"The new partisanship in foreign affairs reflects deep currents in American society that will shape the politics of U.S. foreign policy for years to come," says James Lindsay, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Director for Global Issues and Multilateral Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. The rise of this new partisanship, in the author's view, "has created a paradox: the United States enjoys unparalleled power on the world stage, but presidents are finding it harder to mobilize support for their foreign policies."

Americans cherish the idea that partisan politics should stop at the water's edge. But in practice, bipartisanship has become a scarce commodity in American foreign policy. Democrats and Republicans regularly squabble over what the United States should do abroad, and the congressional wings of both parties seem less and less inclined to defer to whoever sits in the Oval Office. Indeed, rather than ushering in a new era of harmony, the end of the Cold War seems only to have fueled disagreement.

This partisan rancor has left many nostalgic for a return to what President Bill Clinton has called "the great tradition of Harry Truman and Arthur Vandenberg -- a tradition...that casts aside partisanship and brings together Republicans and Democrats for the good of the American people and the world." But anyone hoping that the next president will be able to restore a bipartisan foreign policy will be disappointed. The new partisanship in foreign affairs reflects deep currents in American society that will shape the politics of U.S. foreign policy for years to come.

From Partisanship to Bipartisanship

Bipartisanship is not the natural state of affairs in American foreign policy. The reason is simple -- Americans disagree about what constitutes their interests overseas and how best to achieve them. More often than not, these differences have fallen along party lines.

Consider one of America's most contentious foreign policy debates of the 20th century, the Senate's rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. While World War I was being fought, Democrats and Republicans put aside their differences and formed a united political front (something seen in almost all of America's wars). But just a month before the war ended and on the eve of the 1918 midterm congressional elections, President Woodrow Wilson stuck a stick in a wasp's nest by urging his fellow Americans to reelect a Democratic Congress. A vote for Republicans, he argued, would undercut his ability to fashion a just and lasting peace.

The public disregarded Wilson's advice, and the Democrats lost control of Congress. Not surprisingly, the new Republican majority came to Washington with little interest in rallying around the president. It wanted payback, and the Treaty of Versailles provided the target. While nearly all Senate Democrats supported the treaty, their Republican counterparts buried Wilson's beloved Covenant.

The bitterness of the debate over the Treaty of Versailles and the suspicion that the treaty's defeat had helped pave the road to World War II facilitated the rise of bipartisanship after World War II. In the first few years after the war, Democrats led by President Truman and Republicans led by Senator Vandenberg, the former isolationist turned internationalist who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, cooperated on historic pieces of legislation such as the UN Charter, the Marshall Plan, and the NATO Treaty. The bipartisan tradition that Truman and Vandenberg established grew stronger in the 1950s under President Dwight Eisenhower. By the early 1960s, Democrats and Republicans were nearly unanimous in supporting freer trade, high levels of defense spending, and most important, military intervention in Vietnam.

This is not to say that partisan conflict over foreign policy disappeared in the first two decades after World War II. Democrats and Republicans found things to bicker over, especially U.S. policy toward China. Still, these disagreements paled in comparison to a level of bipartisan cooperation that, looking back decades later, is remarkable. No speaker of the House today would respond to a president from the other party who requested congressional authorization to use military force by saying that "if the President had done what is proposed here without consulting Congress he would have had no criticism from me." But Sam Rayburn (Democrat of Texas) said precisely that when Eisenhower asked Congress in 1955 to authorize him to use U.S. forces to protect Taiwan from attack.

Things Fall Apart

Vietnam rocked the bipartisan tradition. The war split the country and the two parties as well. The Republican Party, once the stronghold of isolationism, held firm to a muscular form of internationalism. Republicans argued that the Soviet Union was overtaking the United States, called for spending more on defense, and continued to uphold the banner of freer trade.

Democrats, meanwhile, moved in the opposite direction. The party that had once embraced President John F. Kennedy's pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" to assure the survival of liberty became skeptical of foreign entanglements. Democrats argued that most third-world conflicts had nothing to do with Moscow, embraced the idea of detente with the Soviet Union, and moved away from their support for freer trade.

Yet even as foreign policy issues increasingly came to divide Republicans and Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s, the legacy of bipartisanship continued to hold sway. Although Vietnam destroyed the knee-jerk willingness of Congress to support the president, congressional deference survived (albeit tattered) well into the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan's great ally in fights over arms control, aid to the contras in Nicaragua, and other foreign policy issues was the reluctance of moderate Democrats to hand him a foreign policy defeat. That caution stemmed partly from political calculations - they feared being blamed for playing politics with national security - but also from the belief that publicly rebuffing a president would harm the country's long-term interests abroad.

