About This Lesson
Two former National Security Advisors and a former member of the NSC Staff – Stephen Hadley, Colin Powell, and Meghan O’Sullivan– discuss the purpose, make-up, function, and history of the National Security Council (NSC) for CFR’s Model Diplomacy, a free multimedia program that engages students through role-play to understand the challenges of shaping U.S. foreign policy in an interconnected world.
The NSC is an advisory rather than a decision-making body, says Stephen Hadley, responsible for issues that require the attention and coordination of multiple federal agencies. Each American president possesses a measure of flexibility in designing the structure of the NSC so that it can adapt to his unique management style. The NSC, says Colin Powell, is intended to draw attention to and advise the president on the nation’s most challenging national security challenges. Ultimately, decisions are made by the president. Meghan O’Sullivan suggests that the increasingly complex nature of national security issues makes the NSC’s work today more challenging than in the past. As a result, she says, the current NSC is relatively larger and more hierarchical.
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