The topic of this episode is, “How is Congress involved in foreign policy?”
My guest is Jordan Tama, a Provost Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service. He is the author or editor of five books on foreign policy. They are:
Jordan also has written many papers on foreign policy, so it seems to me he is a great person to have on the podcast to help us understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.
Welcome to the podcast.
Jordan Tama:
Thanks so much for having me on, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
Some months ago, our listeners heard me chat with Alissa Ardito about the formal powers of Congress in foreign affairs. We talked about things like how the Senate has the authority to approve treaties and to consider nominees to fill high positions in the State Department, the military, and other agencies that are involved in foreign affairs. We also talked about the fact that Congress has the power to declare war and the discretion to fund and create agencies that deal with matters overseas, like the United States Agency for International Development. And we also pondered in a philosophical manner about how we’re supposed to have a representative democracy influencing foreign affairs.
But I wanted to bring you in because you’re so well prepared, well-studied, and scholarly on the matter of where the rubber hits the road and how the wheels actually turn. So let me start by asking, where should the bewildered citizen first look when trying to understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy?
Jordan Tama:
Congress is involved in foreign policy in a lot of ways, more than most Americans realize. This includes both Congress exercising its formal powers and Congress exercising influence in more informal ways. I’ll say a quick word about both of those areas, the formal and informal powers.
Certainly, the formal powers are important, and the most important of these tends to be the power of the purse. When it comes to spending on diplomacy, defense—and defense is half of the discretionary federal budget, so that’s huge—and foreign aid, the president simply can’t act without Congress appropriating the funds. This gives Congress a power that it exercises every single year, and in recent years, Congress has sometimes challenged the president assertively on foreign policy spending. One example of that was when Donald Trump was president. He wanted to cut the budget of the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) by a third, and Congress said no and instead maintained the budget at roughly constant levels, which was important in allowing the U.S. to continue playing an active role in the world and providing foreign assistance to other countries.
Congress also routinely influences foreign policy by passing legislation that authorizes or mandates foreign policy stances or actions. For instance, Congress has mandated sanctions in recent years on many countries, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. This is an area where Congress tends to be quite active legislatively.
But Congress also influences foreign policy through its informal powers, which can include public statements by members of Congress—particularly the more prominent members of Congress like the chairs or ranking members of the key foreign policy committees, or the House or Senate leaders. It also can include trips to foreign countries by members of Congress. It could include private meetings between members of Congress and senior executive branch officials. I’ll just say a quick word about a couple of these informal tools.
Public statements by members of Congress on high profile foreign policy issues can sometimes be pretty important because they can generate a lot of media attention, and that can shape public attitudes. So one recent example of this is “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Republicans in Congress along with Donald Trump and some of the MAGA Republicans running for president have been making public statements in opposition to US aid to Ukraine. And this seems to be moving Republican public opinion away from supporting US aid to Ukraine, even though legislatively the MAGA Republicans don’t yet have the majority on that issue in Congress. Foreign trips can be important. A lot of members of Congress have gone to Taiwan in recent years, and this can send a strong signal to Taiwan, can infuriate China, and complicate things the Biden Administration is trying to do with regard to China. And then there’re private conversations going on all the time between members of Congress and executive branch officials. Sometimes these can be important, but they’re not going to be reported in the media. But that sort of thing is happening all the time.
Kevin Kosar:
One of the things you mentioned is that both individual members of Congress and the committees who have formal jurisdiction have a role to play. And that’s interesting because that means you have a president and his foreign policy apparatus, but you also have 535 other people who can be getting involved in these things in one way or another, which—like you said—doesn’t create a necessarily clear message all the time for foreign nations to pick up on. They instead may be getting a bit of a cacophony, right?
Jordan Tama:
That’s absolutely right, and on a lot of foreign policy issues, there is no consensus position coming out of Congress—there’re just a lot of different positions. When that’s the case, Congress is often not going to be able to pass legislation on the issue, so all you get from Congress is a lot of different messages. But those messages can sometimes still be quite important, and there are issues where there is a prevailing position in Congress. So I’ll again go back to something during the Trump Administration. Trump was very critical of NATO and he privately talked about the idea of withdrawing from NATO. Members of Congress who supported NATO heard that and they passed a resolution reiterating US support for NATO—even though there are some members of Congress who are on Trump’s wavelength on NATO, the majority was not. So, it’s a mix. There are some issues where it’s a complete cacophony and Congress is not going to be able to act legislatively at all, and there are others where it’s still possible to muster a majority.
