The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security By Bartholomew Sparrow
Hardcover, 717 pages. Published 2015 by PublicAffairs. ISBN: 1586489631
In the summer of 2013, I was standing in the Mansfield Room of the U.S. Senate during Senator Jack Reed’s annual reception for visiting West Point Cadets. As a chronic introvert, I have never figured out what to do with myself in rooms full of strangers, and I probably looked very uncomfortable. A slight, elderly man walked up to me, stuck out his hand, and said, “hi, I’m Brent Scowcroft.” Of course, I knew exactly who he was the moment I saw him, but his introduction seemed completely genuine–he really had no expectation that anyone would recognize him on the street. In a city of gigantic egos and talented, powerful people desperate to be recognized and revered, Brent Scowcroft stood out as someone who just wanted to do the work.
Sparrow’s biography is masterful and thorough, but it’s also a doorstop. If you want a reference for just about every significant foreign policy challenge of the Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41 administrations, this is your book. It is particularly valuable for its review of the long, drawn out fall of the Soviet Union and the U.S. government’s responses. It is insightful on the internal deliberations, particularly of the Bush 41 administration, and illuminates some of the mysteries that have deviled outside observers. It turns out Dick Cheney was always like that.
It is virtually impossible to write a biography of Scowcroft that is not admiring. He is disarmingly frank about his own failures. One of the most telling passages is Scowcroft’s own admission that, “My notion about the world that I was entering intellectually as I got deeper and deeper into foreign policy did not really include a world without a U.S.-Soviet confrontation.” Bush’s wise decision to provide support to Gorbachev and the Soviet moderates and to resist the urging of hardliners to humiliate and dominate the Soviets probably provided the softest landing possible in a dangerous situation.
Sparrow’s narrative of the Soviet collapse also demonstrates the difficulty of making policy in a complex world. Bush and Scowcroft were steeped in the language, history, and dynamics of national security, and they made excellent decisions in purely national security matters. Neither was experienced in economic policy, and both, particularly Bush, were trapped in Republican economic orthodoxy. Consequently, economic support to the Soviet Union appeared to be an area where they could throw a bone to the hardliners while remaining within their overall paradigm. The resulting debt deals crippled the Soviets’/Russians’ ability to deal with their burgeoning economic crisis and laid the ground for future Russian political developments.
The 1990-91 Persian Gulf War also demonstrated the limits of Scowcroft’s and Bush’s experience–nobody can be good at everything. While the Bush team took a nuanced approach to the Soviets, informed by decades of interaction and close observation, they took a more two-dimensional approach to Iraq and the Middle East. By demonizing Saddam Hussein so publicly, the team foreclosed their options for a negotiated settlement. They turned what was fundamentally a limited war for limited aims into a total war for regime change in the eyes of the nation. Their miscalculations stemmed not so much from any innate wish to mire the U.S. in Gulf politics as in their lack of understanding. Bush and Scowcroft did not see the possible futures in the Gulf as clearly as they did in Russia because they did not have the background and experience that so brilliantly informed their European, Russian, and China policies. As a side note, they were also taking flak from Dick Cheney throughout the crisis, and their more hawkish stance may have been influenced by the internal divisions. Having lost every battle on the policy toward Soviet devolution, Cheney pushed hard for a more hawkish stance in the Gulf–presaging his position 12 years later. Cheney’s (failed) insistence on letting Israel join the anti-Iraq coalition and his belief that Israel should have been encouraged to directly retaliate for SCUD attacks go far toward explaining his later disastrous judgements regarding Middle East politics and conflict. Cheney was always a terrible strategist, but the second Bush administration removed the failsafes.
Sparrow’s book also pays due attention to Scowcroft’s genius for and attention to process and organization. Here the lessons are somewhat contradictory. Scowcroft inherited a largely dysfunctional National Security Council process from Henry Kissinger during his first stint as national security adviser–a process further damaged by Kissinger’s presence as secretary of state and his dominant position within the administration. Within the constraints of the personalities, he managed to improve the process and serve as an honest broker for President Ford. In his second tour under G.H.W. Bush, Scowcroft ran an exemplary process that ensured input from all relevant parties and provided thorough, honest, and fully formed information and options to the president. Paradoxically, Scowcroft often achieved this excellent process through the creation of ad hoc working groups outside the official structures of the NSC. The effectiveness and dangers of such groups could be the subject of its own study. Under Scowcroft, they worked extremely well, but such groups proved exceedingly dangerous under the G.W. Bush administration when powerful actors used them to exclude dissenting voices and limit the options and recommendations for a president who lacked the experience and temperament to smell the manipulation. On the one hand, Scowcroft built an exemplary process and a smoothly functioning staff; on the other the process was completely dependent upon Scowcroft’s personal leadership. The ultimate lesson may be that process and organization matter, but they are ultimately tools of the individuals who execute and populate them.
The ultimate fragility of his process and organization also point to another partial failure–Scowcroft’s promotion of subordinates. While he championed and elevated superstars like Robert Gates, he was also an early mentor to Robert MacFarlane–a far more problematic figure. Most damagingly, Scowcroft lifted Condoleezza Rice early and quickly, only to see her manage–or fail to manage–a disastrous NSC staffing process in the wake of 9/11 and the runup to the Iraq war. Scowcroft recognized Rice’s obvious intelligence and talent without realizing that she was too young and insecure to do battle with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Where Scowcroft played the honest broker in the G.H.W. Bush administration, ensuring the president received the best advice and had a sober, experienced sounding board for ideas, Rice provided G.W. Bush with an enabler, lashing out at her former mentor when he dared question the conventional wisdom. Insecure in her position among the monstrous egos and misplaced certainty of the Cheney clique, she was unable to moderate their influence, and instead enlisted in their crusade. Her later tenure at State partially justifies Scowcroft’s trust and belief in her, but she was, ironically, out of her depth as the national security adviser, and Brent Scowcroft had put her there.
Committing to 700 pages on the life and work of a Washington bureaucrat is a serious investment. Bartholomew Sparrow has has made it worthwhile for any reader interested in the unglamorous process of formulating and implementing national security policy, but do not take this book to the beach for a light read. In Scowcroft, Sparrow has found the exemplar of what policy-making should look like, illustrating both the process at its best and the limits of the process even when executed by a quiet master with the full support of the president. It should be both a primer and a warning.
James W. Vizzard 