Such fears largely disappeared with the end of the Cold War, and as a result, the tattered bipartisanship of the 1980s gave way to a new partisanship. The change in the politics of American foreign policy is evident in the enmity congressional Republicans have displayed toward Bill Clinton. Senator James Inhofe (Republican of Oklahoma) spoke for many in his party when he called Clinton "unquestionably the worst Commander in Chief in the history of America." And Republicans have seldom missed the opportunity to torment their nemesis. During the Kosovo conflict, congressional Republicans sharply criticized Bill Clinton both before the conflict and during it. The House went so far as to refuse to vote to support the bombing. Not to be outdone, the Senate brought back memories of the Treaty of Versailles by voting down the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), even though President Clinton and 62 senators asked that the vote be postponed in order to avoid damaging America's reputation overseas. Both these episodes broke with past practice. When Congress sought to wrest control of foreign policy from the president on issues such as Vietnam and the MX missile, it had vocal public support. On Kosovo and CTBT, Republicans challenged Clinton even though most Americans backed his positions.

To be fair, the temptation to use foreign policy for partisan gain is hardly restricted to members of Congress or Republicans. The potential for domestic political gain apparently drove many of President Clinton's foreign policies, including the decisions to expand NATO and to push for a National Missile Defense. And Senator Joseph Biden (Democrat of Delaware) was simply being more honest than most when he acknowledged that Democrats believed that the CTBT's defeat would help them at the polls: "(Republican Senator) Bill Roth says he will vote against the treaty. Bingo! That's $200,000 worth of ads" against his reelection.

What accounts for the new partisanship? It is tempting to blame it all on Clinton's polarizing personality, but, in fact, it reflects several deeper causes. One is that the United States no longer faces a looming threat. With the demise of the Soviet Union, there is now greater room for legitimate disagreement on the means and ends of U.S. foreign policy. And because the Democrats and Republicans represent different constituencies with different interests, it is hardly surprising that they see the world differently.

A second cause is generational change. Elements of the old bipartisan ethic survived into the 1980s because so many members of Congress were a product of that tradition. But by the 1990s these legislators began to retire from politics. Today, 45 percent of senators and 61 percent of representatives first took office after 1992. (The numbers will be even higher after the November elections.) These new members have known only the fractious politics of the new partisanship. Resurrecting old norms that members of Congress should defer to presidential leadership and leave politics at the water's edge will hardly be easy.

The third and most important cause of the new partisanship ironically is foreign policy's fading political importance. The American public's interest in foreign affairs, which was fairly high during the Cold War, plummeted during the 1990s. Americans concluded that their country's unparalleled power means they have little at stake abroad. With the public now absorbed with domestic politics, the inhibition against using foreign policy to score political points has broken down. Politicians find that they can energize their core supporters by demonizing opponents and exaggerating policy differences without alienating the more numerous moderate voters. In short, foreign policy has become -- to paraphrase German military strategist Karl von Clausewitz -- the continuation of domestic politics by other means. And as academics have long known, the lower the stakes, the pettier the politics.

The Paradox of Post-Cold War Internationalism

The rise of the new partisanship has created a paradox: the United States enjoys unparalleled power on the world stage, but presidents are finding it harder to mobilize support for their foreign policies. They can no longer assume that Congress and the public will follow their lead. Clinton triumphed on issues such as enlarging NATO, ending the war in Bosnia, and securing Senate approval of the Chemical Weapons Convention only after he committed the full powers of his office to building bipartisan support in Congress. Even then, the margins of victory were slim. On other issues, ranging from China policy to trade policy to global warming, Clinton saw his initiatives fall victim to partisan squabbling on the Hill.

Can the next administration restore the old spirit of bipartisanship? Probably not. The tradition of Truman and Vandenberg rested on a consensus about America's role in the world; Vietnam shook that consensus and the end of the Cold War buried it. A renewed threat to American security might force Americans to reach agreement on the means and ends of American foreign policy in the 21st century, but no adversary equivalent to the Soviet Union is on the horizon.

A national debate might also produce a new foreign policy; ideally, that is a purpose elections can serve. But foreign policy has been largely an afterthought in the 2000 presidential campaign. Vice President Al Gore didn't outline his foreign policy platform until April 2000, after the primaries were over, and he devoted only four sparse paragraphs to the topic in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. Governor George W. Bush has attacked the Clinton administration for letting military readiness decline and for failing to pursue missile defense more aggressively. Otherwise, his foreign policy comments have been long on rhetoric and short on substance.

Gore and Bush have tread lightly on foreign policy partly because, putting their rhetorical differences aside, they agree on the basic outlines of America's role in the world. Both are internationalists at odds with the neo-isolationists within their own parties. But the more important reason why neither has made foreign policy a focal point of his campaign is the same one behind the new partisanship: public apathy about foreign affairs. Presidential candidates naturally gravitate toward issues that ordinary Americans care about. Today, that means prescription drug benefits for seniors and not U.S. policy toward Russia.

So whoever takes the oath of office next January can expect more of the partisanship that buffeted the Clinton administration. Whether this is for good or for ill lies in the eye of the beholder. Bipartisanship on behalf of an imprudent policy can be folly, just as partisanship on behalf of a just cause can be wise. What is clear is that politics will not stop at the water's edge simply because presidents plead for it. American foreign policy will return to the tradition of Truman and Vandenberg only when the American public demands it.

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