Making Foreign Policy

I)    Making Foreign and Military Policy

A)    Kinds of Foreign Policy

1)      Majoritarian Policies—confer benefits and costs on almost everyone—questions like war and peace, and arms control treaties are the best examples.

2)      Interest Group Politics—where some groups promote a particular policy that an opposing group actively works against. Policies like free trade, which are promoted by business groups that export products, but are opposed by environmental and labor groups because they view it as working against their interests, are the best examples.

3)      Client Politics—best illustrated by the example of a corporation doing business overseas that gets favorable tax breaks because of it, or the relationship between Israel and the United States, which initially was reliant upon the political power the Jewish bloc held in the United States.

B)    Constitutional Framework of Foreign Policy

1)      President—the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces

2)      Congress—granted the power by the Constitution to declare war—and, perhaps more importantly, also granted the power of the purse.

(a)    War Powers Act (1973)—in the wake of the Vietnam War, Congress attempted to wrest back from the President some of the power they gave away in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This law has not been directly challenged; presidents from Ford onward have refused to acknowledge that Congress has any control over the commitment of US troops anywhere in the world, and Congress has proven reluctant to challenge that perception.

(b)   Congressional Oversight of Intelligence—has also not exactly worked as planned, since the Congressional committees charged with oversight usually simply rubber stamp the action taken. If the pathetic attempt that became known as the Iran-Contra Affair is any indication, even when handed a smoking gun Congress is reluctant to act in a decisive manner.

3)      State Department—headed by the Secretary of State, and is nominally independent of the President, although they usually work closely with the president.

4)      National Security Council—the White House’s foreign policy team.

5)      Defense Department—now plays a much larger role in gathering intelligence, and also rivals the State Department for influence upon the president in formulating foreign policy.

C)    The New International Order

1)      The Old Bipolar World—from the end of WWII to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War Struggle was viewed as a struggle between two world super powers—the Unites States and the Soviet Union.

(a)    Using client states—although the US and the USSR never directly confronted one another, they willingly used proxies to attempt to best the other, like in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

2)      9/11—the successful terrorist attack has shaped US foreign policy, largely negatively, in my view.

(a)    “Pre-emptive strikes”—George W. Bush codified and expanded a policy that originated during the Clinton administration, promising to take unilateral action, if necessary, to prevent another such attack.

(b)   Iraq War—while Iraq was reluctant, and did harass UN inspectors, it did cooperate with those inspectors, eventually—who found nothing that the US alleged the Iraqi government was hiding. In fact, the US and its “coalition of the willing” had to wait for those inspectors to leave the country before it could launch an attack.

D)    Three Major Problems

1)      Nation Building—the US has had a mixed record when it comes to nation building; it works best, it seems, in economically advance countries, when the country had enjoyed a relatively stable government in the recent past—and less successfully when those conditions were absent.

2)      Foreign Policy and Terrorism—in only 5 of the 14 major wars the US had been involved in have been fought after obtaining a formal declaration of war by Congress.

(a)    Gaining Congressional approval or not seems largely contingent upon the side of the commitment and its duration.

(b)   Governing principles

3)      Changing the Military—the armed forces are organized to fight other military forces—not terrorist organizations. In the wake of 9/11, much attention had been paid to plans to re-organize the military; perhaps some thought should be spent upon asking whether the use of the military against a terrorist threat is the right strategy, or not.

E)     Politics of Foreign and Military Policy

1)      Majoritarian politics—in the bipolar world of the 20^th century, the perception of danger was usually high enough to get the American people to “rally ‘round the flag,” with the end of the Soviet threat, open opposition to some aspects of foreign policy is much more prevalent.

III)  Conclusion