Mounting Crises Raise Questions on Obama Team’s Ability to Cope - NYTimes.com

Mounting Crises Raise Questions on Obama Team’s Ability to Cope - NYTimes.com: One day this month, as the nation shuddered with fears of an Ebola outbreak and as American warplanes pounded Sunni militants in Syria, President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, invited a group of foreign policy experts to the White House Situation Room to hear their assessment of how the administration was performing.

She was peppered with critiques of the president’s Syria and China policies, as well as the White House’s repeated delays in releasing a national security strategy, a congressionally mandated document that sets out foreign policy goals. On that last point, Ms. Rice had a sardonic reply.

“If we had put it out in February or April or July,” she said, according to two people who were in the room, “it would have been overtaken by events two weeks later, in any one of those months.”

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