Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 6-1 – Neil N. Snyder – Tyranny of the Inbox: Managing the US National Security Agenda

Presidential management style, foreign policy preferences, and domestic political interests all affect the national security agenda. International crises, however, are particularly likely to garner the attention of the National Security Council. This podcast analyzes a novel data set of all the issues raised at National Security Council meetings from 1947 to 1993 and finds that contemporaneous crises are very likely to be discussed, but that crisis management attenuates the Council’s attention to noncrisis national security matters. The results suggest presidents focus on crises at the expense of other strategic matters, and they do so when political conditions favor crisis management.

Keywords: national security, presidency, international crises, political science, strategic studies

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You are listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I’m in the studio with Colonel Neil Snyder, author of “Tyranny of the Inbox: Managing the US National Security Agenda,” which was published in the Spring 2025 issue of Parameters.

Snyder is an assistant professor in the Department of National Security Strategy at the US Army War College.

Let’s just go ahead and get started. You describe in your article how international crises dominate presidential attention, often at the expense of broader strategic issues. What are the long-term risks of this crisis-driven focus for US national security planning?

Colonel Neil Snyder

 If I could, maybe I’ll back up and just kind of start with my intuition and my curiosity and why I was doing this research at all.

And, it’s something that my guess is that many of the Parameters readers and [Decisive Point] listeners will relate to, which is the simple intuition that crises can dominate your life. When you are attending to crises, it seems to crowd out all of your other priorities, and I think leaders have this natural intuition whereby when you’re stating priorities, you’re actually talking about the things that . . . It’s a choice. You’re stating which you’re not going to do, what you’re going to defer or just table completely. And, I had this abiding curiosity of whether or not that was happening to us in the national security and strategy realm, too.

It’s kind of like this tyranny of the inbox where, maybe how you and I might manage our e-mail, where if you just answer every e-mail that comes in, in the order in which it comes in, it’s not exactly a dominant strategy for managing your e-mail, right? You’re not choosing to spend your time on those important messages—the ones from family or the ones about your bank accounts or something that might matter the most. You’re just sort of managing the flow that comes in. That tyranny of the inbox can happen two ways—[by] attending to the things that are unimportant or, alternatively, focusing on only the most urgent thing that popped into your inbox at the expense of everything else that might matter to you.

Eisenhower had this concept of Eisenhower’s window [The Eisenhower Matrix]. I’m sure many of the readers have seen it, where it’s this matrix, a two by two of the urgent versus the important. And, I kind of had this intuition that, in the national security world, we focus almost exclusively on the things that are urgent and important to the expense of those things that are important but not urgent.

And, I wondered whether that was actually true or not. So, my curiosity started [not] with a question of whether or not [but] how the US relates to the world. And how we manage national security is affected by a kind of crisis myopia by which we are exclusively attentive to national security [issues] that are urgent. And so, it’s a matter of almost strategic discipline, which is a phrase, a term of art, that we hear a lot now, which is to say, do we have the discipline to attend to a broad range of topics, to have a breadth of our national security agenda, or do we sacrifice that breadth to attend to crises?

And it’s a dilemma—like, we can’t not deal with crises—that’s the nature of a crisis. It’s urgent. It’s a high stakes, [and includes] high risk of use of military force. How do you not deal with that? And that, I see, as a kind of persistent problem. And so, my research is on the presidency. I look at all the presidential national security meetings from 1947 to 1993, the entirety of the Cold War, using primary-source records. And I looked at the post–National Security Council (NSC) meeting accounts of what topics they looked at—so, issues or topics that actually got [a] president’s attention in formal meetings of the NSC. And I looked for patterns, and I used a kind of algorithmic, computational text analysis to figure out whether or not those topics dealt with contemporaneous crises—things that were happening at that time—or other national security issues.

And, I had a few expectations. One is, I thought style would matter, that presidents would vary. You know, Johnson did his Tuesday lunch clubs, whereas Eisenhower had large numbers of very formal NSC meetings. And Nixon was different. He chose to centralize things with Kissinger. And Reagan was certainly different. So, style matters. Every president would likely have different policy views and preferences and preference for either formal meetings or not, and that would determine whether or not they held meetings at all and whether or not they were attending to crises a lot when they did so.

