Sublime

First, our NSC process would deliver options to advance and protect the interests of the American people and overcome national security challenges.

I asked our team not only to map the interests of rivals, adversaries, and enemies, but also to consider the emotions, aspirations, and ideologies that drive and constrain them.

For me, history came to life when it was applied to contemporary challenges and circumstances.

Third, we would insist on the presentation of multiple options to the president, as a means of providing best advice from across all departments and agencies of government.

That is why deterrence by denial—that is, convincing adversaries that they cannot accomplish their objectives through a cyber attack—is essential.

Presenting a single option designed either to tell a president what he or she wants to hear or to present the consensus position of the cabinet is doing him or her a disservice.

Our job was to provide the president with options and integrated strategies that combined elements of national power with efforts of like-minded partners to make progress toward clearly defined goals. The work, however, should begin with identifying challenges and understanding them on their own terms and from the perspective of “the other.”

to ensure that the president received the best assessments, we would include measures of effectiveness for every approved strategy. Assessments would go to the president periodically or when an event occurred that presented a new hazard or an opportunity. And we would scrutinize the assumptions on which the strategies were based and be prepared to

Russia’s appearance of strength, however, belied significant weaknesses that cut across its economy, demographics, public health, and social services. As former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright has observed, Putin’s Russia played a poor hand well.71 The United States and its allies, particularly in Europe, played a much better hand poorly