When Congress cedes its constitutional role in foreign affairs, U.S. policy is left to the president — and subject to change every four or eight years.
When Congress cedes its constitutional role in foreign affairs, U.S. policy is left to the president — and subject to change every four or eight years.
I s Vladimir Putin dealing with Joe Biden, or is he dealing with the United States of America?
That is not an easy question to answer.
Conservatives are uncomfortable talking about defects in the American constitutional system, but there are a few, and the presidency is one of them: An office that ought to involve very little more than being chief executive officer of the executive branch of the federal government has mutated into a kind of elected princedom, insistently at the center of American political life, overawing the legislature, hectoring and threatening the judiciary, and arrogating to itself new powers year after year.
One consequence of that development is that the United States gets a new foreign policy every four or eight years.
The president has appropriate and expansive constitutional powers when it comes to foreign policy, but the Constitution also clearly establishes a role for Congress — it is Congress, not the president, that has the power to declare war; it is the Senate that must approve or reject treaties; it is Congress that is entrusted by Article I with the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations,” to “raise and support armies” and “provide and maintain a navy,” and to make the rules governing these armed forces. Our constitutional arrangements are designed to produce a foreign policy that is a national policy, one in which the House, the Senate, and the executive branch all play roles.
That is a difficult balance to strike and to maintain, and we have in no small degree failed to do so. Instead, we have made our presidency into a monarchy — the sole, personal, autonomous repository of national power — when it comes to foreign affairs.
That is, among other things, a practical problem: We want the people to be able to effect changes in government, including changes in foreign policy, by means of elections — but, at the same time, it is practically impossible to maintain any meaningful foreign policy at all if everything is subject to immediate and radical revision every few years, because securing our real national interests must often involve undertakings that span many years or decades. If Congress were playing its proper role, then this would be less of a problem in that our foreign policy would be shaped by many smaller elections over many years rather than by one national election every four years.
As Putin launches a war in Europe, some Republicans have declared: “This wouldn’t be happening if Donald Trump were president.” That may or may not be true, but, if it is, it’s a mark of deep national failure, presenting dangers both moral and practical: Our position in the world, and our success in securing our national interests, should not be dependent upon one man in one office — or else we should stop calling ourselves a republic.
There are a few organs that facilitate some degree of consistency in our foreign policy, NATO prominent among them. Unlike all of those executive orders and executive agreements in the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations, the North Atlantic Treaty went through the proper constitutional process, with Harry Truman submitting it for Senate approval in 1949. The debate was a lively one, because the North Atlantic Treaty formalized a significant departure from the American tradition of eschewing European entanglements. Because our commitment to NATO was genuinely national and supported by a broad consensus, it has endured, which is why the United States is still in NATO but not in the Kyoto Protocols, the Paris Agreement, the JCPOA, etc.
And it is NATO — the work of the Truman administration, not the work of the Biden, Trump, or Obama administrations — that currently stands between the Russian army and Warsaw, Prague, and Berlin.
As secretary of state, John Kerry once complained, “You can’t pass a treaty anymore.” But George W. Bush, the alleged cowboy unilateralist, managed to secure Senate approval of 163 treaties formalizing certain aspects of U.S. foreign policy as it pertains to everything from human-rights issues to environmental concerns. The Obama administration, meanwhile, saw the approval of only 20, six of which were unfinished business from the Bush administration. (Obama was more eager to negotiate with the ayatollahs in Tehran than with Mitch McConnell.) And Donald Trump’s record was similar to Obama’s.
Of course, the Senate’s power to say “No” to treaties is at least as important: A 28–28 vote in the Senate is the reason Santo Domingo ended up becoming the Dominican Republic instead of one of our states.
Our addled populists hiss about the “establishment” and the “deep state,” but what can be seen in our foreign affairs is the absence of any effective permanent instrument for maintaining consistent policy across administrations. There is such a thing as the foreign-policy establishment — all those career diplomats and functionaries — but what that establishment does not have is the ability to actually conduct foreign policy. In some ways, we might be better off if it did.
Because the question for us is whether our foreign affairs are going to be subject to a consensus national policy that endures across administrations or determined by whatever sounds like a good idea to Joe Biden on any given Wednesday morning.