The second expectation I had was that conditions kind of matter. So, I had previously written a piece, in an academic journal called Presidential Studies Quarterly, which basically showed that NSC meetings become more likely during crisis periods. And so, not only do crises drive attention to national security, generally, because of linked threats, [for example] a crisis in the East might have impacts on security interests elsewhere because of forced trade-offs and these kinds of things. You know, the conditions themselves could drive interest in national security, but the problem with it is that those conditions that cause presidents to pay attention to things can invoke the threat of opportunity costs that, just by taking on an issue, it may trigger public opposition, congressional opposition, Congress may have partisan differences or policy differences with the president over an issue, or perhaps, alternatively, may simply use the opportunity of a president taking on an issue to take the opposite position for horse trading.

And so, you know, when presidents are choosing whether to answer that e-mail in the inbox or not, what they’re actually doing is choosing whether to take resources on or to use resources to take on an issue and potentially overcome congressional opposition. And so, what are the risks, you ask, like, what are the long-term risks of a crisis-driven focus for US national security planning?

Well, if we come back to [a] president’s logic about why they would take things on, they have incentives to deal with crises because it’s a chance for policy gains or political gains, potentially, but also, it comes with a cost. And so, that calculus in my data seems to suggest that presidents are particularly likely to take on crises, and that when they do so, they pay less attention to all other topics.

The president is the most powerful person in the world [and] has a massive range of national security issues that presidents deal with. The challenge of that is that when you focus on one thing, the Ukraine today, the Taiwan today, the Gaza today, you’re not doing the other things. And so, the risk is agenda breadth. The long view tends to suffer.

We tend to get crisis myopia, and it’s a question of how this gets extrapolated over time. In an era when crises are particularly prevalent, what we likely see is that attention to all other things drops off, and that compounds over time as crises last longer and become more frequent, which really reduces our strategic breadth. That’s concerning. It’s concerning for me when I can’t manage my e-mail, and it should be concerning for everybody else who would want our national security system to have a really broad view—because Americans have lots of interests.

Host

How do domestic political dynamics shape the way presidents prioritize national security issues? How about an example for the audience?

Snyder

I’m a social scientist by training. My work isn’t commentary. It’s certainly not a commentary on partisan positions or polarization or anything like that in a contemporary environment. And I’m speaking to data from the Cold War. So, it’s largely retrospective. But what my take is, is that I focus on institutions and incentives. Kind of the way I was describing it earlier is that when presidents make a choice to chart an agenda, they’re taking on issues, and the simple choice of taking on issues is also the choice to take on opposition or to take on the resource costs necessary to either drum up public support for an issue or drum up elite support for an issue or overcome elite opposition to an issue.

You ask, like, what is the domestic political dimension that’s affecting this? Well, my view is that the domestic and the foreign are not separate [and] that [a] president’s decision making is conditional both on international conditions (like crises) and also on the array of partisan forces through our institutions—be that in Congress, in the House and Senate, or [in] the potential for bureaucratic opposition within the executive branch agencies, which has its own kind of bureaucratic domestic politics. The institutions, the separation of power system, the shared power system between Congress and the presidency for certain national security instruments, creates these incentives for political actors on different sides to force negotiations. And those negotiations affect [a] president’s calculus of whether to take on certain issues, and that’s absolutely what the data bears out, that we see attentiveness to crises varies with whether or not the president’s co-partisans are in control of Congress.

So, we can think about it in simple terms. If my friends are in charge over in Congress, they’re probably not going to vote against me, and they probably have policy preferences that are like mine.

So, if I’m considering whether to take on an issue that I have beliefs about, I’m going to feel safer doing it knowing that the costs are going to be less if my friends are in charge. Whereas, if it’s [a] divided government where the opposition owns or has control of all or part of Congress, then you’re going to see substantial difference where they may be less likely to do things.

Host

Do you have an example that you can give us?

Snyder

I like to draw back to good historical examples. The one I use in the paper is [President Harry S.] Truman. President Truman ends World War II. We think of him as a great president. He assumed office after [Franklin D. Roosevelt’s] death. You know, he’s the one and only person in human history to have employed nuclear weapons to end a war. [He was], like, this great president.

Well, by 1948, things were not going well for him. So, [in] the spring of ’48, he’s got his partisan opposition in control of Congress—the Republicans. He was a Democrat. The Republicans had control of Congress. His approval ratings in the spring of ’48 were super low. They were below 40 percent for the whole of the spring. His party was going to force him to a convention to get the party nomination for his reelection in the fall of ’48, so he knew that, come June, July of ’48, he was going to have to drum up party support to stay in office.