But when there’s a cacophony, it does weaken the US’s position in the world because it makes it harder for the US to speak with one voice. It makes it harder for other countries to trust US commitments because when they hear a lot of different things coming out of Congress. The president may be saying to them, “We’re ready to negotiate some long-term partnership with you,” or, “We’re ready to offer you a long-term aid package.” But if foreign governments hear members of Congress criticizing that idea or saying something entirely different, they’re going to question whether they should enter into this partnership with the US or whether they can trust the US, because who knows who’s going to be president in a few years or what Congress is going to be doing in a few years. So that is a real problem for the credibility, reliability, and reputation of the US.
Kevin Kosar:
Certainly it complicates things, and since the United States is not a parliamentary system—but a separation of power system—it’s probably even more difficult for foreign audiences to understand what’s going on. When is a legislator popping off not something to be paid much attention to versus what he’s saying is relevant because this guy chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee or he has some influence? Now, is it possible—as a generalization—to characterize Congress as leading on foreign policy issues or following and reacting to the president, or is it just issue by issue?
Jordan Tama:
Certainly, the standard view of Congress is that it follows the president on foreign policy. I think the reality is more nuanced than that. Congress does often follow the president, but there are many cases where it’s leading on foreign policy. The cases where it’s leading, though, tend to be issues that are a little less salient.
But certainly, the president leads overall on foreign policy. The president is usually the first mover on foreign policy, thanks to certain institutional advantages. Compared to Congress, the president has access to more extensive and up-to-date information about what’s going on around the world. The president is getting regular reports from the intelligence community and US diplomats, who are more up-to-date than information that’s coming into Congress on a day-to-day basis. And the president can usually act more quickly than Congress. Even when some members of Congress want to do something, they may not be able to persuade their colleagues to go along, may not be able to get legislation approved.
Certainly, when it comes to the use of military force, the president is usually in the driver’s seat. Typically, when use of the military is on the table, the president is the initiator, and then Congress is left to endorse the use of military force, criticize it, or simply do nothing. And often Congress is unable to reach consensus and so just doesn’t take any kind of action as a unified body. As a result, even though the Constitution gives power to declare war to Congress, there’ve been lots of military deployments in recent decades by presidents that were not authorized by Congress, and Congress has more or less sat on the sidelines regarding that decision.
But there are plenty of other issues where Congress does lead on foreign policy. This is often in the form of members of Congress pressing for the US to pay more attention to a certain foreign policy issue—a “do more” on a foreign policy issue that some members of Congress feel is being neglected. I’ll give an example from my own experience on this.
A decade ago, I served as a fellow on the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House—this is the body with the charge of elevating attention to human rights in Congress—and in that role, I was supporting the work of Congressman Jim McGovern, who is the Democratic co-chairman of that Commission. And I assisted him as he and some like-minded members of Congress spearheaded the enactment of a law called the Magnitsky Act, which placed sanctions on Russian government officials who had committed major violations of human rights. This legislation was entirely an initiative of members of Congress. It was resisted by the Obama Administration because the Administration thought it would antagonize Russia and hurt U.S. relations with Russia. But Congressman McGovern and his allies on the Hill pushed it through and Obama signed it reluctantly because it had so much support in Congress. This type of thing happens regularly—there is congressional entrepreneurship on foreign policy on certain issues that are priorities for particular members of Congress. There are members of Congress who really care about certain issues and they push for more attention on those issues.
Kevin Kosar:
Your example is a good one and actually spurred me to remember that, in more recent years, we’ve seen Congress lean in on the issue of the cruelties towards the Uyghurs in China, for example, and on a whole variety of trade-related issues. And as you referenced, the idea of sanctions being a frequent tool that Congress leans in on felt to me that they were way ahead of where the president was.
