Trump’s National Security Council is Flailing

When the Pentagon recently launched a review of a landmark security pact with Australia and the United Kingdom, the move blindsided many key officials elsewhere in the U.S. government.

The decision, it turns out, was a unilateral move by the Pentagon championed by its policy chief Elbridge Colby. The official goal of the review is to see if the pact, AUKUS, which involves selling nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, is in line with President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda.

But many officials at the State Department, the White House-based National Security Council and others who are tasked with making the many-layered agreement a reality weren’t told in advance that the review would happen or what its parameters were. Many of their counterparts in Canberra and London were caught off guard, too.