He was in this very precarious position at home, where his attention was, by some accounts, focused on his own political fortunes and not getting voted out of office as this great president who won World War II.

Then there’s the Soviets. The dawn of the Cold War. There was a conflict, [a] competition, over what would happen with Berlin. And, in June of ’48, the Soviets blockaded Berlin and, eventually, we had the Berlin Airlift and all of these things that everybody knows about [like] American pilots bravely dropping candy to kids over Berlin. Well, the question is, how did Truman deal with the situation? That crisis seized the government. I mean, we considered a forcible ground option to penetrate Soviet defenses and retake Berlin, like, essentially reopening World War II—the endgame of World War II.

We considered nuclear strikes in the period of the crisis. Truman ends up holding something like 25 different National Security Council meetings on the issue, 16 of which, I believe, were about Berlin itself or related to Berlin. The question is, did his domestic weakness cause him to be more (or less) attentive?

In the article, I don’t call the case.

I’m using this case to stimulate curiosity because there seems to be a real intuition from Truman’s case that it probably did. In fact, [the] chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, the first chairman, Omar Bradley, in his retrospective memoir, essentially criticized the president for being too attentive to domestic politics instead of the crisis, which is a pretty damning indictment.

I’m interested in patterns like how did this play out over the entirety of the Cold War? And my intuition and the data [seem] to say that domestic politics really, really matters, which is striking. Like, you would think that we would attend to international crises because of the crisis and security stakes, not because of domestic politics. But that’s not what the data shows—that, in fact, presidents sometimes don’t take these things on simply because of the domestic political costs involved.

Host

Given the centrality of the National Security Council, what reforms or practices could help ensure the NSC maintains strategic breadth even during periods of intense crisis?

Snyder

I have more recent personal experience with the National Security Council in the last few years, but that’s not the topic of the research, and I’m certainly not commenting on current things, but I think there are some lessons.

Right?

So, what we see is that over the course of the Cold War, foreign policy and national security issues [became] increasingly centralized at the White House. And, in fact, this was by design. There was a debate after World War II about what presidents need to manage US security, now that the US was this leading global power. We equipped the president with the National Security Council, and that has multiple things that help the president maintain some breadth, thing one is the system itself. So, presidential meetings of the National Security Council are but one feature of what we call the Scowcroft [Model] for the NSC. So, you have presidential meetings, and you have principals’ meetings—which are the cabinet officials and the adviser—without the president present. You have deputy’s meetings. You have interagency policy coordinating committees and sub IPCs, and they’ve got different names, but all of those structures allow attention to national security matters, even with the president not in every meeting. Thing one—how do we get strategic depth is the system itself is fairly resilient.

Thing, two, is the NSC staff. Now, the staff size is varied—and it sometimes includes lots of professionals—sometimes lots of detailees from the departments and agencies. That system ensures that the president has access to experts who have topical focus areas and [that] they're maintaining the work on that portfolio throughout the administration.

And the third part is the WHSR, the White House Situation Room, the nerve center for the NSC with communications and access to intelligence and information to inform decision making and figure out what issues ought to surface.

These structural features have really evolved over time. And, you know, today what you see is that these structures allow the NSC to have a lot of breadth, bearing in mind that the limiting factor is that there’s only one president. If there are certain hard issues that [are] truly urgent and important that need to go to the president for direction or decision, there can only be one, so to speak. And so, that is a chokepoint. And that is a feature of the system by design. The president can only do so many things.

Host

You mention that inattention to non-crisis issues may contribute to strategic decline. Can you give us some examples where deferred issues later escalated into crises, and maybe how better agenda management might have changed outcomes?

Snyder

 In the paper, from a pure science perspective and in terms of methodology, I’m applying a method of looking at the topics that are raised over time. And so, it’s really, really difficult to draw the different continuities between different kinds of topics. And so, it’s difficult to know whether there’s a shadow cast forward or cast after crisis periods, which is to say, social scientists will struggle to know whether or not inattention or attention today—because the US is so powerful and has so many capabilities—might prompt crises later, or not.

So, in fact, there’s a problem of endogeneity and the rigorous way of saying it where, like, “what I do today might affect whether or not there’s a crisis that I have to attend to later, which might lead to crisis myopia later (or not),” and that’s difficult to untangle. And, I’m careful in the article to recognize the limits of what the data can tell us.

