Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Marion David Boyes Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S.

Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the third episode in a special

presidential transition series on the President's Inbox. From now until inauguration day,

I am sitting down with experts to unpack who will staff the Donald Trump

administration and how it will likely approach the many foreign policy challenges it faces.

This week's topic is Trump's picks for national security positions.

With me to discuss the people that President-elect Trump has so far named to foreign policy in national security posts in his second administration is Chris Tuttle.

Chris is a senior fellow here at the council, where his work focuses

on the politics and processes behind U.S. foreign policy. Before his current stint at CFR,

Chris served as the policy director of the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign

Relations under its chairman, Republican Senator Bob Corker.

Chris has also held positions in the U.S. State Department and in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Chris, thank you for coming back on the president's inbox.

Always great to be here, Jim. Thanks.

So Chris, President-elect Trump made a number of appointments or nominations over the last week.

Give me your overall assessment of the team he is assembling in the foreign policy national security field.

Sure. First, I think it's important to point out that even more so than other administrations,

Trump is going to run his own foreign policy. The advisors can tell us a few things about where things might go, but where I'm

going for where I think foreign policy is likely to head is directly to the primary source,

which is Donald Trump. And I think that if the past can serve as a guide to us,

that Trump is going to run his own foreign policy and that advisors are going to have limited

capability to actually steer policy beyond what the president might like. So what we have

...