Jordan Tama:
I think that’s exactly right. The Uyghurs is an excellent example of that. Congress passed legislation imposing sanctions on China for human rights abuses against the Uyghurs. This was not something President Trump would have wanted to do, and Congress has passed similar bills targeting Chinese human rights abuses in Hong Kong.
Even though our recent US presidents have had tough stances toward China, these are bills that presidents have not been enthusiastic about because they want more flexibility. They don’t want Congress to mandate these laws that bind their hands because then the president doesn’t have the flexibility of being able to negotiate and wield the levers of carrots and sticks with regard to a foreign government. Congress in these cases is often restricting the president’s flexibility, and that’s a common source of tension between Congress and the president.
Kevin Kosar:
Absolutely, and it gets at that difficult matter of democratic accountability. It’s understandable a president would want to have an absolute free hand to be able to cut a deal. Negotiations are messy—the president’s going to be negotiating with a country on multiple topics where issues are linked and decoupled, so they might well bristle at anything that comes in and curbs that authority. At the same time, foreign policy is ultimately American policy, and there’s got to be some sort of democratic accountability, and that’s what the legislature is for.
Jordan Tama:
That’s absolutely right, and this is a question I ask my students often, “Are we better off with a more active Congress or with a dominant president?” And I think this is the tradeoff: a more active Congress makes foreign policy more accountable to the American people, more representative of the wide range of views of the American people. On the other hand, the president is often more attuned to the overall national interest. Sometimes there’s tension between what might be in the overall best interest of the United States and what might best represent the views, perspectives, and interests of particular parts of the American population that are represented most effectively in Congress. So this is a real tension and trade-off.
I don’t think one answer is more right or better or more important than the other, but I think tension is at the heart of our system and it really comes through in foreign policy in particular.
Kevin Kosar:
Certainly that trade-off between what’s good for the nation as a whole versus localities. We saw that issue relitigated or debated again when we had this effort to renegotiate NAFTA. The argument was, “Whatever great things it did for the nation as a whole in the aggregate, the costs on particular populations (e.g., textile workers, etc.) were too high, so we need go back and change the agreement to get the trade off to work a little bit better.”
Jordan Tama:
Right. Yeah, that’s right.
Kevin Kosar:
So as a kid I remember hearing the phrase, “politics stops at the water’s edge,” and I don’t remember if the context was in discussing the United States at war or if it was just a more general phrase that was used to justify the president having a freehand in foreign policy. You use those words in the title of one of your books, as listeners heard. Do legislators tend to curb their divisions to present a united front to the world, or is this more an ought statement—an executive wish that politics would stop at the water’s edge, but they just don’t?
Jordan Tama:
It’s more the latter. It’s an ought statement. The notion that politics stops at the water’s edge has been expressed often in discussions of foreign policy since the early Cold War days. It was really in the early Cold War when that phrase became commonly used. It was in the context of proponents of policies of containment toward the Soviet Union were looking for bipartisan support for that, and they argued that members of Congress in both parties should rally around the president so that the US could speak with one voice in the competition with the Soviet Union.
The reality is that politics has never stopped at the water’s edge. That certainly remains true today, but even during the heart of the Cold War, politics didn’t stop at the water’s edge. There were many examples of foreign policy issues during the Cold War that became highly politicized and where members of Congress were attacking the president, in part for partisan reasons. After the successful Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, Republicans in Congress blamed (former President) Harry Truman for losing China to the Communists and went after him aggressively in the 1950 congressional election.
The notion that partisanship comes into play on foreign policy is not new. In general, members of Congress in the opposition party support the president on foreign policy when it’s in their political interest to do so, and criticize the president on foreign policy when they can score political points through that type of criticism. If a presidential foreign policy position or action is broadly popular, members of Congress in the opposition party will typically support it or just simply stay silent on it. But if voters or key constituents are lukewarm or concerned about a presidential foreign policy stance or initiative, then members of the opposition party will typically go after the president and they won’t hold themselves back from criticizing it. This type of criticism is healthy to an extent—in a democracy, we should have back and forth. We don’t want to have an imperial president who is not challenged by members of Congress.
