Politically, it would be difficult to return the job’s focus to foreign affairs, as the Constitution intended. But it would do the nation a lot of good.
Politically, it would be difficult to return the job's focus to foreign affairs, as the Constitution intended. But it would do the nation a lot of good.
T he American presidency is a deeply weird job: The president’s legitimate constitutional powers and his fundamental responsibilities have overwhelmingly to do with foreign affairs and national security, but almost all the political juice is in domestic events shaped mainly by Congress and other forces beyond his control, such as economic cycles. Presidential politics are governed by a perverse Pareto Principle: 80 percent of a president’s career depends on concerns that should take up, at most, about 20 percent of his resources, including his mental resources and his time.
As Daniel L. Byman and Jeremy Shapiro put it in Foreign Policy, “Promoting economic growth has been the top priority of every White House since the invention of macroeconomic statistics.” But contra the confidence of presidential advisers such as my friend Larry Kudlow, there is relatively little presidents can do that directly affects economic growth, employment, wages, and such in the near term. The economy certainly responds to changes in both taxing and spending, but the president himself cannot effect such changes: He can only advocate them and hope Congress will act.
Congress, thankfully, often declines to do so.
Yet we still talk about the “Reagan deficits” and the “Clinton surplus” instead of the Tip O’Neill deficits and the Newt Gingrich surplus, which would be more accurate. Some sober-minded Chamber of Commerce–type conservatives privately confess that their preferred configuration of power in Washington is one that pits a weak Democratic president against a Republican Congress that hates him. In the other four major configurations — Democratic president and Democratic Congress, Republican president and Republican Congress, Republican president and Democratic Congress, divided Congress — the political energies supporting government expansion overpower the modest forces of restraint, which are weak in the best of times. Americans say they dread gridlock, but they vote for it.
Even the economic levers that are within the president’s reach typically produce results that are unintended, unpredictable, and comprehensible only in retrospect. When the Reagan administration oversaw reforms to FCC regulations touching low-power radio transmitters, no one foresaw how central Wi-fi and Wi-fi-enabled devices would come to be 20 years down the road. The federal initiatives that contributed to the millennial housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis had their roots in the 1930s. All those $10,000 toilet seats you hear about the Pentagon’s buying are the unintended result of federal procurement procedures, many of them intended to prevent waste and inefficiency.
Unintended results rule the day economically. If there were some policy formula by which we could achieve strong, predictable growth with rising wages and stable prices, then you can be sure that implementing such a formula would be at the top of every president’s agenda: No president would choose a recession, a financial crisis, or a stock-market crash. But a thriving economy isn’t something you can put together like a jigsaw puzzle. It is more like a delicate flower you try to cultivate.
By way of contrast, the president has a great deal of real, direct constitutional power when it comes to foreign policy. His power is not fully plenipotentiary — treaties have to be ratified, trade accords require legislation to implement them, Congress may authorize or decline to authorize military force or entangle him in purse-strings, etc. — but it is both expansive and invested in him personally. And though this is not always obvious, it has applications other than war-making. You would think that would be attractive. But the realities of democratic politics draw the president’s attention in other directions.
Might the presidency be drawn back? It would be difficult, but the payoff would be great. Rather than the national-chieftain model of the presidency we have today, we could have one that is focused on administrative competence and faithful execution of the law at home and securing U.S. interests abroad, which would be a great improvement — sparing us a god-emperor and, with any luck, giving us a better-functioning administration.
Unhappily, there remains that mismatch between the politics of the job and the duties of the job. During my lifetime, the only two presidents to have come into office with considerable appetite and vision for foreign affairs were the Californians — Richard Nixon, who sought a rebalancing of power in the Cold War, and Ronald Reagan, who was determined to win it. (And did, which ought to matter more than it seems to.) George H. W. Bush hoped to quietly enjoy a peace dividend and cultivate his “thousand points of light,” but Saddam Hussein had other plans; the second President Bush wanted to be an education reformer but found himself instead at war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and then with Saddam Hussein again. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both sniffed at Republican military adventures abroad and insisted on “nation-building at home,” and both would have preferred to have presidencies occupied by repairing potholes in Poughkeepsie and handing out free false teeth. Donald Trump had a vague conviction that the United States was being drained to no purpose by its overseas commitments and ran to the pacifist side of that infamous warmonger Hillary Rodham Clinton but lacked any real positive program. Joe Biden’s agenda, so far, is pretending to undo what Trump did, and so he broadcasts conventional diplomatic noises across the Atlantic while maintaining Trump’s trade protectionism and executing Trump’s military retreat.
One of the things that will make it difficult to reorient the presidency toward foreign affairs is that our presidential politics naturally selects figures with primarily domestic portfolios: senators, governors, the occasional big-city mayor. The Republican foreign-policy bench has been pretty deep at times, but its leading figures either were uninterested in pursuing the presidency or politically unable to do so. We would have been better off with a President Condoleezza Rice or a President Colin Powell than we were with President Donald Trump. James Baker might have made a good president if circumstances had permitted it. On the Democratic side, Madeleine Albright, who actually did the job of secretary of state, probably would have been a better president than would have Hillary Rodham Clinton, who pretended to do that job. (The great tragedy of the 2016 contest between Mrs. Clinton and Donald Trump was that it was an election for president rather than an election for mayor of New York City, a job that either of them probably would have performed ably.) The Democrats made two failed presidential contenders secretary of state back-to-back: Hillary Rodham Clinton after her failure in the 2008 primary, and then John Kerry a decade after his failure in the 2004 general. That was a good political calculation in the case of Mrs. Clinton, who was certain to run again. But, in general, it would be better to serve as secretary of state or defense, or in a similar role, before running for president, rather than assuming the role as a consolation prize after crashing and burning.
But it is unlikely that the Republicans with an eye on the White House will turn to someone with a real foreign-policy résumé in the near future. (It is difficult to imagine President Mike Pompeo, though stranger things have happened.) The prominent or up-and-coming national figures in the Republican Party are a handful of governors and former governors (Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Kristi Noem), a few senators (Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz), and a considerable gaggle of disreputable Trump vestiges, Mike Pence prominent among them. Of all of them, Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations, has the most plausible claim to meaningful foreign-policy experience. Democrats are in about the same condition, and if President Biden is succeeded by a Democrat, it is likely to be one grimy patronage-politics lawyer or another: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, etc.
If you want a president mainly focused on day-to-day domestic affairs, one who keeps himself busy visiting the hurricane-stricken and cutting ribbons and praying for a stock-market boom, one who thinks he “runs the country” — president-as-mayor, as Jay Nordlinger puts it — then a governor is what you’re after, or, maybe, on the Democratic side, a big-city mayor. (The ruthless Machiavellian Michael Bloomberg, not the feckless and witless Bill de Blasio.) But if you want a president who functions properly according to our actual constitutional architecture, then you don’t want a hand-holder, a lip-biter, or a your-pain-feeler. You want a diplomat and a statesman, someone who might be able to locate on a desktop globe some of those 150-odd foreign countries where U.S. troops are based, someone who has some inkling of the complex global linkages of the U.S. economy, and who sees in China something other than a ruthless competitor in the manufacture of cheap flip-flops.
It would take a very large spoonful of sugar to make that medicine go down the democratic gullet. But it would do the body politic a lot of good.