THE MULTIPLE INFLUENCES ON U.S. FOREIGN POLICY-MAKING
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The decentralization of foreign policy-making in the United States "reflects the growth of the U.S. government and its increasing accessibility to outside interests," says Stephen Wayne, professor of government at Georgetown University and an expert on the American presidency. Foreign policy is being "debated and conducted for the most part by more people with substantive training and experience in foreign affairs from both the public and private sectors," he says. |
When people think of foreign policy-making in the United States, they usually think of the president. After all, presidents have been the chief architects and implementers of American foreign policy since the beginning of the republic. The framers of the U.S. Constitution were mindful of the advantages that the presidency brought to this endeavor: a hierarchical institution with a single head, the one institution that would be in continuous tenure, and the one that could act with the greatest "energy, dispatch, and responsibility," to quote James Wilson, one of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention.
But the framers also were fearful of arbitrary and irresponsible actions by a chief executive, such as the ones they attributed to King George III and cited as a cause of the American Revolution. To reduce the likelihood that a president might engage in activities that would be harmful to the national interest, the Constitution imposed checks on a range of executive powers, particularly those of war and peace. Treaties were subject to Senate ratification by a two-thirds vote, while executive appointments, including those of ambassadors, required concurrence by a majority of the Senate. Also vested in Congress was the authority to regulate foreign commerce; declare war; raise, maintain, and make rules for a standing army and navy; call up the militia, and appropriate money for the operations of government and conduct of foreign policy.
Divided powers require institutional cooperation to formulate public policy. That is why the framers sought to establish the Senate, the smaller of the two legislative houses, as an advisory body to assist the president in making foreign policy. Both the treaty-making and appointment provisions require the Senate's "advice and consent." However, when the country's first president, George Washington, tried to seek the Senate's advice on a treaty that his administration wished to negotiate with native peoples who lived in the western part of the state of Georgia, he found the Senate slow to respond and members' advice insipid at best. Instead of returning to the Senate for foreign policy recommendations, Washington turned instead to the principal heads of his executive departments, a group James Madison termed the president's cabinet. The term stuck, and so did the practice of using the cabinet as an advisory body for foreign and domestic affairs.
Beginning with Washington, presidents became the chief foreign policy-makers and their secretaries of state their principal advisers and administrators for that policy. The Senate continued to ratify treaties, but presidents rarely sought its institutional advice. Nonetheless, about 70 percent of the treaties they submitted to the Senate gained ratification with little or no modification.
Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, presidents dominated the foreign policy-making process. They received ambassadors, recognized countries, and entered into agreements, short of formal treaties, with their executive counterparts in other countries. As commanders in chief, presidents also positioned armed forces to defend American lives and interests. President Thomas Jefferson ordered the Navy and Marines to retaliate against the Barbary pirates, who threatened American shipping. President James Polk directed the Army into disputed territory with Mexico to reinforce what Texans considered to be their rightful border. President Abraham Lincoln called up the militia and instituted a blockade of the South. Congress could have opposed these presidential actions but chose not to do so. When a policy was unsuccessful, however, members of Congress felt free to condemn it, as they often did. Only in the areas of trade and tariffs did Congress play an active policy-setting role.
The country's involvement in the international arena began to expand at the beginning of the 20th century during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Both presidents designed new international initiatives for the United States, and both used their "bully pulpits" to try to rally public support for them. Roosevelt succeeded in obtaining approval to build the Panama Canal, but Wilson failed to obtain ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, and for U.S. participation in the League of Nations.
Nonetheless, a broad presidential prerogative in foreign affairs had been firmly established. In 1936 the Supreme Court acknowledged this prerogative in the case of The United States vs. Curtiss-Wright Corporation, ruling that the president possessed implied and inherent constitutional authority to conduct foreign affairs, whereas in the domestic sphere the policy-making responsibilities were clearly vested in the Congress.
The distinction between foreign and domestic policy-making continued for another three decades. The United States' entry into World War II, followed by the Cold War, led to and continued a crisis atmosphere which encouraged Congress to follow the president's lead. During this period, politics was said to stop at the water's edge. Bipartisan cooperation characterized foreign policy-making until the end of the 1960s.
The Vietnam War put an end to this institutional and partisan cooperation. Angered by false and misleading statements and promises made by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, disillusioned by the loss of American lives and the deepening military involvement, and moved by increasing criticism at home, Congress resisted presidential policy that prolonged and expanded the war. In 1971, legislation was enacted to restrict the use of government money to extend the war into neighboring Southeast Asian countries; two years later Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over President Nixon's veto to give the House and the Senate a larger voice in the decision to go to war. During the 1980s, Congress also limited the president's expenditure of funds, this time in Central America. It was the violation of this policy by officials of the Reagan administration that led to the Iran-Contra scandal involving the sale of arms to Iran and diversion of profits from the sale to the Contras in Nicaragua, and resulted in criminal charges being brought against two national security aides who broke the law.