But as we were talking about before, it weakens the effectiveness of US foreign policy when partisan attacks on the president by the opposition party becomes the norm. It makes it harder for the US to speak with one voice. It weakens the position of the president overseas when the half of Congress is regularly criticizing what the president is doing.
Kevin Kosar:
Right. As you were counting the divisions during the Cold War over policy, my mind was bouncing both forward and backward in time. There was the more recent when the United States was in Somalia and there was the Black Hawk Down and Marines died. There were incidents like that.
But you go back to the earliest days of the United States, where Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were doing battle over who our true friend was—was it France or Great Britain? They fought hard over that matter, so I think that makes clear to me that politics stopping at the water’s edge is utterly aspirational.
Jordan Tama:
Yes, I think that Hamilton-Jefferson example is a great one. That was a very intense debate between what was the beginning of America’s first two political parties.
Kevin Kosar:
So getting into this debates and partisan intensity, I can’t let you go from the podcast until I ask you this question about polarization and foreign policy, since you’ve got a book on that.
Certainly, the House of Representatives has become intensely partisan on a variety of high salience issues—some of them relating to foreign affairs (e.g., immigration). Does this kind of combat—a gratuitous attack-dog style of politics—occur as frequently on foreign policy issues as much as it does on domestic issues, or is policy making in the foreign affairs area generally more consensual?
Jordan Tama:
Polarization has been increasing on foreign policy over the past few decades. Immigration policy is a great example of that. The trend line in terms of polarization is going up, just like polarization has been going up in domestic policy. But the level of polarization on foreign policy remains below the level of polarization on domestic policy. In other words, the polarization trend line is going up in both policy areas, but the line is higher on domestic policy than on foreign policy. So overall, bipartisanship does remain more common on international issues. I’ll give a couple examples of this. One example today is US policy toward China. There’s a lot of bipartisanship when it comes to US policy toward China. Generally, most Democrats and Republicans today favor tough stances to counter the rise of China and strengthen the US position with respect to China, both economically and in a security sense. There’s some debate about that, but there’s a broad consensus on that overall trajectory.
The nuance I would add is there are a lot of foreign policy issues where bipartisanship coexists with intra-party division, and this is evident on US policy toward Ukraine right now. So there are internationalist Republicans who are aligned with the Biden Administration and most Democrats on Ukraine in favoring heavy USA to Ukraine and various steps to counter Russia. I’m thinking of people like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Michael McCaul (Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), and Nikki Haley and Mike Pence in the presidential race. These internationalist Republicans, when it comes to Ukraine, are on the same page as Joe Biden, more or less. In fact, they think we should be giving even more military aid to Ukraine than Biden is. But within the Republican Party, you’ve also got the MAGA Republicans—Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy in the presidential campaign, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz in the House—who think we shouldn’t be giving any aid to Ukraine, that Ukraine is not a priority of the US and we should not be caring about this conflict. So there’s a real debate within the Republican Party at the same time as there’s bipartisan cooperation between one wing of the Republican Party and the Biden Administration. This kind of intra-party division is more typical on foreign policy than on domestic policy.
Kevin Kosar:
Right, and it’s also the case that domestic affairs generally tend to be a bit more salient to Americans; foreign affairs are a little less clear, and there’re a whole number of reasons why that seems to be the case. As such, there are lots of issues in foreign affairs that have almost no visibility domestically, or they’re so in the weeds that they don’t build up much salience.
Jordan Tama:
That’s absolutely right, and that what that means when it comes to partisanship and polarization is on those less salient issues, members of Congress have more leeway to take different stances—there’s not a party orthodoxy that everyone has to follow. On an issue like abortion, for example, you can’t be a successful Republican politician and be pro-choice. But when it comes to aspects of US foreign aid policy, most voters aren’t paying attention to that and it’s not a key focus of advocacy groups in the party. So if you’re Republican, you could take different kinds of positions and still be a successful politician. It gives more leeway to move away from party orthodoxy when an issue is not as salient politically, and that enables more bipartisanship.
Kevin Kosar:
Well, we’ve reached our time. Professor Jordan Tama, thank you for being on the program and for helping us better understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy.
Jordan Tama:
Thanks so much, it was a real pleasure talking with you.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you’ll share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging at @AEI. Once again, thank you for listening and have a great day.
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