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