2026-06-17T09:00:07.854Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/17/politics/trump-sidelined-national-security-experts-iran
- 消息人士称，过去一年特朗普将国家安全委员会（NSC）的工作人员从约200人裁减至不足100人。
- 前官员表示，精简后的国家安全委员会错失了与盟友协调以及评估伊朗是否愿意封锁霍尔木兹海峡的机会。
- 特朗普依赖一小批顾问团队，而非通常为战争规划提供咨询的广泛专家网络。
本文由人工智能生成摘要，经CNN编辑审核。
由于担心总统在开战期间仅凭经验行事，国会介入设立了专家委员会为总统提供建议，从政府各部门收集信息，以考量军事行动的后果和影响。
当时的总统是富兰克林·D·罗斯福，战争则是第二次世界大战。国会设立的这一咨询机构——国家安全委员会——在此后的数十年间为14位总统服务，成为信息和规划的关键枢纽。
然而，在唐纳德·特朗普总统任期的最后一年，在特朗普针对伊朗发动一系列战略调整的对伊战争前夕，国家安全委员会基本被掏空。
据三位消息人士的估算，特朗普将该委员会的工作人员从初期的约200人裁减至如今的不足一半。特朗普此次裁员至少部分是应极右翼阴谋论者劳拉·卢默的要求，后者声称国家安全委员会充斥着对特朗普不够忠诚的人。
特朗普没有借助该委员会从庞大的联邦专家网络中汲取意见，而是在讨论对伊战争战略时，依靠一小批亲密盟友，例如国家安全顾问马尔科·卢比奥和特使史蒂夫·维特科夫夫。这给军事规划者带来了挑战，据CNN此前报道，他们被排除在战前讨论之外，随后却突然接到命令将美国资产调往中东。
“在特朗普2月28日决定袭击伊朗之前，规模缩小的国家安全委员会无疑错失了不少机会，”一位前特朗普政府官员告诉CNN。
四位特朗普第二任期的老兵在接受CNN采访时表示，国家安全委员会的空心化在对伊战争和乌克兰战争的关键时刻改变了美国外交政策，同时迎合了特朗普即兴发挥的管理风格。
两位前官员表示，精简后的国家安全委员会也有一些好处，例如在危机发生时可以减少官僚主义繁文缛节。
但这位前官员称，更大规模的国家安全委员会本可以帮助特朗普更好地与海湾盟友就伊朗对美国军事打击的反应进行协调，并更“彻底”地讨论德黑兰实际封锁霍尔木兹海峡的意愿。
相反，特朗普在3月告诉CNN，这场战争“最大的意外”是德黑兰用导弹袭击阿拉伯海湾国家的猛烈程度。据CNN此前报道，尽管美军多年来一直在推演这一确切场景，但美国政府仍大幅低估了伊朗封锁海峡的意愿。
国家安全委员会在奥巴马政府2015年达成的监控伊朗核计划协议中发挥了核心作用。该协议的首席谈判代表罗伯特·马利也曾担任国家安全委员会高级官员。当时在国务院负责伊朗事务的官员内特·斯旺森表示，国家安全委员会“深度参与”了该协议的制定和执行，并就此举行了多次会议。
“国家安全委员会比以往任何时候都更有效、更响应总统的优先事项，”白宫发言人安娜·凯利在一份声明中说道。
“任何暗示包括战争部、国务院、能源部、财政部、中央情报局等在内的所有相关实体，都没有参与‘史诗之怒’行动及后续行动的说法都十分荒谬，”凯利补充道。“总统经常与他的国家安全团队会面，并就任何特定问题听取各种意见。最终，他才是最终决策者。”
据了解相关会议的消息人士透露，尽管能源部和财政部等机构的关键官员出席了美国袭击伊朗前的一些早期规划会议，但过去几届政府中作为决策过程不可或缺组成部分的机构分析和预测，在此次决策中沦为次要考虑因素。
参议院财政委员会首席民主党议员罗恩·怀登表示，特朗普提名的财政部负责经济政策的助理部长斯里普拉卡什·科塔里曾告诉参议院工作人员，他不知道财政部内有任何人在美军对伊朗发动军事行动前开展与能源市场相关的分析或工作。
财政部长斯科特·贝森特告诉怀登，财政部“依靠数百名职业经济专家和其他人”为贝森特提供建议。（贝森特未具体说明这些顾问是否就伊朗战争提供了相关建议。）
“内阁部门可以承担大量繁重工作，但大规模梳理复杂信息正是国家安全委员会的专长所在，”这位前官员说道。
全球约五分之一的石油流经霍尔木兹海峡，伊朗曾利用封锁海峡的威胁在结束战争的谈判中向美国施压以换取让步。特朗普在计划于周五正式签署协议前，于周日宣布了美伊之间的框架协议。
两位熟悉当时规划讨论的消息人士表示，联邦机构之间缺乏协调在五角大楼早期的决策中体现明显——五角大楼优先打击伊朗军事目标，而非投入资产阻止伊朗试图封锁海峡。
其中一位消息人士称，尽管美国在袭击伊朗前在中东部署了大量军事资产，但这些资产并不适合阻止伊朗封锁海峡。
“空袭开始后，航母战斗群无法提供任何能改变封锁局势的助力，”这位消息人士告诉CNN。