And so, I don’t want to extrapolate beyond my support, too much, but what I will comment on is that the NSC deals with a massive range of issues. For example, today, it might be about space policy or cyber biotechnology, quantum computing, general artificial intelligence, or all kinds of other issues that can get securitized or brought into the national security domain when any of the world's issues could be the president’s issues and could get on the table. Then certain crises—like an ongoing war, Arab-Israeli conflict in the ’60s and ’70s, [and the] ’50s, crises over the Taiwan Strait—when those things demand attention in the immediate, what happens, and what you see in the data, is that those topics take on a certain weight, a certain frequency of attention during the crisis, and then, after. There’s this lagged effect. And, in general, NSCs only deal with so many topics per meeting, they can only cover so much, and these are complex, thorny issues, and the NSC is a forum for deliberation. These are hard topics.

What we see is that when we attend to crises, there’s this current and then downstream effect. And, I’ve looked at this several different ways. I’ve looked at it through the lens of meetings themselves, which is what the paper is about. I’ve also looked at it through national security directives to see if the types of guidance that [come] out of the NSC to the government drops off about certain topics after a crisis, and the answer is there’s some evidence that it does.

Essentially, these crises cause a massive drop off across everything that's noncrisis. And so, you asked, “Can you give an example of a particular issue that's deferred?” My answer is actually that it’s not a particular issue. It’s all the issues that get deferred. That becomes the all-consuming challenge that we should be worried about. That, when all things that I should be paying attention to, I don’t, well, we have a problem. That’s the problem with strategic breadth that I’m talking about—I mean, agenda breadth, the scope of things that we could look at as the most prosperous, secure, powerful country in the world. We have a big agenda, and we should. And the question is, how do we manage that? And if we’re only managing today’s problems, are we living up to American’s expectations for what we should be doing to care for their security?

And, I have questions about that.

Host

In today’s environment of simultaneous crises—Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan—how can the United States walk and chew gum strategically?

Snyder

Going into my research, I had this intuition, and maybe it’s because I was inspired by some great historians that I’ve been mentored by over the years, that if there was going to be a one period of American history when we could look back and say the US had great strategic breadth and vision, I would have thought early Cold War, you know, [for example] Eisenhower, [and] the birth of the NSC. He was known for having used it very effectively.

And even during that period of time, you see crisis myopia, where the presidents get drawn into these things and can’t escape the dilemma of paying attention to the urgent and important at the expense of everything else. Today, crises are perhaps more prevalent. And if you believe that we are in a kind of a new multipolar world where balance-of-power strategies are becoming more prevalent, then [the] contemporary environment, along with media attention and the ability for the information environment to hype or kind of inflate risk perceptions in crisis conditions, I think that the dilemma is probably getting worse.

Our current conditions may exacerbate the idea of crisis myopia. And so, if I were to predict, and I’m not really, in the paper, speaking off the cuff, I think that we may see NSC processes that become increasingly affected by crisis myopia. So, increasing centralization to the White House plus this information environment plus domestic discord plus media creates all kinds of incentives for continued crisis myopia. And what might that mean? Well, sadly, it may mean that we may be entering into a period of continued or persistent crisis myopia where we’re not really able to look long, and that is going to have potentially negative consequences.

Host

So, maybe extending that thought a little bit, we do need to wrap it up. Do you have any concluding thoughts or takeaways?

Snyder

I think the obvious question is, like, how do you get out of the dilemma? And so, woe be it from me as just a lowly professor at the [US Army] War College, to try to, like, offer advice to presidents about how to solve this.

But I think, as a leader in the Army, I think to myself to remind leaders that taking on issues is a choice you’re making a choice. It should be a thoughtful, reasoned choice. And you ought to be careful about what you’re choosing to defer and how you delegate [and] who you empower to do other things so that many things can happen simultaneously.

And, I guess the last thing I would say, [is that] maybe we should extend our national security leaders some grace [and] be cognizant of the huge burden that they bear and that they’re facing these dilemmas. The weight of their responsibility is massive, and it likely takes a toll on them as people across the organization. And, maybe we should just give them some grace and recognize that there are these strong forces that condition them and that lead them to focus on crises and limit their worldview.

Host

What a great point to end on. Thank you.

Listeners, you can read the genesis article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 55, issue 1. For more Army War College podcasts, check out Conversations on Strategy, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.