The increased involvement of Congress in foreign policy-making was more than simply a reaction to the unpopular Vietnam War, however. Changes within the institutional, political, and informational environments also were responsible for expanding interest in foreign policy matters, the pool of foreign policy participants, and sources of information and expertise needed to make foreign policy judgments.
The institutional changes decentralized power. In Congress, the committee system, dominated by the senior members of the party that controlled the legislative body, was deemed too autocratic and exclusionary by younger and newly elected members of Congress who were anxious to get into the action. In 1974 they staged a mini-revolution to reduce the power of committee chairs and disperse it to rank-and-file members. A standing subcommittee system was established in which each subcommittee was headed by a different representative of the majority party. Not only were more members of Congress involved in foreign policy-making, but a much larger congressional staff system, needed to support this committee expansion, also was created. The staff provided Congress with the information and expertise it needed to legislate, and for which it had been previously dependent on the executive branch, thereby increasing the legislature's ability to act on its own.
Executive branch activities expanded as well. U.S. entry into World War II and subsequent developments during the Cold War led to greater responsibilities for the State and Defense Departments. In addition, separate aid and information agencies were created (although the U.S. Information Agency has recently been incorporated into the State Department), new intelligence agencies were established, and an Energy Department came into being, in part to oversee the growing number of atomic and nuclear programs and facilities. Today, all of the executive departments have divisions that deal with the international aspects of their missions. To coordinate and monitor these efforts, presidents have expanded their own Executive Office. They have created a trade office to negotiate agreements, established economic and national security policy councils to proffer and coordinate advice, and used the Office of Management and Budget to oversee policy-making and implementation.
In addition to the institutional reforms, divided partisan control of government contributed to the closer scrutiny that Congress gave to presidential foreign policy initiatives and matters of implementation. The party that controlled one or both houses of Congress, but not the White House, gained political advantage from investigating irregularities, mismanagement, and failures in the conduct of foreign policy by the executive branch. These investigations included the failed rescue attempt of American diplomats held hostage in Iran during the Carter administration, the sale of arms to Iran and diversion of profits from the sale to the Contras in Nicaragua (the Reagan administration), U.S. inaction in the failed coup attempt in Panama (the Bush administration), and the loss of American lives during the humanitarian mission in Somalia and the sale of satellite missile technology to China (the Clinton administration). Naturally the news media highlighted these investigations, giving members of Congress, particularly those of the opposition party, the publicity they desired.
A more investigatory and negative press also reported more and in greater depth on executive implementation problems, policy disagreements within the administration and between it and Congress, and issues that generated international conflict and domestic discord. Moreover, technological changes within the communications media have forced more and more decision-making into the public arena and media spotlight, thereby shortening time frames for decisions and making quiet compromise more difficult.
Other political developments have had an equally profound impact on the greater openness and accessibility of foreign policy-making. Single issue interest groups have proliferated, professionalized, and now regularly promote their policy goals within the legislative and executive arenas. The explosion of group activity has been particularly evident in the foreign policy realm, which had been relatively free of strong, broad-based group pressures. Add to these multiple and increasingly powerful organizations a much larger pool of academic and policy experts in foreign and military affairs who go in and out of government and who also represent many international interests, and one sees how much more open, accessible, and prominent the foreign policy arena has become in the United States. Today most multinational companies, some large foreign-owned companies, and even foreign governments hire Americans with legislative and executive experience and "contacts" to represent them on pending issues in which they have an interest.
The involvement of so many people and groups has helped obliterate the distinction between domestic and foreign policy. In fact, a new word, "intermestic" is now used to describe policy that impacts on both international and domestic issues.
Although the president remains the principal initiator of American foreign policy, there are now more relevant players, more issues, and more pressures. Foreign policy has become more people's business, debated and conducted for the most part by more people with substantive training and experience in foreign affairs from both the public and private sectors. Nor does politics stop at the water's edge as it used to. Today partisan and institutional politics pervade practically all aspects of foreign policy-making.
This decentralization of foreign policy-making in the United States reflects the growth of the U.S. government and its increasing accessibility to outside interests. It also testifies to America's expanding international concerns, to the interdependency of world economies, the growth of political and cultural internationalism, and the overlapping of social interests from human rights to the environment, from nutrition and health to child labor, from the Internet to genetic engineering and hormonal research. The world has gotten smaller and more complex. The distinction between foreign and domestic as well as the one between national and international has become blurred. As a consequence, the pressures and players have multiplied as has the politics.