“通过详细的规划流程，战争部已准备好应对伊朗政权可能采取的任何行动，”白宫发言人凯利说道。“任何相反的说法都十分荒谬。”
自成立以来，国家安全委员会时不时会令一些五角大楼官员感到沮丧，他们认为该委员会在篡夺军方的战争规划职权。这在拜登政府时期亦是如此，当时国家安全委员会的工作人员人数远超300人。但很少有总统像特朗普这样对国家安全委员会痛下杀手。正是由斯蒂芬·米勒领导的国土安全委员会——这一机构是9·11事件后为应对美国本土威胁而设立的——成为了制定针对马杜罗领导下的委内瑞拉的计划的枢纽。
斯旺森曾在特朗普第一任期和拜登任期内担任国家安全委员会伊朗事务顾问，他将特朗普第一任期的国家安全委员会描述为他所知的日程安排最紧凑的国家安全委员会之一。他表示，当时有关伊朗问题的会议频率极高。
而在特朗普第二任期，政府似乎“完全放弃了这一流程”，他告诉CNN。
斯旺森在特朗普第二任期初期曾在国务院伊朗谈判团队任职，后因卢默抱怨他是“奥巴马遗留人员”而被解雇。
“如今（国家安全委员会）似乎完全是自上而下的决策，并且害怕向总统传递坏消息，”斯旺森说道。
在乔治·H·W·布什总统下令对萨达姆·侯赛因1990年入侵科威特做出军事回应之前，布什的国家安全委员会举行了一系列会议，讨论军事行动的利弊。
来自五角大楼、情报机构、国务院和财政部的代表均出席了会议，向国家安全顾问布伦特·斯考克罗夫特及其副手汇报情况。国务院官员汇报了他们为组建后来的数十个国家支持对侯赛因的军事行动的联盟所做的努力。财政部官员汇报了他们与外国同行合作实施对伊拉克封锁和稳定石油市场的工作。
这种协调正是该委员会旨在促成的，符合1947年国会在罗斯福领导第二次世界大战后设立国家安全委员会时的初衷。
历史学家、前五角大楼演讲稿撰稿人约翰·甘斯表示，国家安全委员会是一种将联邦官僚机构各部门人员聚集在一起，为总统提供决策信息，并追踪政策执行情况的方式。
政策专家会从各机构借调至白宫旁边的艾森豪威尔行政办公楼履职。
“设立国家安全委员会是因为二战期间人们非常担心，一位最终在任上去世的总统基本上仅凭经验指挥一场全球战争，”甘斯说道，他的著作《白宫勇士》记录了总统们在战争时期如何利用国家安全委员会，以及如何被国家安全委员会利用。
拥有强大的国家安全委员会能够提供充足建议，这一做法有利有弊。
“更大规模的国家安全委员会可以同时处理更多议题，但也存在官僚机构认为自己可以做出本应属于总统的决策的风险，”第一位前官员说道。
“这不是一届传统的政府，”另一位前特朗普官员说道。“总统和他的高级官员才是制定政策的人，因此这是一种自上而下的方式，而非自下而上。这种方式无疑效率高得多。”
这位前官员辩称，特朗普能够比保留国家安全委员会官僚机构的情况下更高效地制定结束加沙战争的计划。
但在其他情况下，官僚主义或个别官僚主义者 arguably 仍会碍事。第三位前美国官员表示，在特朗普第二任期初期，几乎所有国家安全委员会的聘用决定都必须经过当时白宫人事办公室主任塞尔吉奥·戈尔的审批。随着加沙战争的爆发，由于戈尔阻挠部分新 hires，国家安全委员会的中东事务部门仅剩下寥寥数人。
甘斯表示，自第二次世界大战以来，每位美国总统都曾因官僚主义或媒体泄密而感到沮丧，并缩小了其顾问圈子。就连甘斯称之为“第一次海湾战争期间国家安全委员会管理黄金标准”的乔治·H·W·布什总统，也在战争推进期间“基本停止”召集正式委员会的会议。
国家安全委员会被排除在国家安全决策进程之外的最明确迹象之一，出现在去年7月，当时国防部长皮特·赫格西并未告知白宫他暂停向乌克兰运送武器的决定。据CNN此前报道，这是赫格西2025年第二次决定暂停美国向乌克兰运送武器，令高级国家安全官员措手不及。
当一名记者在内阁会议上询问是谁批准暂停武器运送时，特朗普回答道：“我不知道，你为什么不告诉我？”
“我们还没看到更多类似国家安全委员会被重大国家安全决策打个措手不及的公开案例，这已经算是个奇迹了，”第三位前官员说道。
CNN的阿尔皮塔·达西卡为本报道撰稿。
How Trump sidelined national security experts ahead of his war with Iran
2026-06-17T09:00:07.854Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/17/politics/trump-sidelined-national-security-experts-iran
- Trump slashed the National Security Council staff from roughly 200 to less than 100 in the past year, sources say.
