adviser to a sub-cabinet position and moved his office into the basement, reducing the NSC to what Mr Rothkopf calls “an undersupervised, underproductive, ingrown system.” The result was the Iran-Contra fiasco, in which Oliver North, a rogue NSC official, illegally diverted money from secret arms sales to Iran to the right-wing Nicaraguan contras. The NSC recovered after 1986, when Frank Carlucci and Colin Powell introduced changes to reduce the bureaucratic rivalries. These reforms held through the presidency of George Bush senior, and were finally institutionalised by Bill Clinton’s first national security adviser, Tony Lake.

What of today’s NSC? Despite securing interviews with several key Bush administration officials, including Condoleezza Rice, Mr Rothkopf simply rehashes the view that Ms Rice was usurped by Vice- President Dick Cheney, who built up a mini-NSC on his own staff and used his allies on the NSC to magnify his power. Ms Rice also comes under fire for failing to grasp the threat from al-Qaeda before the September 11th attacks, but this charge has been common since Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism chief, published his own book more than a year ago.

Mr Rothkopf’s is not among the more successful efforts to prise open the black box of decision-making in the current Bush administration. But as a synthesis of current American policy, it serves a purpose. Anecdotal, garrulous, even gossipy at times, it is just like school–only with higher stakes.

Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.

By David J. Rothkopf.