- Former officials say the reduced NSC missed opportunities to coordinate with allies and assess Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz.
- Trump has relied on a small group of advisers rather than the broad network of experts that typically inform war planning.
AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor.
Worried about a president who seemed to be flying by the seat of his pants as he waged war, Congress stepped in to establish a council of experts to advise the president, gathering information from across the government to consider the consequences and effects of military action.
The president was Franklin D. Roosevelt and the war was World War II. The advisory body Congress created, the National Security Council, served the next 14 presidents in the intervening decades as a key nexus for information and planning.
However, in the last year under President Donald Trump, the NSC has been largely gutted in the lead up to a war with Iran that has seen Trump shuffle through a series of strategies.
Trump slashed the council’s staff from roughly 200 in the early days to less than half of that today, according to estimates from three sources. Trump made the cuts, at least in part, at the behest of far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer who claimed that the NSC was full of people who were inadequately loyal to Trump.
Instead of using the council to draw on input from a vast federal network of experts, Trump has leaned on a small group of close allies, such as national security adviser Marco Rubio and envoy Steve Witkoff, when debating strategy for the war. That has presented challenges for military planners, who were kept at arm’s length from pre-war discussions before being abruptly tasked with moving US assets to the Middle East, CNN has reported.
“There’s no doubt there were missed opportunities with a smaller NSC” ahead of Trump’s decision to attack Iran on February 28, one former Trump administration official told CNN.
The hollowing out of the NSC has altered US foreign policy at key moments of the wars in Iran and Ukraine while catering to Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip management style, four veterans of Trump’s second term said in interviews with CNN.
There are some benefits to a smaller NSC, including that it means there’s less bureaucracy to navigate when crises occur, two of the former officials said.
But a larger NSC could have helped Trump better coordinate with Gulf allies over Iran’s response to US military strikes and facilitated a more “thorough” discussion of Tehran’s willingness to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz, the former official said.
Instead, Trump told CNN in March the “biggest surprise” of the war was the ferocity with which Tehran hit Arab Gulf states with missile strikes. The administration also significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the strait, despite the military having war-gammed that exact scenario for years, CNN previously reported.
The NSC had a prime role in the deal the Obama administration reached, in 2015, to monitor Iran’s nuclear program. Robert Malley, a lead negotiator for the deal, also served as a senior NSC official. Nate Swanson, who was an Iran-focused State Department official at the time, said the NSC was “extremely involved” in shaping and implementing the deal and held numerous meetings on the subject.
“The NSC is more effective and responsive to the President’s priorities than ever before,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement.
“Any suggestion that all of the relevant entities – including the Department of War, Department of State, Department of Energy, Department of the Treasury, Central Intelligence Agency, and more – were not involved over the course of Operation Epic Fury and beyond is laughable,” Kelly added. “The President meets frequently with his national security team and listens to a variety of opinions on any given issue. Ultimately, he is the final decisionmaker.”
While key officials from agencies including the Departments of Energy and Treasury were present for some of the early planning meetings before the US attacked Iran, sources briefed on the meetings said, the agency analyses and forecasts that would have been integral elements of the decision-making process in past administrations were secondary considerations.
Sriprakash Kothari, whom Trump nominated to be assistant Treasury secretary for economic policy, told Senate staff that he was unaware of anyone at Treasury who conducted analysis or work related to energy markets before the US military operation against Iran, according to Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the finance committee.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Wyden the Treasury “relies on hundreds of career economic experts” and others to provide Bessent with advice. (Bessent did not specify whether those advisers did so in relation to the Iran war.)
“The cabinet departments can do a lot of the heavy lifting, but the distilling of complicated information at scale is what the NSC thrives at,” the former official said.
About a fifth of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran leveraged its closure to try to extract concessions from the US during negotiations to end the war. Trump announced a framework agreement between the the US and Iran Sunday ahead of a planned formal signing on Friday.
A lack of coordination across federal agencies was evident in the Pentagon’s early decision to prioritize attacks against Iranian military targets rather than dedicating assets to deterring Iran from attempting to close the strait, two sources familiar with the planning discussions at the time said.
While the US had significant military assets in the Middle East before the US attack on Iran, those assets weren’t suited for preventing Iran from closing the strait, one of the sources said.
“After bombs started falling, there is nothing else the carrier strike groups could have provided that would have changed the calculus on closure,” the source told CNN.
“Through a detailed planning process, the Department of War was prepared for any potential action taken by the Iranian regime,” said Kelly, the White House spokesperson. “Any suggestion otherwise is laughable.”
Since its inception, the NSC has periodically frustrated some Pentagon officials who have seen it as a power grab of their war-planning duties. That was true during the Biden administration, where the NSC staff numbered well over 300 people. But few presidents have taken a sledgehammer to the NSC the way Trump has. It was the Stephen Miller-led Homeland Security Council, a body created in the wake of 9/11 to deal with threats to the US homeland, that was the hub for drawing up plans for a post-Maduro Venezuela.
Swanson, who went on to serve as an Iran adviser at the NSC in the first Trump and Biden administrations, described the NSC in Trump’s first term as having one of the most rigorous schedules of any NSC he was aware of. That included a heavy cadence of meetings on Iran, Swanson said.
In the second Trump term, the administration appears to have “abandoned the process altogether,” he told CNN.
Swanson served on the State Department’s Iran negotiating team at the beginning of Trump’s second term until he was ousted after Loomer complained that he was an “Obama holdover.”
“This [NSC now] seems to be exclusively top-down decision making and fear of bringing bad news to the president,” Swanson said.
Before President George HW Bush ordered a US military response to Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Bush’s National Security Council held a flurry of meetings to debate the merits of miliary action.
Representatives from the Pentagon, spy agencies and the State and Treasury departments were all at the table, providing updates to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft or his deputies. State Department officials reported on their efforts to build what would become a coalition of dozens of countries to support military action against Hussein. Treasury officials reported on their work with foreign counterparts to enforce a blockade of Iraq and stabilize the oil market.
It was the sort of coordination that the council was designed to facilitate, in line with what Congress intended in 1947 when the NSC was created in the wake of Roosevelt’s prosecution of WWII.
The NSC was a way of forcing people from across the federal bureaucracy into a room to produce decision-making information for the president, and to track how those policies were executed, according to historian and former Pentagon speechwriter John Gans.
Policy experts take leave from various agencies to report to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House.
“The NSC was created because people were very scared during World War II that you had a president, who ended up dying in office, who was basically running a global war by the seat of his pants,” said Gans, whose book “White House Warriors” chronicles how presidents have used, and been used by, the NSC in times of war.
There are positives and negatives to having a robust NSC able to provide ample advice.
“A larger NSC can handle more topics simultaneously, but there’s also the danger of a bureaucracy believing it can make decisions that rightfully belong to the president,” the first former official said.
“This is not a traditional administration,” another former Trump official said. “The president and his top officials are the ones dictating policy, so it’s a top-down approach rather than bottom-up. It certainly is way more efficient this way.”
That former official argued that Trump was able to put together a plan to end the war in Gaza far more efficiently than if he had kept the NSC bureaucracy in place.
But in other cases, bureaucracy, or a single bureaucrat, has arguably still gotten in the way. At the start of Trump’s second term, nearly every NSC hiring decision had to go through Sergio Gor, then the head of the White House personnel office, according to a third former US official. As the war in Gaza raged, the NSC’s Middle East directorate had only a few people because Gor was blocking some new hires, the source said.
Since World War II, every American president has grown frustrated with the bureaucracy or press leaks and shrunk the size of their circle of advisers, according to Gans. Even President George HW Bush, who Gans called the “gold standard” for NSC management during the First Gulf War, “basically stopped” calling meetings of the formal council as the war progressed, Gans said.
One of the clearest signs of the NSC’s removal from the national security decision-making process came last July, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not inform the White House about his decision to pause weapons shipments to Ukraine. It was the second time in 2025 that Hegseth had decided to halt the flow of US weapons to Ukraine, catching senior national security officials off guard, CNN previously reported.
When a reporter asked during a Cabinet meeting who authorized halting the weapons shipment, Trump replied, “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”
“It’s kind of a miracle we haven’t seen more” public examples like that of the NSC being blindsided by big national security decisions, the third former official said.
CNN’s Arpita Dasika contributed to this report.